Background
He was born near Huntly in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, the son of John Elmslie and Jane Wans Elmslie. Elmslie's father emigrated and found work in Chicago, and in 1885 his family joined him.
He was born near Huntly in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, the son of John Elmslie and Jane Wans Elmslie. Elmslie's father emigrated and found work in Chicago, and in 1885 his family joined him.
His only formal education came from the rigorous Duke of Gordon Schools in Scotland.
After a year in a Chicago business school, Elmslie apprenticed himself to William Le Baron Jenney, the architect-engineer credited with developing the revolutionary "steel-cage" system of building construction.
Wright almost immediately left Silsbee to join the firm of Dankmar Adler and Louis H. Sullivan.
In 1890, at Wright's suggestion, Sullivan hired Elmslie.
Elmslie remained with Sullivan for nearly twenty years.
He became Sullivan's assistant in 1893, when Wright was dismissed from the firm, and from 1895--the year in which Adler and Sullivan dissolved their partnership--until 1909 he was Sullivan's principal associate.
Sullivan's highly personal style left an indelible impression on Elmslie, to whom he turned over his domestic commissions.
Elmslie also developed his own intricate ornament, which only the trained eye can distinguish readily from Sullivan's.
Elmslie is more fruitfully compared with Wright, although he was less innovative.
In 1909 Elmslie left Sullivan to go into practice with William Gray Purcell and George Feick, Jr. , who had just established an office in Minneapolis.
According to David Gebhard, Elmslie's joining the new firm "added tremendous prestige. "
By 1913 Feick had left the firm, and in 1919 Purcell and Elmslie returned to Chicago.
The partnership was officially dissolved in 1922, and Elmslie remained in Chicago to practice alone until the Great Depression brought an end to virtually all building projects.
He remained in Chicago for the rest of his life.
If the years from 1900 to 1909 mark Wright's dominance among practitioners of the Chicago and prairie schools of architecture, the years from 1909 to 1915 belong to Purcell and Elmslie.
Some sixty-four of Purcell and Elmslie's buildings survive--more than half are in Minnesota, while most of the balance are in Illinois, Wisconsin, and adjacent states.
The firm's best-known work is the Bradley bungalow at Woods Hole, Massachussets (1911), remarkable for its early use of wide expanses of plate glass and for its open, highly integrated plan.
The whole is a striking and original blend of the Sullivanesque and the Wrightian in an arts and crafts context.
The Merchants' Bank (Winona, Minn. , 1911), with its bold use of steel, powerful massing, and sensitive ornamentation, is also typical of Purcell and Elmslie's skillful adaptation of Sullivan's vocabulary.
The Edison Shop (Chicago, 1912) is as bold and as successful as any of Wright's buildings of the date.
Another notable building, the Woodbury County courthouse (Sioux City, Iowa, 1915 - 1917), designed in collaboration with William La Barthe Steele, is composed of two sharply contrasting masses; its tower rises some dozen floors, while its geometrical abstraction hints of later designs by Wright.
But his architecture was largely ignored after World War I, when architectural schools reverted to the wearying formulae of restrained revivalism.
Quotations:
Elmslie freely acknowledged this influence; in 1910 he wrote that "the genesis of the modern movement belongs in far greater part to England and her men. "
His own architectural philosophy was clearly derived from that of John Ruskin; of his art he wrote, "Buildings are truly a flowering of mankind's deepest as well as commonest emotions in the same way that music and poetry are. "
On October 12, 1910, Elmslie married Bonnie Marie Hunter. She died in 1912, and he never remarried.