He was one of the most important architects in St. Louis and the midwestern United States at the turn of the twentieth century, designing commercial, residential, industrial, and governmental structures.

After graduation, he joined the firm of George I. Barnett, a native of Nottingham, England, who became St. Louis' best-known architect during the mid-nineteenth century and who trained several generations of local designers.

Taylor, who rose to serve as Barnett's junior partner from 1876 to 1881, worked on several of the firm's prominent commercial projects in St. Louis, including the Southern Hotel, the Julie Building (which housed Barr's Department Store), and the Mercantile Center for the Famous Clothing Company.

Taylor's firm became well known for major commercial buildings in downtown St. Louis, which in the last quarter of the nineteenth century began to emerge as one of the dominant metropolises in the American Midwest, not the least because of its strategic location just south of the juncture of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers.

According to David Simmons, Taylor built his career by establishing a reputation as "an honest and dedicated architect" who strove to complete commissions in a timely manner and within his given budget, while still accepting challenging jobs that other designers refused to take.

One reason was his 1890 hiring of a new chief designer, Milwaukee native Oscar Enders (1865-1926), who had gained considerable experience as a draftsman with several firms in Chicago, and who in 1895 became the second president of the St. Louis Architectural Sketch Club.

[4] St. Louis' protracted growth at the close of the nineteenth century was due to its strategic location as a transportation hub for steamboat and railroad traffic, particularly following the completion of the Eads Bridge over the Mississippi River in 1874.

"[7] Taylor built a solid structure, with an interior supported by massive brick arches, cast iron columns encased in hollow tile, and steel floor beams covered with seven inches of yellow pine that was in turn topped with one-inch-thick dressed maple.

Probably influenced by John Wellborn Root's Rookery Building in Chicago, Taylor made extensive use of terracotta ornament and iron interior staircases.

The buildings he designed in the central business district reflect such diversity, though typologically they did not differ substantially, consisting mostly of monumental office blocks that ranged from 3 to 10 stories in height and often dominated their sites.

[9] In 1901-02 he completed the National Bank of Commerce, a towering eleven-story French Renaissance skyscraper that housed 198 offices; sculptural lion heads from its interior are now on display at The Wolfsonian-Florida International University in Miami Beach.

In 1901, Taylor's strong connections to St. Louis' leaders in business and industry, including the city's most influential banker, landed him the position of chairman of the Architectural Commission and Director of Works.

Taylor hired a young architect, Emmanuel Louis Masqueray, as his chief designer, and the two of them collaborated on the overall layout of the fair, which consisted of the somewhat-odd arrangement of two axes of buildings set at a right angle to each other and bisected by a third axis formed by the Grand Lagoon at a 45-degree diagonal.

The most innovative project, though, involved the raising of the Equitable Building in St. Louis in 1910 by setting the top eight stories on hydraulic jacks and replacing the bottom two floors and the brick-and-stone foundation with a reinforced concrete and steel structure behind a glass skin.

Taylor also completed two permanent monumental civic structures in his last years, both of them exercises in axial, Beaux-Arts neoclassicism, as befitting the City Beautiful movement, then in vogue in a number of major American metropolitan centers.

He was well-respected among his peers and one of the leaders of the increasing professionalization of architecture in America at the end on the nineteenth century, becoming a charter member of the Western Association of Architects.