Background
Jenney was born on September 25, 1832, in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, the son of William P. and Elizabeth LeBaron (Gibbs) Jenney.
Jenney was born on September 25, 1832, in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, the son of William P. and Elizabeth LeBaron (Gibbs) Jenney.
Jenney began his formal education at Phillips Academy, Andover, in 1846, and at the Lawrence Scientific school at Harvard in 1853, but transferred to École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures (École Centrale Paris) to study engineering and architecture. He graduated in 1856.
Returning to the United States, Jenney became an engineer for the Tehuantepec Railroad Company of New Orleans on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, but after a year went again to France and spent eighteen months in additional study in architecture.
At the outbreak of the Civil War he returned to the United States and enlisted in the Federal army. Shortly after his enlistment, on August 19, 1861, he was appointed captain additional aide de camp and assigned to engineering duty on the staff of General Grant. He served with Grant from Cairo to Corinth and then, at General Sherman's request, was transferred to his command and put in charge of the engineering work at Memphis, Tennessee. Subsequently he became chief engineer of the XV Army Corps and continued to serve on the staff of General Sherman until he resigned on May 19, 1866, with the rank of major.
After doing some miscellaneous engineering work in western Pennsylvania, he went to Chicago in 1868 and established himself as an engineer and architect. Among his first architectural works were a large church and several large office buildings. In the latter he introduced a change over existing designs in that he provided for attractive entrances, light and commodious hallways, and no dark office rooms. About 1883 he was appointed architect for the Home Insurance Company of New York to design an office building, to be built in Chicago, which was to be fire-resistant and to have the maximum number of well-lighted small offices. For this building (erected 1884) he devised a skeleton construction in which each story - walls, partition and floors - was carried independently on columns. This proved to be "the first high building to utilize as the basic principle of its design the method known as skeleton construction, " and as such was "the true father of the skyscraper. " The columns for the building were of cast-iron and in it were used for the first time a few Bessemer steel beams. In appreciation of the service he had rendered the industry in this pioneer application of structural steel, the Bessemer Steamship Company of New York later named one of its vessels for him (Brickbuilder, February 1897).
Jenney also devised many of the appointments that are now common to good office buildings, such as tile office vaults, rapid metal elevators, and a system of plumbing of a most approved type. In 1891 he took William B. Mundie into partnership. Following the completion of the Home Insurance Building, his services were in constant demand. He designed and built in Chicago the Siegel Cooper & Company department store, the Y. M. C. A. Building, the Chicago National Bank Building, the Horticulture Building at the World's Columbian Exposition, and the New York Life Building. The last work in which he was actively interested was the erection of the Illinois memorial on the battlefield of Vicksburg. His poor health prevented his completing this undertaking however, and he retired in 1905 to Los Angeles, California, where he died.
Shortly before his retirement the firm had become Jenney, Mundie & Jensen. He was the author of numerous magazine articles, and in 1869 published Principles and Practice of Architecture.
On May 8, 1867, Jenney married Elizabeth H. Cobb of Cleveland, Ohio, who with two sons survived him.
