Irving Kane Pond

Pond was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1857. He was the son of Elihu Pond and Mary Barlow (Allen) Pond. His father was a member of the Michigan State Senate, warden of the Michigan State Prison for two years, the first president of the Michigan Press Association and the editor and publisher of the weekly newspaper, the Argus of Ann Arbor. Growing up in Ann Arbor, Pond lived in a house on the current site of the Michigan Union, a building he later designed. His next door neighbor as a child was the noted legal scholar, Thomas M. Cooley. Cooley encouraged the young Pond, who aspired to be an artist, by presenting him with his first art book and by commissioning Pond to draw a set of cartoons of the Cooley family. Pond attended the public schools in Ann Arbor before enrolling at the University of Michigan.

Pond was an engineering student at the University of Michigan from 1875 to 1879 and took architecture classes taught by Chicago architect William LeBaron Jenney. Six years later, Jenney gained fame for designing Chicago's metal-framed Home Insurance Building. In 1934, Pond wrote an article challenging the popular assertion that the Home Insurance Building was the first steel-framed skyscraper.

While attending the University of Michigan, Pond was a member of the first Michigan Wolverines football team. On May 30, 1879, the team played its first intercollegiate football game against Racine College at White Stocking Park in Chicago. The Chicago Tribune called it "the first rugby-football game to be played west of the Alleghenies." Pond scored the first touchdown in University of Michigan history in the match. He scored the touchdown midway through "the first 'inning'." According to Will Perry's history of Michigan football, the crowd responded to Pond's plays with cheers of "Pond Forever." Pond graduated from Michigan in 1879 with a degree in civil engineering.

Early career

In 1879, Pond moved to Chicago to pursue a career as an architect. He worked as a draftsman in the offices of his former teacher, William LeBaron Jenney, and worked as the head draftsman in the office of Solon Spencer Beman during the construction of the planned Pullman community. While working with Beman, Pond was an ardent supporter of the Pullman planned community, he later acknowledged the resentment of Pullman residents that the town was anachronistic and represented some form of medieval barony.

Some of Pond's earliest works as an independent architect were for clients in his home town of Ann Arbor and nearby Detroit. As early as 1882, he designed "a modest but commodious home of stone and brick" on South State Street for Dr. Victor C. Vaughan. Pond later pointed to the designs of the old mantels in the Vaughan house which "foreshadowed his future works." He also designed Ann Arbor's Ladies Library Association Building (1885) and the West Physics Building for the University of Michigan, built in 1887 and destroyed by fire in 1967. In 1887, he renovated the Detroit Opera House, increasing the seating capacity to 2,100 and relocating the auditorium to the main floor.

In 1886, Pond and his brother Allen Bartlitt Pond (1858–1929) formed their own architectural firm in Chicago under the name Pond and Pond. The brothers continued to operate the firm for more than 40 years, and their buildings are considered to be among the best examples of Arts and Crafts architecture in Chicago.