Edmund B. Gilchrist

Edmund Beaman Gilchrist (March 13, 1885 - December 18, 1953) was an American architect, best remembered for his English-Cotswold and French-Norman suburban houses.

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he attended Germantown Friends School, Drexel University for a year, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1906. He apprenticed in the offices of architects Horace Trumbauer and Wilson Eyre, and launched his own firm in 1911.

In the 1880s and 1890s, architects G. W. & W. D. Hewitt designed more than 100 houses in the Chestnut Hill section of Philadelphia for developer Henry H. Houston. A generation later, Dr. George Woodward, Houston's son-in-law, hired Gilchrist, H. Louis Duhring, Jr., and Robert Rodes McGoodwin to expand the planned community, building dozens of freestanding houses and attached houses grouped to look like manor houses. The Woodward houses were rental properties and, a century later, most remain so.

In addition to suburban houses, Gilchrist designed summer houses (especially in Maine), churches, a Moderne-style public library, a Federal-style city hall, and alterations to numerous residences. He designed a 33-story Art Deco skyscraper in Philadelphia, and an Art Deco retail store for the candy manufacturer Whitman & Sons.

He was considered an expert on group housing. Working as an architect for the U.S. Navy during World War I, he designed housing at what is now North Island Naval Air Force Base in San Diego, California. During the Depression, he served on President Herbert Hoover's Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership (1932), and on the national AIA's Special Committee on the Economics of Site Planning and Housing (1934–35). He also designed public housing under the WPA.

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