Gilchrist, Edmund B. (Edmund Beaman), 1885-1953

Edmund Gilchrist was born in Philadelphia, son of William W. and Susan (Beaman) Gilchrist. He took courses in architecture at the Drexel Institute and at the University of Pennsylvania and worked in the offices of Horace Trumbauer and Wilson Eyre. He first worked with his most important early client, developer Dr. George Woodward, while in Eyre's office. Woodward gave Gilchrist his first independent commissions near the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. Together with Philadelphia architects H. Louis Duhring (1874-1953) and Robert Rodes McGoodwin (1886-1967), Gilchrist created a garden city community within the Chestnut Hill neighborhood of Philadelphia that combined complex, modern planning with historicist details and gracefully mixed clustered and free-standing houses, gardens, and roadways. Woodward dubbed his development "St. Martin's," and retained most of the houses he built there for rental. Gilchrist continued to design new houses for Woodward into the 1920s, and made minor renovations to his earlier designs into the 1930s. In the later 1910s Gilchrist expanded his practice, designing houses in the contiguous Germantown, Chestnut Hill, and Mount Airy neighborhoods of the city for clients largely from an elite Philadelphia social stratum of old families. Work in resort communities in Maine where these Philadelphians summered also began in this period.

Gilchrist's planning expertise and innovations were recognized in the profession and beyond. During the latter part of World War I he produced designs to the U.S. Shipping Board's Emergency Fleet Corporation housing. He was one of a number of prominent architects to design house groups for the planned community of Mariemont, Ohio in the 1920s. In the early 1930s, he served on the Philadelphia AIA's special committee on the economics of site planning and housing, producing model designs, and on the Committee for Design for President Hoover's Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership. He also produced designs in the 1930s for the reconstruction of the central portion of the town of Ellsworth, Maine, after a destructive fire. Although the bulk of Gilchrist's work was domestic, he also designed commercial buildings in central Philadelphia, and the Unitarian Church of Germantown, a regional landmark. He retired from practice in 1943.

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