Hermann V. von Holst

Hermann V. von Holst (1874–1955) was an American architect practicing in Chicago, Illinois, and Boca Raton, Florida, from the 1890s to the 1940s. He is best remembered for agreeing to take on the responsibility of heading up Frank Lloyd Wright's architectural practice when Wright went off to Europe with Mamah Cheney in 1909.

Von Holst was born in Freiburg, Germany, on June 17, 1874, the son of the eminent historian Hermann Eduard von Holst and a Hoboken, New Jersey, native, Annie Isabelle Hatt, who had married on April 23, 1872, in New York City. The von Holsts lived in Germany with visits to the United States until they emigrated from Germany to Chicago in 1891, where von Holst, Sr., became head of the department of history at the University of Chicago.

Herman V. von Holst graduated from the architecture program at the University of Chicago in 1893 and the architecture program at MIT in 1896. He found employment as a draughtsman at the prestigious architectural firm of Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, in their Chicago office, one of the successor firms of the celebrated architect Henry Hobson Richardson. By 1900, von Holst was head draughtsman at the firm. Following extensive travels, von Holst opened his own practice in Chicago in 1905, with offices in The Rookery Building, Chicago. In 1909, he moved his office to Chicago's Steinway Hall, where he was among a collegial group of Prairie School architects.

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