Murphy, Henry Killam, 1877-1954

Architect; A.B. Yale 1899, graduate study, 1899-1900; began practice in New York City, 1906; member firm Murphy & Dana, 1908-1920, Murphy, McGill & Hamlin, 1921-1923; after 1924 alone in firm; some major works in China, including, Yale-in-China, Changsha, China, 1913-1923; Yenching University, Peking, China, 1918-1932; he also wrote on Chinese architecture and lectured on the same.

Henry Killam Murphy was born on August 19, 1877, in New Haven, Connecticut. After graduating from Yale College in 1899, Murphy spent a year in the Yale Graduate School preparing for a career as an architect. In 1900 he studied design in the Atelier Masqueray and then worked for the firm of Tracy and Startwout, architects. In 1907, he opened his own firm, and in 1908, took Richard Dana as a partner. Together Murphy and Dana designed entire colleges, private residences, libraries, office buildings, schools, churches, and other buildings, both in the United States and abroad. A substantial number of these were in China, including the development of a Changsha campus for the Yali Middle School and Hsiang-Ya Medical School built by the Yale Foreign Ministry Society (now Yale-China). After Dana left the firm in 1921, the firm continued as Murphy, McGill, & Hamlin until 1924 when Murphy began his own practice. Enamored of Chinese architecture, Murphy continued to do work in China. In 1928 he was appointed advisor to the National Government of the Republic of China and by 1929 was architect for city planning of Nanking. Murphy died on October 12, 1954, in Branford, Connecticut.