In the 1860s, Van Brunt and fellow Harvard graduate William Robert Ware established the architectural firm of Ware & Van Brunt. The firm produced designs for many buildings in the Boston area, including Harvard University's Memorial Hall, "said to be one of the greatest examples of Ruskinian Gothic architecture outside of England".[5]
In 1869, he married Alice S. Osborn; together they had 6 children. In 1874 Van Brunt published a translation of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc's Discourses on architecture, and he remained a prolific writer through his career.
His partnership with Ware dissolved in 1881. The same year, Van Brunt and former employee Frank M. Howe established the firm of Van Brunt & Howe, and about six years after took the dramatic step of moving his office from Boston to Kansas City,[6][7] partly for multiple commissions for the Union Pacific Railroad for grand stations in western cities like Ogden, Utah (1889; burned down 1923), Denver, Colorado (1895; rebuilt 1912), Cheyenne, Wyoming and Omaha, Nebraska (1899; replaced 1931). Many Kansas City civic landmarks of the time were Van Brunt's designs. Stylistically, most of his later work is comfortably consistent with Richardsonian Romanesque; in at least one case, the Hoyt Library, he adapted and finished a rejected Richardson design.
Van Brunt returned to Massachusetts around 1902, and died in Milton, Massachusetts, in 1903.[4] His headstone in Cambridge Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts, gives his date of death as April 7, 1903.
^Society of Architectural Historians. Brief Biographies of American Architects Who Died Between 1897 and 1947.
^Institute of American Architects. The New York Times, October 24, 1884. p.5.
^"City of Cambridge". Archived from the original on December 2, 2008.
^"The Yorktown memorial: the monument which is to be erected upon the battle-field". The New York Times. Baltimore. August 11, 1881. p. 5. Retrieved January 10, 2021 – via Newspapers.com.