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Beginning his career at a time when there were probably no more than 30 U.S. architects who had received any formal training—either in the U.S. or abroad—Cobb was an obvious choice for clients seeking architects with an understanding of historicism, the borrowing and transforming of previous architectural idioms.

Although Cobb worked in the midst of an architectural revolution, his own contributions were more stylistic than structural. And his best work, says Lewis, came not in the the University of Chicago’s Oxford–inspired quadrangles. Designing buildings to meet “a demand for Gothic,” Lewis notes, “his campus buildings are about as Gothic as the Reliance Building,” a Loop monument to modernity. He pauses, reconsiders: “Still, the buildings are gray, and they do have gargoyles and grotesques.”

Cobb’s best work, Lewis continues, was done in Chicago and in the Romanesque revival idiom first made famous by H. H. Richardson. Used for residences, clubs, and commercial buildings well into the 1890s, Richardsonian Romanesque buildings often featured heavy, rough-cut stone walls, rounded arches and squat columns, deeply recessed windows, and pressed metal bays and turrets. With a natural talent for ornamental drawing, Cobb delighted in adding fancifully elaborate detail—whether the aquatic figures decorating his Fisheries Building for the Columbian Exposition, the playful grotesques on the Chicago quadrangles, or the celestial imagery at Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin.

In 1898, Cobb left Chicago for Washington, D.C. (though he maintained an office in Chicago for several years after the move). With his national reputation—he had won commissions for banks, residences, and office buildings all over the country—he may have gone east for his children’s health. But it’s also likely, says Lewis, that he was “chasing important work in Washington,” especially in light of a construction slump that hit Chicago following the panic of 1893.

In fact, after 1898, when the bulk of his work for the University was done, Cobb designed only two buildings of importance in Chicago—the Dutch Renaissance–inspired warehouse and office building at Dearborn and Kinzie that now houses Harry Caray’s Restaurant, and the Chicago Post Office and Federal Building. “The old Post Office” occupied an entire block (between Dearborn and Clark Streets and Adams and Jackson Streets) until 1965, when it was torn down and replaced by a federal complex.

Once in Washington, the work Cobb sought—a chance to repeat his U of C experience by creating a campus for the new American University—never materialized. Asked to design only one building for the new university, he soon moved on to New York City. There his work included both office buildings and residences. He was active as an architect until his death in 1931. Lewis says he and Daniel are “hot on the trail” of several of Cobb’s New York houses, but the record is sparse, partly because he was no longer getting the day’s biggest commissions. “After he left Chicago, Cobb declined,” Lewis says, “both in terms of popularity and in the quality of his work.”

Perhaps the most important reason for Cobb’s decline, explains Lewis, was that, as architectural styles changed, he began “to be perceived as old-fashioned. After the Columbian Exposition in the Midwest, and even before in the East, there was a great hunger for Beaux Arts buildings,” with restrained, classical lines.

“Not very comfortable with the classical idiom,” Cobb began to lose business to firms like McKim, Mead & White. McKim’s Agricultural Building had been among the most influential structures at the 1893 Exposition—far outshining Cobb’s seven buildings there—and he designed such Manhattan landmarks as the Pennsylvania Railroad Station and the J. Pierpont Morgan Library.

Nor was Cobb a builder of skyscrapers. Instead, his version of Sullivan’s “form follows function” dictum was seen most clearly in his design for Yerkes Observatory, completed in 1897. The building, which needed to house a 40-inch telescope and two smaller telescopes, posed, in Lewis’s words, “a problem for which no historical solution existed.” Cobb solved the problem by creating an extremely functional building. One dome, with a still stunning interior of curved wood, houses the largest telescope, appropriately dominating the design. The two smaller domes at the observatory’s other end provide an architectural balancing act. At the same time, the structure, with its repeated patterns of arcades and pillars, easily fits into the Romanesque style. In the end, the Yerkes Observatory is one of Cobb’s most Richardsonian designs, showing the same ability to incorporate decoration without detracting from the structure’s larger lines and function.

Although Henry Ives Cobb was no Henry Hobson Richardson, Julius Lewis still believes that the architect deserves a book of his own: “A better understanding of Cobb’s work is important for a picture of that time. The modernist strain still trumpeted today was only one kind of architecture at that time—perhaps the least of it.”