Kenneth Franzheim portrait

Abstract

This photograph of Kenneth Franzheim is part of the Vera Prasilova Scott portraiture collection. Scott was a studio photographer and the wife of a Rice faculty member. She took portraits of many prominent Houstonians in the late 1920s and early 1930s.Architect Kenneth Franzheim's major buildings in Houston were the seventeen-story Humble Tower (1936, with Staub, later became the Exxon Building); the second Hermann Hospital and the Hermann Professional Building (1949, with Hedrick and Lindsley); the eighteen-story Prudential Building (1952); the twenty-one-story Texas National Bank building (1955); and the twenty-four-story Bank of the Southwest building (1956). Franzheim's best known Houston building was Foley's Department Store (1947, 1957), for which he won an Award of Merit from the American Institute of Architects in 1950. Franzheim was particularly interested in incorporating works of art in his architecture, and this led to collaboration with the artists Wheeler Williams, Peter Hurd, Leo Friedlander, and Rufino Tamayo. Franzheim was the first chairman of the board of the Allied Arts Association of Houston and was an honorary member of the National Sculpture Society