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 firm was considered among the "earliest modernizers in architecture" in the period after the Great Chicago Fire.[1]
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.[2] One interesting note is that their most significant student union building, the Michigan Union, was built on the site of the brothers' boyhood home.[3]
Allen Bartlitt Pond was born in Ann Arbor, MI, on November 21, 1858, and died in Chicago on March 17, 1929. Irving Kane Pond was born in Ann Arbor on May 1, 1857, and died in Washington, D. C., on September 29, 1939.
^The University of Chicago By Jay Pridmore, Peter Kiar, Page 108
^"Annual Report of the Supervising Architect to the Secretary of the Treasury", United States Dept. of the Treasury, Office of Supervising Architect, 1909, page 148
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