Potter, William Appleton

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Potter, William Appleton (1842–1909). American architect, the half-brother of E. T. Potter, he designed several outstanding US equivalents of High Victorian Gothic, including the Chancellor Green Library, Princeton University, NJ (1871–3), the South Congregational Church, Springfield, MA (1872–5—with bold polychrome treatment and a vast wheel-window of plate-tracery, probably his finest work), and the Custom House, Evansville, IN (1875–9). He took Robert Henderson Robertson (1849–1919) into partnership in 1875, and thereafter the firm's work was strongly influenced by that of H. H. Richardson, notably at the round-arched Alexander Hall, Princeton University (1891–4). The Pyne Library at Princeton (1896–7) and the First Reformed Dutch Church, Somerville, NJ (1895–7), are Gothic Revival. For his houses he drew on the English Domestic Revival as well as on American Colonial exemplars.

Bibliography

Are, xxvi (1909), 176–96;
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, xxxiii/2 (May 1973), 175–92;
S. Landau (1979);
Placzek (ed.) (1982);
Summerson (ed.) (1968);
Jane Turner (1968);

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