Biography | George Howe — The Same Hand, Three Years Apart

In 1929 the American Battle Monuments Commission put up a white stone block beside a country road in Flanders: two swords cut in flat relief, a helmet lying on a laurel wreath, one inscription repeated in three languages. The design was George Howe's, and it was the architecture he had been trained to make.

He took his Harvard degree in 1908, worked in the Atelier Laloux in Paris, and came out of the École des Beaux-Arts in 1912. He served in the war and did not come home until 1919. Through the 1920s he was the third name in Mellor, Meigs & Howe, a Philadelphia practice known for stone-and-slate country houses.

In 1928 he left it. In 1929 — the same year the Flanders stone went up — he formed a partnership with the Swiss architect William Lescaze.

The Philadelphia Saving Fund Society accepted their design in November 1930 and moved in during 1932. Thirty-six storeys and 491 feet: black granite, grey limestone and stainless steel, ribbon windows running the full length of each floor, a T-shaped tower planned for daylight and rentable area rather than for a silhouette. It is generally described as the first International Style skyscraper built in the United States, and it was made a National Historic Landmark in 1976.

The partnership dissolved that same year, the building finished. Howe was supervising architect at the Public Buildings Administration from 1942 to 1945, went on to the American Academy in Rome, chaired Yale's architecture department from 1950, and died in 1955.

The tower has been a hotel since 2000, and the twenty-seven-foot letters are still on the roof. The stone in Flanders is still on the Kemmelstraat, still maintained by the commission. Three years and one signature separate them.

📸 Cover: the tower seen from Market Street, photograph by Peter Clericuzio, 24 December 2006, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.