Lawrence Buck

Lawrence Buck (1865—1929) was a successful and influential Chicago area residential and commercial architect, artist and landscape painter, associated with the Prairie School and the American Arts and Crafts Movement.

Lawrence H. Buck was born in 1865 in New Orleans, Louisiana. His father was William Henry Buck (1840 in Norway – 1888 in New Orleans). The elder Buck was a landscape artist, specializing in sub-tropical landscape, genre paintings and sporting scenes which are highly prized by collectors. He was trained by Henry Thiberge and worked as a draughtsman. During preparations for the World's Industrial and Cotton Centennial in 1884, Buck became associated with French architect Edouard Sidel, a gold-medal winner at the exposition. He assisted Sidel in commissions for the Caldwell Hotel and Morris Building in Birmingham, Alabama and remained in the city in partnership with A. J. Armstrong in the firm of Armstrong & Buck.

Among the firm's first designs was a successful entry for the competition for the Fort Worth Board of Trade Building in Fort Worth, Texas. By the time the building was constructed in 1889, Armstrong had moved to Texas to staff Armstrong & Buck's "branch office" before leaving to join the partnership of Armstrong & Messer. Buck remained in Alabama and partnered with English architect John B. Sutcliffe. In 1889, Sutcliffe relocated to Chicago, Buck followed him there and continued their professional association.

Buck was a member of a group of young progressive Chicago architects sometimes referred to as "The Eighteen", who were friends and colleagues of Frank Lloyd Wright, Dwight Perkins, Robert C. Spencer, and others, who had offices in Steinway Hall. Buck maintained an office in Steinway Hall from 1902 through the 1920s.

Buck worked both prior to and contemporaneously with the Prairie School architects and his work at times resembles theirs, but it is not limited to the Prairie Style aesthetic. He drew on a wide range of forms to create simple yet dignified buildings that have tremendous appeal, whether in a simplified Tudor, Arts and Crafts, English cottage, Prairie Style or Colonial revival mode. For example, his 1909 house for Mrs. Helen Campbell in Palo Alto is designed in a modified Dutch Colonial style.

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