Henry L.A. Jekel: Architect of Eastern Skyscrapers and the California Styleby H. Vincent Moses; Catherine Whitmore
2018 signed and inscribed copy, Inlandia Institute (Riverside, California), 9 7/8 x 9 7/8 inches paperbound in color pictorial covers, 244 pp. Slight soiling, rubbing and edgewear to covers, with minor creasing to tips. Slight staining to fore page edges. Nicely inscribed and signed by both authors on the title page. Otherwise, a very good copy - clean, bright and unmarked.
If anyone ever embodied the great Cass Gilbert's definition of an architect, it was Henry L. A. Jekel. From his seventeenth year to his death in 1960, he engaged architecture ''with enthusiastic interest in every detail,'' adopting it as his muse and his art form. Given his commitment and talent, Jekel emerged rapidly from the venerable apprenticeship ranks of Buffalo, New York, and New York City, placing him in the cohort of some of the greats of architecture at the turn of the twentieth century.
Like many of those designers, Jekel quickly proved himself an architectural whirlwind. In 1899, the Buffalo dynamo came roaring into New York City, intent on ''nothing less than complete success.'' Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., received him next, where he designed and built the first steel-skeleton skyscrapers in those cities.
The collapse of Jekel's Philadelphia enterprise in 1904 and the dissolution of his fledgling skyscraper design firm, H. L. A. Jekel Company, Architects, due to his investors' overestimation of the Philadelphia market for high-rise buildings, turned his plans in a different direction. In 1909, Henry Jekel felt the air and sunshine of Southern California for the first time. In Riverside, the Eastern whirlwind succumbed to the allure of navel orange blossoms, palm trees, and the romance of Mission Revival architecture. After a short sojourn in Buffalo, in 1921, he and his wife, Amanda, finally resettled in Riverside for good.