Charles Follen McKim - Encyclopedia

GEOGRAPHICAL NAMES

CHARLES FOLLEN MCKIM (1847-1909), American architect, was born in Chester county, Pennsylvania, on the 24th of August 1847. His father, James Miller McKim (1810-1874), originally a Presbyterian minister, was a prominent abolitionist and one of the founders (1865) of the New York Nation. The son studied at Harvard (1866-1867) and at Paris in the E cole des Beaux-Arts (1867-1870), and in 1872 became an architect in New York City, entering the office of H. H. Richardson; in 1877 he formed a partnership with William Rutherford Mead (b. 1846), the firm becoming in 1879 McKim, Mead & White, when Stanford White (1853-1906) became a partner. McKim was one of the founders of the American Academy in Rome; received a gold medal at the Paris exposition of 1900; in 1903, for his services in the promotion of architecture, received the King's Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects; and in 1907 became a National Academician. He died at St James, Long Island, N.Y., on the 14th of September 1909. McKim's name is especially associated with the University Club in New York, with the Columbia University buildings, with the additions to the White House (1906), and, more particularly, with the Boston Public Library, for which the library of Ste Genevieve in Paris furnished the suggestion.