The Pond brothers worked together for more than 40 years, and their buildings are considered to be among the best examples of Arts and Crafts architecture in Chicago.

[1][2] Growing up in Ann Arbor, Pond lived in a house on the current site of the Michigan Union, a building he later designed.

[1][4] 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.

In 1934, Pond wrote an article challenging the popular assertion that the Home Insurance Building was the first steel-framed skyscraper.

On May 30, 1879, the team played its first intercollegiate football game against Racine College at White Stocking Park in Chicago.

[10][11] 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.

[13] In 1887, he renovated the Detroit Opera House, increasing the seating capacity to 2,100 and relocating the auditorium to the main floor.

[1][2] 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.

[15] The Pond brothers gained their greatest acclaim as the architects for Jane Addams's Hull House.

Their father's work as warden of the state prison had sparked an interest in social reform and the settlement house movement.

Allen Bartlitt Pond was the assistant superintendent of the Armour Mission,[16] an educational and healthcare center, when Jane Addams came to Chicago in January 1889 looking for a building in which to open a new settlement house.

The City Club building, noted for its "gently curving limestone arch that ties together the windows of the second floor," is today operated as the John Marshall Law School.

Its two-story dining-lecture hall, complete with balcony and private eating chambers, accommodated over two hundred for the weekly luncheon talks on social and political issues of the day.

Architect and club member Irving K. Pond declared that 'every line of the building illustrated some phase of the uplift movement.

[29] Pond and eleven others, including his brother Allen Pond, Lorado Taft, Hamlin Garland, Ralph Clarkson, Horace Spencer Fiske, leased a plot of land on a steep ridge with "craggy rocks" and gnarled cedars overlooking the Rock River.

In its early years as the Little Room, the group was described as "an exclusive organization consisting of creative individuals of like temperament joined together for relaxation.

[1] Pond's best known buildings include three National Historic Landmark structures located in Chicago — the Hull House dining hall[25][26] the Lorado Taft Midway Studios,Alice Sinkevitch (2004).

[37][38] Other notable Pond designs include the Freer House (1898) in Ann Arbor, the American School of Correspondence building (1906–1907) in Chicago, the federal building in Kankakee, Illinois, the Michigan Union (1919) built on the site of Pond's boyhood home in Ann Arbor,[39] the Purdue Memorial Union (1924) at Purdue University, the MSU Union in East Lansing, Michigan, the Kansas Memorial Union at the University of Kansas, the Park Ridge Public Library, the Michigan League in Ann Arbor, the Omaha Apartments in Chicago, the Kent Building in Chicago (1902), and the Toll Building in Chicago (1908).

However, the old ideas are not to be spurned and the old forms are not altogether to be cast aside when they contain the spark of life ...[42]Pond's article was viewed by some as a criticism of those in the Prairie School who overemphasized the horizontal over the vertical.

[42]In the AIA Guide to Chicago, the Ponds are identified as part of the "circle of young architects", including Frank Lloyd Wright, that was responsible for "transforming the concepts of the Arts & Crafts movement into the indigenous Prairie School.

Pond was a contemporary, and in some ways rival, of Wright in the Chicago architectural scene of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

"[46] In 2009, Pond's autobiography, written in the two years before his death, was published by Hyoogen Press through the efforts of Chicago architect David Swan.

(1895), "The Whale - A Study: The Historic School of Jonah" (1897),[51] "The Poetry of Motion: and Other Matters" (1899), "A Few Meloncholy Reflections and Lively Anticipations of Misdeeds to Come" (1905), "A Side Light on Architecture" (1906), "Art and the Expression of Individuality" (1911), "Architecture: Its Origins and Illusions" (1914),"Poems" (1917), "Here Lies the Way" (1918), "Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On.

"[52] "The Stones of Venice" (1919), "A Day Under the Big Top: A Study in Life and Art" (1924),[53] "On Believing and Leaving" (1928),[54] "Toward an American Architecture" (1930), "Hold Your Horses: The Elephants Are Coming!"

[1] In 1910, he published an essay in Gustav Stickley's The Craftsman, advocating an architectural style embodying the American spirit and idealism.

Through his sympathy and understanding, in the light of his clear thought, and under his inspiration I have been better able to follow those paths of individual, professional and civic endeavor in which a rare ancestry bade us walk.

[58]After his brother died in 1929, Pond married Katherine N. de Nancrede, who was 47 years old, at a ceremony in Ann Arbor.