Pioneer Information
Walker and Weeks was an architecture firm founded in Cleveland, Ohio in 1911. Natives of West Springfield, Massachusetts, Weeks (b. 1871) and Walker (b. 1877) both completed their architectural training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Prior to co-founding their practice, both architects worked for several firms in the Boston area. In 1905 John Carerre, a distinguished architect and member of the Cleveland Group Plan Commission, recruited them to join his office in Cleveland. The two men worked for Carrere on numerous public building projects before starting their own firm.
To compete for public and commercial projects during the city鈥檚 rapid growth in the 1920s, Walker and Weeks distinguished themselves from other architecture firms by championing interdisciplinary collaboration. Employing planners, architects, draftsmen, and engineers, they became one of the few firms in Cleveland that could manage all aspects of a commission.
Walker and Weeks developed a specialty in bank buildings and completed more than 60 of them, including the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland in 1923. The same year, they won a nationwide competition to design the Indiana World War Memorial Plaza in Indianapolis, a five-block-long commemorative landscape with Neoclassical buildings, fountains, and sculptures. After Weeks died in 1935 and Walker in 1949, the firm continued under the leadership of Howard Horn and Frank Rhinehart, who later renamed it Horn & Rhinehart.
