Kimball, Fiske (08 December 1888–14 August 1955), architectural historian, architect, and museum director, was born Sidney Fiske Kimball in Newton, Massachusetts, the son of Edwin Fiske Kimball, an educator, and Ellen Leora Ripley. Kimball received a B.A. and a master’s degree in architecture from Harvard University in 1909 and 1912, respectively. According to Kimball, the education he and his colleagues received at Harvard caused them to pursue “teaching, writing and editing rather than practice.” Kimball began his career as an architectural educator at the University of Illinois at Urbana, where he was hired as an instructor for the 1912–1913 academic year. During the year Kimball met and married Marie Goebel, the daughter of a professor of German philology at the university. The couple had no children. The university’s nepotism rule prohibited Kimball’s reappointment, so he began the following fall semester as an assistant professor of architecture at the University of Michigan. In addition to his teaching responsibilities, Kimball designed resort cottages in Michigan (1913–1915) and a residential tract in Ann Arbor (1914–1917). During this period the Kimballs began their research on the architectural works of ...
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Kimball, Fiske (1888-1955), architectural historian, architect, and museum director
Lauren Weiss Bricker
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Speyer, A. James (1913-1986), architect and museum curator
Pauline Saliga
Speyer, A. James (27 December 1913–09 November 1986), architect and museum curator, was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Alexander Crail Speyer, an investment banker, and Tillie Sunstein, a painter and sculptor. Born into a prominent Pittsburgh family that was actively involved in the arts, Speyer studied painting as a child but, at the urging of his pragmatic father, turned his artistic talents to the practice of architecture as a young adult. He attended Carnegie Institute of Technology in his home city, and received a bachelor of science degree in architecture in 1934. Afterward, Speyer continued his dual interest in architecture and painting, and from 1934 to 1937 he studied fine art at the Chelsea Polytechnic in London and at the Sorbonne in Paris....
