Wilson Brothers

In the 1950s when Victorian architecture was still reviled by architectural historians, historian of engineering Carl Condit looked dispassionately at the 19th century through the lenses of construction and engineering. Architects who had been attacked for the flamboyance of their designs were rediscovered for their creativity in utilizing the new materials and systems of the Industrial Age. One of the designers that Condit rediscovered was Joseph M. Wilson and his future firm, Wilson Brothers & Co., whose quarter century of work for the Pennsylvania Railroad, the generating force behind Philadelphia’s applied science revolution, spread their influence across the industrialized United States. Unlike Wilson’s contemporaries, such as Frank Furness, whose records had been thrown out when his office closed in the 1930s, the work of Wilson Brothers & Co. could readily have been found through their publications, Catalog of Work Executed and Architectural Work of the Wilson Bros. & Co. They described the firm’s engineering and architectural work for the Pennsylvania Railroad through to their new form of practice, which combined architecture with civil, structural, and hydraulic engineering for the design of bridges, railroad stations, hotels, houses, and commercial and industrial buildings across the entire United States and the Caribbean. Their structural daring and originality led Condit in American Building Art: The Nineteenth Century to place Wilson and his partners in the line that led to modern architecture. He summarized their achievement in his discussion of the great train sheds that “Joseph Wilson & Brothers” had designed: “Although Wilson’s primary concern was functional, with emphasis on the validity of pure empirical form, he anticipated three cardinal doctrines of modern architectural theory—simplicity, volume rather than mass, and free-flowing space.” Despite the vast numbers of his projects, Wilson found time to be an active participant in the principal professional organizations of his day, including the Franklin Institute, the city’s leading research institution, serving as its president between 1887 and 1896; the American Institute of Architects (1870; Fellow, 1876); the American Society of Civil Engineers (1873); and the American Philosophical Society (1874). In 1876, he was voted into membership in the British Institution of Civil Engineers, beginning a cross-Atlantic conversation that lasted until his death. Futurist William Gibson tells us that the future is already here—it is just unevenly distributed. At the end of the 19th century, the industrial future had arrived early in Philadelphia’s giant industries, guided by Joseph Wilson and his fellow engineers.

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