Philip Gengembre Hubert
French architect (1830–1911)
Philip Gengembre Hubert, Sr., AIA, (August 20, 1830 – November 15, 1911) was a French-American architect and founder of the New York City architectural firm Hubert & Pirsson (later Hubert, Pirsson, and Company, active from c. 1870 to 1888, and Hubert, Pirsson, and Haddick, active from 1888 to 1898) with James W. Pirsson (1833–1888). The firm produced many of the city's "Gilded Age" finest buildings, including hotels, churches and residences.
Life
Hubert was born in Paris to Colomb Gengembre, an architect and engineer who taught him architecture. His sister was artist Sophie Gengembre Anderson. Hubert emigrated with his parents in 1849 to the United States, first settling in Cincinnati, Ohio. In Cincinnati, he taught French by writing his textbooks, "which were published and widely used in schools of that time." In 1853, he took up a position at Girard College in Philadelphia as the first professor of French and history; he moved to Boston and was offered a professorship at Harvard, which he did not accept. He moved to New York in 1865 and studied architecture. "As a young man, he contributed a large number of short and serial stories to magazines—of a versatile turn of mind he took a vivid interest in many things and conversed with keen intelligence and originality upon politics, social science, invention and literature…."
He moved to New York in 1865 at the end of the American Civil War. He became associated with Pirsson to design six single-family residences on the southwest corner of Lexington Avenue and East 43rd Street.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7183605. VIAF identifies the subject as 55449874. The Library of Congress control number is n80094556. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1830, 1911, 1870 and 1888.
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This entry incorporates text from “Philip Gengembre Hubert” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.