Biography
Born in 1848 at Salem, Massachusetts, Joseph Lyman Silsbee graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard. He then became an early student of the first school of architecture in the United States, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Thereafter he served an apprenticeship with Boston architects Ware & Van Brundt and William Ralph Emerson, respectively. Silsbee traveled in Europe before moving to Syracuse, New York in 1874. In 1875 he married Anna Baldwin Sedgwick, daughter of influential lawyer and politician Charles Baldwin Sedgwick.
Silsbee practiced architecture from 1875 until his death in 1913. He had a prolific practice and at one point had three simultaneously operating offices. He had offices in Syracuse (1875–1885), Buffalo (Silsbee & Marling, 1882–1887), and Chicago (Silsbee and Kent, 1883–1884). From 1883–1885 his Syracuse office was a partnership with architect Ellis G. Hall. Silsbee's Chicago office had a number of architects who were later to become known in their own right, including: Frank Lloyd Wright, George Grant Elmslie, George W. Maher, and Irving Gill.
Silsbee was one of the first professors of architecture at Syracuse University, one of the earliest schools of architecture in the nation. He was a founding member of the Chicago and Illinois Chapters of the American Institute of Architects. In 1894 Silsbee was awarded the Peabody Medal by the Franklin Institute for his design for a Moving Sidewalk. This invention had its debut at the Worlds Columbian Exposition and saw usage in subsequent Worlds Fairs.
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