After graduating from Harvard and MIT, he served an apprenticeship with
Boston architects
William Robert Ware &
Henry Van Brunt and
William Ralph Emerson, respectively. Silsbee traveled around
Europe before moving to
Syracuse,
New York in 1874. In 1875, he married Anna Baldwin Sedgwick, daughter of influential lawyer and politician
Charles Baldwin Sedgwick. He had a prolific practice and at one point had three simultaneously operating offices. He had offices in Syracuse (1875–1885),
Buffalo (Silsbee & Marling, 1882–1887), and
Chicago (Silsbee and
Kent, 1883–1884). From 1883 to 1885, his Syracuse office was a partnership with architect Ellis G. Hall. Silsbee's Chicago office had a number of architects who were later to become known in their own right, including: •
Frank Lloyd Wright •
George Grant Elmslie •
George W. Maher •
Irving J. Gill •
Henry G. Fiddelke Silsbee was one of the first professors of architecture at
Syracuse University, another one of the earliest schools of architecture in the nation. He was a founding member of the Chicago and Illinois Chapters of the
American Institute of Architects. In 1894, Silsbee was awarded the Peabody Medal by the
Franklin Institute for his design for a Moving Sidewalk. Silsbee designed the lavish interiors of
Potter Palmer's "castle" in Chicago. Several of his residential designs survive in
Riverside and
Evanston Illinois. His most prominent surviving work in Chicago is the
Lincoln Park Conservatory. Considerably smaller in scale but filled with such elegant details as mosaic floors and a graceful oak roof with "hammer-beams trusses and curved brackets" is his Horatio N. May Chapel on the grounds of
Rosehill Cemetery. Silsbee designed the
movable walkway at the
World's Columbian Exposition pier in 1893, and submitted plans to provide this improvement for the
Brooklyn Bridge in 1894, although these plans were never executed. In his 1941 autobiography, Frank Lloyd Wright wrote: Silsbee practiced architecture until his death in 1913.
Works Works include: ==Gallery==