Maginnis & Walsh
In 1948, Maginnis received the AIA Gold Medal for "outstanding service to American architecture," the highest award in the profession.
He attended The English High School in Boston, and worked as a draftsman for Peabody and Stearns from 1887 to 1893, when he left to study in Europe.
[7] Our Lady of the Presentation Catholic Church in the Oak Square neighborhood of the Brighton section of Boston was begun in 1913 and completed in 1921.
[9] St. Gabriel's is in the Renaissance Revival architecture style, constructed of buff-colored brick with cast stone accents and red mission tile roof.
[10] In 2017 plans were approved to convert the monastery property into a combination of condominiums and apartments, largely geared to graduate students.
In the Boston area, the firm built St. Catherine of Genoa Church on Spring Hill in Somerville, Massachusetts, regarded as a masterpiece.
The Girls' Latin School, Huntington Avenue Building was built in 1907 in collaboration with Peabody & Stearns and Coolidge & Carlson.
Located in the Fens area of Boston, it was founded by the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur and opened in 1919 as the first women's Catholic college in New England.
[14][15][circular reference] The Church of Ascension of Our Lord was built between 1927 and 1928, for the English-speaking Roman Catholic population in Westmount municipality of Montreal, Canada, on land originally belonging to the Grey Nuns.
Its architect, Maginnis & Walsh was “based in Boston and was considered the foremost specialist in Catholic ecclesiastical architecture of the period.
Although its architectural style looks to the Gothic churches of Europe, its construction was modern for the period: a steel frame, encased in brick or concrete and clad in Montreal limestone, with Berea sandstone trim.
[14][15][circular reference] In 1929 the firm designed Our Lady of Sorrows Church in South Orange, New Jersey, in the French Gothic style, to replace the 1889 St Mary's.
Maginnis's design broke from the traditional Oxbridge models that had inspired it, and that had until then characterized Gothic architecture on American campuses.
Using stone quarried on the site, the building was constructed at the highest point on Chestnut Hill, commanding a view of the surrounding landscape and the city to the east.
In its unprecedented scale, Gasson Tower was conceived not as the belfry of a singular building, but as the crowning campanile of Maginnis' new "city upon a hill".
Although Maginnis' ambitious Gothic project never saw full completion due to the Wall Street Crash of 1929, its central portion was built according to plan and forms the core of what is now Boston College's middle campus.
[19] Maginnis also designed the chancel at Trinity Church in Copley Square, the high altar at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Midtown Manhattan, and the Massachusetts Veterans War Memorial Tower on the summit of Mount Greylock.
