McKim, Charles Follen

(born Aug. 24, 1847, Chester County, Pa., U.S.—died Sept. 14, 1909, St. James, Long Island, N.Y.) U.S. architect. He was educated at Harvard University and in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts. In 1879 he joined William Rutherford Mead and Stanford White to found McKim, Mead & White, the most successful U.S. architectural firm of its time. Until 1887 the firm excelled at Shingle style residences. In later years it championed the formal Renaissance tradition and its Classical antecedents, helping to inspire a Neoclassical revival. Among the widely admired examples of McKim's formal planning are the Boston Public Library (1887), the Columbia University Library (1893), the building program of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1893, with Daniel H. Burnham and Richard Morris Hunt), and in New York City the Morgan Library (1903) and the magnificent Pennsylvania Railway Station (1904–10; demolished 1963).

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