HOOD, RAYMOND M. 1881-1934

SKYSCRAPER ARCHITECT

Currents and Contradictions

During the 1920s America was noted for its distinguished sky-scraper architect s—Harvey Wiley Corbett, Ralph Walker, Ely Jacques Kahn, William Van Alen—but no single figure so fully embodied the currents and contradictions of the decade as Raymond Mathewson Hood. Classically trained in the United States and Paris and apprenticed in one of America's major architectural firms, Hood proved amazingly independent. In the course of his brief twelve-year career he evolved from an adherent of the Gothic style to a practitioner of modernism. Born into a prosperous, conservative family, he preferred the commotion of the urban scene to the respectability of the stately architectural firm. As one commentator remarked, during a decade in which most well-known architects were in the Social Register, Raymond Hood was in the phone book. Yet he designed and built several of the notable commercial buildings of the 1920s and early 1930s.

Beginnings

Hood, the son of a well-to-do Providence, Rhode Island, box manufacturer, attended Brown University for two years and then enrolled in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned an architectural degree in 1903. Following his graduation he worked as a draftsman in Boston for the Gothic architectural firm of Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson and then in the New York office of Palmer and Hornbostel. Unsuccessful on his first attempt to be admitted to Paris's Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Hood finally was accepted and took a degree there in 1911. On his return to the United States he spent three years in Hornbostel's Pittsburgh office, where he not only assisted in executing building commissions but also created several prize-winning designs for the architectural competitions that the firm regularly entered. In 1914 he and another young architect set up their own office in New York City. Hood was sustained during World War I and the recession of 1920-1921 mostly by renovation jobs, notably for Placido Mori's restaurant-speakeasy, and by a small but steady salary from the American Radiator Company, for which he designed radiator covers. His increasing success in architectural competitions bolstered his optimism about his potential success as an architect, and in 1920 he married Elsie Schmidt, his secretary, with whom he would have three children.

Success

In 1922 John Mead Howells, one of the well-known American architects who had been specially invited to submit designs for the heavily publicized Chicago Tribune competition, asked Hood to join him in the project. The exact nature of each man's contribution to the competition design is unclear; apparently, however, owells provided a sketch that Hood then radically modified in his drawing. Amid a storm of controversy the anonymously submitted Howells-Hood entry narrowly won the competition over the entry of Finland's Eliel Saarinen. At the time, Saarinen's design was felt by certain critics to be more modern, more experimental than that of Howells and Hood. Yet retrospective examinations of their graceful Gothic tower have generally praised the sophistication of its setbacks and its elevator plans as well as the flexibility of its office space, thereby confirming the original judges' decision. Despite the controversy—or perhaps because of it—Hood's reputation was made, and his $10,000 share of the $50,000 first-place prize money helped remedy his rather precarious financial situation.

American Radiator Building

Before the Chicago Tribune Tower was completed in 1925, Hood in 1924 had finished his second distinctive skyscraper, an office building for his old friends at the American Radiator Company. With the assistance of architect Frederick Godley and engineer J. André Fouilhoux he designed a structure that, despite its midblock location and its mere twenty-story height, would project an impression of massiveness. Hood achieved this end by erecting a building that shot straight up from its base and culminated in a series of sharp setbacks near its top. Constructed of black brick so that during daylight hours its dark-appearing windows would not "punch holes" in and thereby destroy its solid appearance, the American Radiator Building had a startling gold-gilded top, which was lighted at night, and abstract gold-gilded decorations at setback points. This stylized ornamentation was regarded by some critics as an early example of Art Deco style in America. Others saw the black-and-gold structure as the perfect example of the marriage of skyscrapers and commercialism—a torchlike building advertising a company that sold furnaces and heaters.

Daily News and McGraw-Hill Buildings

In 1929 Hood again teamed with his Chicago Tribune Tower collaborator, Howells, to design an office-building production plant for Capt. Joseph Medill Patterson's tabloid, the New York Daily News. The building, a nine-story production-plant base topped by a thirty-six-story office tower, was a white, massive, vertically defined structure with dramatic setbacks and a flat crown. Its only significant exterior decoration was hung over the entryway: an enormous marble panel containing a skyscraper skyline, drawings of tradesmen, and a quotation from Abraham Lincoln ("He made so many of them"—referring, of course, to God and the common man). Inside this modernistic structure Hood placed a black glass lobby with a sunken center that contained a huge revolving globe, an extremely dramatic touch. The Daily News Building was completed in 1931, the same year as another modernistic structure, the McGraw-Hill Building, designed by Hood in collaboration with Fouilhoux. A setback, green terracotta structure, it had on each floor almost uninterrupted windows, giving it a horizontal appearance similar to that found in many of the European International Style buildings. Hood's structure was crowned by a mesalike pent-house, which bore in huge letters the company's name.

Rockefeller Center

Throughout his career Hood accepted commissions for buildings other than sky-scrapers—private homes, apartment complexes, public buildings—though none of these projects was particularly notable for its architecture. He was a major designer for the Century of Progress Exposition, which opened in Chicago in 1933. He also toyed with such speculative but unfulfilled ventures as apartments in bridges and a tower city surrounded by broad highways and open countryside. His final major work, before his death of heart and circulatory problems at the age of fifty-three, was on Rockefeller Center, begun in 1930 and completed ten years later. Designed by a consortium of architects, this sky-scraper complex cannot in any real sense be credited to Hood. However, he has been described as the "key man" in its development, and the massing of the buildings, their monochromatic exteriors, and their rooftop landscape gardens almost certainly reflect his influence. Whatever the case, Raymond M. Hood was the greatest skyscraper architect of the 1920s, embodying and inspiring the evolution of skyscraper design in America during the decade.