The Columbia was designed in collaboration by the great naval architect and engineering innovator Frank Kirby and the artist, architect, and designer Louis O. Keil. Kirby and Keil worked together as a collaborative team over a 30-year period. Kirby was responsible for the naval architectural and engineering framework ensuring that the Columbia was safe, fast, and strong, and Keil was responsible for conceiving and overseeing the creation of the “steamboat palace” decor that would ensure that experience of the Columbia’s interiors would be visually rich, engaging, and worthy of the term “palatial.”

Frank Kirby: In 1864 prominent New York financier Jesse Hoyt sponsored a promising 15-year-old student named Frank Kirby to come east to study engineering at Cooper Union in New York City. Upon returning to Michigan, Kirby helped to open the first Great Lakes shipyard created specifically to build metal hulls, and his first design was launched there in 1872. Kirby soon developed an international reputation as an engineering innovator. He developed icebreaking systems that permitted longer operating seasons on the Great Lakes, and then received commissions for icebreakers from the Imperial Russian Government. In his design for the Columbia in 1902, Kirby created a girder system that allowed for spans that permitted the first proper ballroom afloat. As a celebrated senior figure in engineering Kirby encouraged a young apprentice named Henry Ford, who never forgot the kindness expressed to him. In the wake of the loss of the General Slocum, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Kirby to serve as a one-man Federal Commission to reform steamboat safety codes. In 1906 Kirby moved back to New York City to design some of the most celebrated Hudson River day-liners, including the Hendrick Hudson, the Washington Irving, and the Robert Fulton. The commissioners of the Hudson Fulton Celebrations of 1909 turned to Kirby to design their replica of the Clermont. In 1920 he spent six months in China supervising construction of ships there; he also consulted on designs for Russia, China, and South America. After Kirby’s death in 1929, his headstone was engraved with the profiles of his designs including the largest paddlewheel steamer ever built.

Louis O. Keil: In 1885 the fresco painter Louis O. Keil worked with Frank Kirby on the architectural and decorative treatments of the interiors of one of Kirby’s steamers. This began a collaborative partnership that lasted more than 30 years until Keil’s death in 1918. Keil became known as an architect in his own right and came to preside over a renowned workshop of artisans that conceived and created carved and gilded paneling, painted murals, and leaded glass windows for the interiors he designed in consultation with Kirby. Keil inventively adapted beaux arts, gothic, art nouveau, baroque, Moorish, and oriental architectural forms and motifs to the curvilinear interiors of a steamboat to create richly original spaces. Keil also collaborated with the workshops of Louis Comfort Tiffany on some of his maritime projects. 

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