Francis Barry Byrne Collection
1926-1952
Francis Barry Byrne (1883-1967)
This collection includes published and unpublished writings, photographs, architectural drawings and biographical information. Byrne apprenticed with Frank Lloyd Wright in his Oak Park studio for seven years and in 1913 agreed to manage Walter Burley Griffin's office while Griffin and his wife, Marion Mahony, were in Australia developing the plan for the new capital city of Canberra. Although steeped in the Prairie School design idiom, Byrne's exposure to modernist European architects such as Mies, Mendelsohn, Loos, and Poelzig produced an individualized, streamlined form of the Prairie School style with bolder masses, unadorned surfaces, and clean-edged openings. Byrne was notable as a designer of residences, churches, and civic buildings; as an architecture critic and theorist he wrote extensively on the design of religious architecture in response to the Catholic Church's liturgical reform movement.
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Contact the Ryerson and Burnham Art and Architecture Archives:
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Manuscripts, typescript papers, printed papers, architectural drawings and black and white photographs.