Robert D. Kohn
American architect (1870–1953)
Robert D. Kohn (May 12, 1870 – June 16, 1953) was an American architect most active in New York City.
Life and career
Kohn was born in Manhattan, attended Columbia University, and spent four years at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, from 1891 through 1895. After brief stints for other architects, he established an independent practice in 1896. In 1905 he married sculptor Estelle Rumbold of St. Louis, Missouri.
His first building of note was the Vienna Sezession-detailed Old New York Evening Post Building (1906–07), 20 Vesey Street, one of the limited number of Art Nouveau structures in New York. Stacks of convex copper-framed windows press forward between unrelieved limestone piers. Of the four sculpted figures in the uppermost floors, two are by Kohn's wife, and the other two are by Gutzon Borglum.
He designed the hall for the Society for Ethical Culture (Central Park West and 64th Street, 1911) and had formerly collaborated with Carrère and Hastings on the adjoining Ethical Culture school building (1902). "Like Christian Science, the Ethical Culture movement was searching for its own form - it had no historic precedents from which to draw.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4230339. VIAF identifies the subject as 96204547. The Library of Congress control number is nr00018149. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1870, 1953, 1891 and 1895.
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This entry incorporates text from “Robert D. Kohn” 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.