Corydon Tyler was born on May 17, 1859 in Grand Rapids, Wisconsin, United States, the first son and first of three children of Samuel Jones Purdy, a carpenter and joiner, and Emma Jane (Tyler) Purdy. His parents, whose English forebears had come to America in the early eighteenth century, had moved to Wisconsin from New York state.
Corydon Purdy was educated in the local public schools and at the University of Wisconsin. He completed his undergraduate study in 1885 with a degree of Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering, and added a year's graduate study to earn the degree of Civil Engineer in 1886.
Purdy left university after his freshman year to join the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad as a draftsman associated with the construction of the new line between Chicago and Evanston. During his graduate year and the year following he also held the position of city engineer of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Purdy worked as an engineer for the Keystone Bridge Company in 1888 and 1889.
In 1889 he established a partnership in Chicago with Charles G. Wade. Although the firm specialized in the design of steel bridges before its dissolution in 1891, he worked for the structural system of the Rand McNally Building in Chicago. Purdy was quick to see the possibilities of steel framing for high-building construction.
He turned completely from bridge to building design, and after a short-lived partnership with J. N. Phillips (1891 - 92), he founded a new firm with Lightner Henderson in 1893, which was to continue as a corporation after the latter's death in 1916. He was concerned with the construction of high buildings as early as 1891, when he designed the iron frames of two that fell in the skyscraper class at the time, the twelve-story Boyce Building and the fourteen-story Ellsworth Building, both completed in 1892. The skeleton of the Old Colony Building (1894) was the first from Purdy's hand in which steel was used extensively, and probably the first in which portal arches were adopted for wind bracing. Purdy and Henderson opened a New York office in 1894, and shortly after the turn of the century they opened branch offices in Boston, Montreal, Seattle, Vancouver, and Havana.
In 1896 George A. Fuller, one of the leading building contractors of Chicago, asked Purdy to establish a New York office for him and persuaded the busy engineer to manage it for one year. In 1898 the office of Purdy and Henderson added to their designing activities the role of structural consultants to the United States Realty and Construction Company. The engineers received international attention in 1900 when they accepted an invitation from the United States government to prepare an exhibit on steel-frame construction for the Paris Exposition of that year.
After the disastrous Baltimore fire of 1904, Mayor E. Clay Timanus engaged Purdy as the consulting engineer for the revision of the city's building code, a long overdue step that greatly stimulated local progress in both steel and reinforced-concrete construction. Purdy's mastery of the structural design of large and complex buildings - among them hotels, banks, department stores, newspaper headquarters, many office towers, and the Union Station in Toronto (1927) - inevitably led to invitations to lecture before engineering societies and at colleges.
Purdy retired as president of his firm in 1917 but continued his association as chairman of the board of directors until his death. In later years he devoted increasing time to the management of a farm near Monroe, New York, which had been a family property since 1734.
In his last years Purdy made his home in Melbourne, Florida, and it was there that he died, of a coronary thrombosis, at the age of eighty-five.
Corydon Tyler Purdy was responsible for the structural system of the Rand McNally Building in Chicago, which involved the first all-steel skeleton ever used. His most famous New York skyscrapers: Fuller Building, unique because of its narrow triangular plan, Metropolitan Tower, the highest building in the world at the time it was completed. After disastrous Baltimore fire Purdy was the consulting engineer for the revision of the city's building code. For his paper on the New York Times Building he received the award of the Institute's Telford Premium in 1909.
Purdy was a member of the National Child Welfare Association.
Purdy was twice married: to Eugenia Cushing of Turner, Maine, in 1889 and, following her death, to Rose Evelyn Morse of Livermore, Maine, on March 19, 1892. By his second wife he had one child, Corydon Phillips.
