Independence Hall

Edmund Woolley was an early American architect and master carpenter. He was responsible for designing and erecting the first building on the University of Pennsylvania's first campus, the Pennsylvania State House and Hope Lodge. Woolley was born in England around 1695, and emigrated to America... around the year 1705. He was one of the first members of The Carpenters' Company of the City and County of Philadelphia. Beginning in 1732, Woolley was responsible for the design and construction of the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia, a project that employed Woolley and his apprentices well into the 1750s. Traditionally, credit has been given to Andrew Hamilton for the design, but contemporary scholarship has revealed that Hamilton was an amateur architect who contributed very little to the project. Woolley designed and built the Whitefield Meeting House, also in Philadelphia, which was erected in 1740.
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William Strickland , was a noted architect in nineteenth-century Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Nashville, Tennessee. Strickland was one of the founders of the Greek Revival movement in the United States, using the plates of The Antiquities of Athens for his inspiration. Strickland's design for the... Second Bank of the United States in Philadelphia beat out the design of his teacher, Benjamin Latrobe. Although Strickland was still copying classical prototypes at this point, the Second Bank is an ambitious building modeled on the greatest Greek design: The Parthenon of Athens. The competition had called for "chaste" Greek style: Strickland's elegant Greek temple design is a fitting result. The architect clearly saw this building as one of his major accomplishments, as he had it included as the background of the portrait that Philadelphia society painter John Neagle did of Strickland in 1829 Comparison of the Second Bank of the U.S. with the later Merchants' Exchange , also in Philadelphia, reveals the growth of Strickland's talent and confidence as an architect.
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