Allen, Francis Richmond

ALLEN, Francis Richmond (1843-1931) was a Boston architect and master of the neo-Gothic style who is best know for his work on Park Avenue Baptist Church, 64th Street West, New York City (1923), and for Riverside Church, 122nd Street, New York City (1928-30). Born in Boston, Mass. on 22 November 1843 he graduated from Amherst College in 1863 and worked for his father in the dry goods business. In 1876 he enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and studied architecture for two years before departing for Paris to join the atelier of Emile Vandremer at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. Allen established his own office in Boston in 1879 and commenced a partnership with Charles Collens (1873-1956) in 1904. Together they acted as the consulting design architects on KNOX PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, Sixth Avenue West at 4th Street, Calgary, Alta. (1912-13), a commission carried out in collaboration with the local Calgary architect Francis J. Lawson (C.R., xxv, 31 May 1911, 58; 6 March 1912, 59). This work is a refined and skillfully detailed essay in stone and is among the most sophisticated ecclesiastical works to be found in western Canada. Allen retired from active practice in 1925 and died in Boston on 7 November 1931 (obituary in the New York Times, 8 Nov. 1931, 30; biography in National Cyclopedia of American Biography, xxxii, 243-44; biography on Allen & Collens in Macmillan Encyclopedia of Architects, 1982, i, 70)