Background
Frank H. Holden was born in 1870 in Chicago, Illinois, United States.
Frank H. Holden was born in 1870 in Chicago, Illinois, United States.
After preliminary architectural study at the Manual Training School there, in 1894 entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Later he went to Paris to become a pupil in the Atlier of Marcel Lambert, one of the ablest teachers of the nineties, and later passed the examination for admittance to the Ecole des Beaux Arts.
Returning to the U. S. after some years of advanced study, Mr. Holden joined the New York office of Howard & Cauldwell, and worked with a group headed by John G. Howard on plans for the final competition on the University of California buildings. A few years later he began practice in partnership with F. H. Bosworth and under the firm name of Bosworth & Holden designed various buildings of which the most interesting was the Episcopal Church House in the Bronx “notable for its simplicity and good proportions." When in 1911 Mr. Bosworth retired from practice to become Professor of Architecture at Cornell University, Mr. Holden joined the firm of Hoggson Brothers, bank specialists, for whom he designed interiors of banking rooms until the start of the first World War. In the next phase of his career, 1918 to 1935 he carried on work in association with Mr. Kohn and Charles Butler, retiring in the latter year because of ill health. After a few months of rest he resumed practice, and in association with Marshall L. Oliver and J. Scott Dawson, designed his last buildings, the Denison Store on lower Fifth Avenue, and Doubleday-Doran's Book Store on the Avenue at 28th Street.