MCKIM, CHARLES FOLLEN

born Aug. 24, 1847, Chester County, Pa., U.S. died Sept. 14, 1909, St. James, Long Island, N.Y. American architect who was of primary importance in the American Neoclassical revival. McKim was educated at Harvard and at the cole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He was trained as a draftsman by the architect H.H. Richardson while the latter was completing Trinity Church, Boston. In 1879 he joined William Rutherford Mead and Stanford White to found McKim, Mead & White, which became the most successful and influential American architectural firm of its time. Until 1887 the firm excelled at informal summerhouses built of shingles, and McKim designed one of the most significant of these, the residence at Bristol, R.I., of W.G. Low (1887). In later years the firm was famous for championing the formal tradition of the Italian Renaissance and its classical antecedents. Among the celebrated examples of the formal planning of McKim are the Boston Public Library (1887) and in New York City the Columbia University Library (1893), the University Club (1899), the Morgan Library (1903), and the Pennsylvania Railway Station (190410). With D.H. Burnham and Richard Morris Hunt, he developed and oversaw the building program of the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893, which was classically inspired. McKim designed the Agricultural Building. He also aided Burnham in reviving Pierre L'Enfant's plan for Washington, D.C., and was the originator of the American Academy in Rome.