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Founded by John Stewardson and Walter Cope in 1885.1
Walter Cope (1860–1902)
In 1860, Walter Cope was born in Philadelphia to Thomas P. Cope and Elizabeth Waln Stokes Cope. After graduating from the Germantown Friends School, he attended classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1883. In 1885 the firm of Cope & Stewardson was established.
Cope was a founding member of the T-Square Club in 1883 and later served as vice-president, secretary, treasurer, president, and as a member of the executive committee. He was also a professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania from 1892 to 1902. After teaching at Penn, he became a professor at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He died after suffering a stroke in 1902.
Cope was also part of the investigating committee appointed to study conditions governing the new State Capitol Building competition in 1901. From 1896 to 1898 he was chairman of the committee on the restoration of Independence Hall.
John Stewardson (1858–1896)
John Stewardson, son of Thomas and Margaret Haines Stewardson, was born in 1858. His early education had been in private Christian schools in the Philadelphia area. He continued his studies at Adams Academy in Quincy, Massachusetts, from 1873 to 1877.
After graduation, he entered Harvard College, but left in 1878. He briefly continued his studies at the University of Pennsylvania and then joined the Atelier Pascal in Paris, France. In 1882 he returned to Philadelphia, working first in T. P. Chandler's office and then in the office of Frank Furness.
In 1884 he returned to Europe to travel through Italy and Belgium. A year later, he joined in personal practice with Walter Cope. They were joined in 1887 by John's younger brother Emlyn L. Stewardson, who had recently graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in civil engineering.
In 1892, Stewardson joined the University of Pennsylvania as staff lecturer in their new School of Architecture. He was also one of the founding members of the T-Square Club, serving in 1885 and 1891 as president of that organization. He also served as treasurer of the Philadelphia Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in 1886.
He is credited with the taste for English Gothic Revival which Cope & Stewardson used in their collegiate buildings. Talbot Hamlin, in his biographical description, for the Dictionary of American Biography notes that, following Stewardson's trip to England in 1894, the buildings at the University of Pennsylvania, which were on the boards at the time, changed from stone structures to brick with stone trim.
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Stewardson died in 1896 after a skating accident on the Schuylkill River, where he had gone for an afternoon's outing with his friend, the architect Wilson Eyre. Following his funeral his fellow architects established a fund, now known as the prestigious Stewardson Fellowship, which is awarded annually to promising young architects from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to study architecture abroad. He is interred with a modest marker at Philadelphia's Laurel Hill Cemetery, Section 14, Plots 235&236.
From Wikipedia’s article on Cope and Stewardson, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3