Leopold Eidlitz: Architecture and Idealism in the Gilded Age

In buildings such as the New York State Capitol (Albany), the Tweed Courthouse and Temple Emanu-El (New York), and P.T. Barnum’s mansion Iranistan, Leopold Eidlitz (1823-1908) created a fusion of structure and ornament that defied the Gilded Age’s aesthetic conventions and sowed the seeds of modern American architectural theory, a generation before Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright.