Pond and Pond

Pond and Pond was an American architecture firm established by the Chicago architects Irving Kane Pond and Allen Bartlitt Pond.

Working in the Arts and Crafts idiom, the brothers gained renown for elaborately detailed brickwork and irregular massing of forms. One of their earliest projects, in 1885, was a building for the Ladies Library Association of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Only the dated cornerstone survives—preserved in a stairwell of the present Ann Arbor Public Library.

Irving K. and Allen B. Pond were born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Their father was newspaperman Elihu Pond, editor of the weekly Ann Arbor Argus. Jokingly called by friends "Ikey" and "Abie", after their initials, the two brothers attended the University of Michigan, where in 1879 they were pupils in architectural classes given by William LeBaron Jenney, who commuted from Chicago to deliver the first courses in architecture at Michigan. [Later, in the Home Insurance Building, Jenney developed the steel skeleton framework that made highrise buildings possible.]

The Pond brothers were part of an active artists' scene in Chicago that included Lorado Taft, Bert Leston Taylor, Jane Addams, and Harriet Monroe. The brothers were founding members of the Cliff Dwellers Club of Chicago, of the Eagle's Nest Art Colony in Ogle County, Illinois, and associated with Jane Addams' Hull House in Chicago, for whom they designed various buildings.

The firm was considered among the "earliest modernizers in architecture" in the period after the Great Chicago Fire.

The firm was also notable for its success in a new field of architectural design, that of large university student union buildings. Pond and Pond built student unions for the campuses of Purdue University, University of Michigan, Michigan State, and University of Kansas. One interesting note is that their most significant student union building, the Michigan Union, was built on the site of the brothers' boyhood home.

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