LEE, Frederick Clare (1874-c. 1936), active in Toronto from 1912 in partnership with Edward F. Stevens (see list of works under Stevens & Lee). Born in Chicago on 30 November 1874 he was educated at Exeter Academy , New Hampshire, and graduated from the School of Architecture at Yale Univ. in 1896. He moved to Paris and enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux Arts (in 1897-1902) and returned to the United States and worked in New York City as a draftsman for Lord & Hewlett (in 1902-07). Lee then moved to Toronto in 1907, joining Darling & Pearson where he took charge of their major commission for the Toronto General Hospital, College Street (1910-12). During this period he undertook his first project under his own name, that for the Rosedale Golf Club House, Mount Pleasant Road at Glen Echo Road, TORONTO, ONT., 1909-10 (Jack Batten, Rosedale: The First 100 Years of Rosedale Golf Club, 1993, 37-9, illus.). In 1911 he was credited with the design of the large private wing for Wellesley Hospital, Homewood Place near Wellesley Street East, TORONTO, ONT. (City of Toronto b.p. 30103, 2 Sept. 1911).
In 1912 he formed a partnership with Edward F. Stevens, F.A.I.A., and specialized in the design of hospitals, with Lee remaining in Toronto to handle the Canadian commissions, and Stevens operating the Boston branch of the firm. Their office can be credited with more than twenty hospital buildings in Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and Manitoba, as well as nearly fifty hospitals in the United States. The firm remained active until 1933. Lee's membership in the Ontario Assoc. of Architects lapsed in December 1936 (biog. and port Who's Who in Canada, 1926-26, 179; inf. Ontario Association of Architects). A lengthy illustrated article entitled 'Modernism and Medicine: The Hospitals of Stevens & Lee 1919-1932', written by Prof. Annmarie Adams, appeared in The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, lviii, No. 1, March 1999, 42-61