Robert Seyfarth

Who was Robert Seyfarth?

Robert Seyfarth was an American architect based in Chicago, Illinois.

Having spent the formative years of his professional career working for the noted Prairie School architect George Washington Maher, and having been a member of the influential Chicago Architectural Club, Seyfarth was a product of the Chicago School of Architecture. Although his early independent projects directly reflected Maher’s stylistic influences, as his own style developed Seyfarth’s work became distinguished more as a distillation of prevailing revivalist architecture, characterized not by the frequent devotion to detail that typified the movement but by strong geometry, a highly refined sense of proportion, and the selective, discriminating use of historical references. Although any use of these references was condemned by many of the proponents of what was seen as "modern" architecture in the ensuing years, "the neoclassical impulse...was an effort to purge American architecture of the wilder excesses of historical revivalism [of the nineteenth century] by returning to fundamental architectural principles.