Raymond Hood

The Tribune Tower in Chicago

News Building, NYC, rendering by Hugh Ferriss

Raymond Mathewson Hood (March 29, 1881 – August 14, 1934) was an early-mid twentieth century architect who worked in the Art Deco style.Raymond Hood, together with the architects of the modern movement such as Ely Jacques Kahn played an activity focused on the implementation of English Free style, with variations, in suburban building types such as private houses and country clubs, sometimes with the mediation of colonial porch.Rem Koolhaas calls it "an agent of manhattanism","whose nervous system is intertwined with that of the second Metropoli".Raymond Hood Rem Koolhaas is one of the architects of the culture of congestion with its projects: "A city under a single roof" and "Manhattan 1950".This projects united by the idea of concentrating functions in skyscrapers bundled together with a synthesis of realism and vision, and sublime example of Koolhaas to achieve artistic quality through the satisfaction of pure instances pragmatiche.According to Rem Koolhaas however is just Hood evolves culture congestion, which is materializing in Rockefeller Center,to the lecorbusian culture of de-congestion , as by the appearance in the series of study projects, building a stick long and narrow to facilitate unlimited space and naturally ventilated, the prototype of what become RCA Building, attempt by the sensitivity of Manhattan incorporate the modernist happy Ville Radieuse, full of light, air and greenery.

He was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, educated at Brown University, MIT, and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. At the latter institution he met John Mead Howells, with whom Hood later partnered. Hood frequently employed architectural sculptor Rene Paul Chambellan both to create sculpture for his building and to make plasticine models of his projects. He died at age 53 and was interred at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Sleepy Hollow, NY.

Hood in Fiction

Frank Heynick has argued from a study of the journal notes of Ayn Rand made in the late 1930s and of incidents in her novel The Fountainhead, published in 1943, that Raymond Hood's career and works provided fodder for her fictional architect Peter Keating. This major figure in The Fountainhead exemplified the "second-hander" who (in stark contrast to the uncompromisingly individualistic and innovative hero of the novel Howard Roark, exemplified in real life by Frank Lloyd Wright, whom Rand idolized) works in committees and adapts the classicist and historicist Old World architectural styles even to the new American phenomenon of the skyscraper and subsequently adopts the modernistic trends when these come into style. Certain specific incidents in the fictional Keating's career are pointed to by Heynick as having been drawn from Hood's real-life career: Their both winning of the highly publicized contest in the early 1920s for a skyscraper with a design in the historicist style; their both heading the committee for a midwestern World's Fair in the 1930s from which the hero architect (Howard Roark in the novel, Frank Lloyd Wright in real-life) was excluded.

Nevertheless, with regard to Rockefeller Center, of which Hood was the chief designer, Rand, despite her earlier negative comments in her journals, was subsequently cited as having some good words for the RCA Building. More intriguingly, as Heynick points out, Rand is quoted in a 1943 newspaper interview as referring to Hood's McGraw-Hill Building as the most beautiful in New York, thus, apparently, allowing Hood redemption in her eyes. This, Heynick argues, was justly so. The creating of the fictional Peter Keating character in Rand's novel required dichotomizing on her part, drawing exclusively upon the negative aspects of Hood's career as she perceived it. But Hood was in fact no mere follower of new trends, but a force in creating them, particularly in his use of the art-deco mode.

Selected works

• Tribune Tower, Chicago, Illinois 1924
• American Radiator Building, also known as the American Standard Building, New York, New York 1924
• Ocean Forest Country Club, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina 1926-1927
• New York Daily News Building (the model for Superman's The Daily Planet), New York, New York 1929
• Masonic Temple, Scranton, Pennsylvania 1930
• Rockefeller Center, New York, New York, where Hood was a senior architect on a large design team. 1933-37
• McGraw-Hill Building, New York, New York 1931

References

<references>

The unmarked mountain laurel gravesite of Raymond Hood in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

* Walter H. Kilham (1973). Raymond Hood, Architect - Form Through Function in the American Skyscraper. Architectural Book Publishing Co Inc, New York.

• Einar Einarsson Kvaran. Architectural Sculpture of America. unpublished manuscript
• Contemporary American Architects: Raymond M. Hood (1931). Published by Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill Book Co., New York. Trade publication featuring a large collection of photographs of Raymond Hood works.
• Kenneth Frampton. "Storia dell'Architettura Moderna" 4a edizione, Zanichelli
• Roberto Gargiani. "Rem Koolhaas/Oma".Grandi Opere-Gli Architetti,editori Laterza