CHAMPNEY, Edouard Frere (1874-1929), architect of Seattle, Wash. and active in a partnership with Augustus W. Gould (see list of works under Gould & Champney). He was born in Ecouen, France to American-born parents including his father F. Wells Champney, a well-known artist. He was brought to the United States for his education at Harvard College, but returned to France in 1896 where he enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1896. He studied in the atelier conducted by Victor Laloux, then moved back to America in 1900 where he joined the office of Carrere & Hastings in New York City, overseeing their work at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901, and supervising construction of private mansions by the firm at Palm Beach, New York City and in Newport, R.I.
In 1902 he moved to St. Louis, Missouri to work as assistant to Emmanuel L. Masqueray, another graduate of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris who had been appointed Chief of Design at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904. Upon completion of this major work, Champney moved to Washington, D.C. to take up the position of designer in the office of the U.S. Supervising Architect, and assisted with the design of exhibition buildings at the Lewis & Clark Exposition in Portland, Oregon (1905), and preparing designs for federal post offices and courthouses. In 1907 he joined John Galen Howard, a leading architect from San Francisco, and supervised their Seattle office, holding the post of chief designer of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition which opened there in 1909.
While working there, he was invited by Augustus W. Gould to form a partnership, headquartered in Seattle and with a branch office in Vancouver, B.C. Their major commission there was the Rogers Building, and eleven storey commercial landmark which is still standing in Vancouver as of 2020. Their collaboration ended in 1912, and Champney continued to work under his own name in Seattle and San Francisco. He later died at Berkeley, Calif. on 4 June 1929 (obituary in the A.I.A. Washington State Chapter, Monthly Bulletin, ix, No. 6, June 1929, biog. in Pacific Builder & Engineer [Seattle], viii, 5 June 1909, 231; biog. H. Withey, Biographical Dictionary of American Architects, 1956, 116; biog. and port in Jeffrey K. Ochsner, Shaping Seattle Architecture, 2014, 162-67, illus.; 367, 394).