Janssen, Benno

JANSSEN, Benno (1874-1964), a prominent architect in Pittsburgh, Penn. and partner in the firm of Janssen & Abbott, active 1906-18 (see entry under Franklin Abbott). In 1922 he formed a new partnership with William Y. Cocken, and in 1929 they prepared a monumental Art Deco design for the Shipshaw Power House for the Aluminum Co. of America, to be located at Chute a Caron, SAGUENAY, LAC ST. JEAN, QUEBEC, P.Q. (Pencil Points [New York], x, Aug. 1929, 545, illus.). Towering one hundred and twenty feet above the Saguenay River, this hydroelectric station was part of a larger complex intended to generate power for heavy industry and commercial customers in central Quebec.
Janssen studied at the Univ. of Kansas, at Massachusetts Inst. of Technology, and at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, and later trained in office in St. Louis and Boston. He lived and worked in Pittsburgh for the duration of his career, and executed a variety of designs for institutional, commercial and residential works. An extensive collection of drawings documenting more than sixty projects by Janssen has survived and is now housed at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. A full monograph on his work, written by Donald Miller, entitled The Architecture of Benno Janssen was published in 1997.