Pioneer Information
Raised in the Lakeside (now Hubbard Woods) neighborhood of Winnetka, Illinois, West learned Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, and German as a child. He attended the Chicago Manual Training School, which had been founded by the Chicago Commercial Club in 1882. He studied literature, science, and industrial and architectural drawing at the school, and upon graduation in 1898, interned with landscape architect O. C. Simonds. He served as an apprentice at Graceland Cemetery, where he learned about landscape design on the job. West would spend his entire career with Simonds’s firm, becoming a partner in 1925, when the practice was renamed Simonds and West, Landscape Designers.
Assuming the company’s daily management in the 1920s, West continued Simonds’s naturalistic design philosophy and with junior partner Erle O. Blair, adapted to changing tastes—introducing terraces and formal outdoor spaces at private residences. West was the principal for many estates, including the vast Sinnissippi property of Frank and Florence Pullman Lowden in Oregon, Illinois, and those for Arthur Marks in Palm Beach, Florida; Bar Harbor, Maine; and Westchester County, New York. Additional projects included the Belle Meade Farm subdivision (now Belle Meade Golf Links Historic District) in Nashville, Tennessee; country clubs, including the Indian Hill Club in his hometown; and the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Summit, Illinois.
Deeply committed to conservation and civic life, West was a founding member of The Prairie Club—alongside Jens Jensen, Dwight Perkins, and Simonds’s daughter, Gertrude—and belonged to the Chicago Regional Planning Association and Friends of Our Native Landscape and several other organizations. A bachelor who lived with his siblings and nieces and nephews, West took a brotherly interest in fostering an appreciation of nature in young people. He was elected a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects in 1939 and died at his home in Winnetka in 1941.
