Рэймонд Худ: Архитектор небоскрёбов и политик

American architect
the member of the Michigan House of Representatives

Raymond Mathewson Hood (March 29, 1881 – August 14, 1934) was an American architect who worked in the Neo Gothic and Art Deco styles. He is best known for his designs of the Tribune Tower, American Radiator Building, and Rockefeller Center. Through a short yet highly successful career, Hood exerted an outsized influence on twentieth century architecture.

Raymond Mathewson Hood was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island on March 29, 1881, to John Parmenter Hood and Vella Mathewson. John Hood was the owner of J. N. Polsey & Co., a crate and box manufacturing company. The family lived at 107 Cottage Street in a house designed by John Hood and local architect Albert H. Humes. In a 1931 profile of Hood in The New Yorker, writer Allene Talmey described the Hood home as "the ugliest place in town." In 1893, the Hood family visited the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, an experience that may have sparked Hood's interest in architecture. At MIT, Hood studied under Constant Désiré Despradelle, a prominent proponent of the Beaux Arts style. Hood excelled at creating meticulously rendered architectural drawings, and after graduating worked as a draftsman for Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson. During his time at Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson, Hood purportedly worked on the 1899 design of the Classical Revival Deborah Cook Sayles Public Library.

In 1911, Hood returned to the US, taking a job at the office of Henry Hornbostel in Pittsburgh.

In 1984, the Whitney Museum hosted an exhibition of Hood's work entitled "City of Towers." Curated by Carol Willis, the exhibit featured Hood's sketches and blueprints. In 2020, The David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University, Hood's alma mater, held an online exhibition titled "Raymond Hood and the American Skyscraper." The exhibition focused on a selection of Hood's built and unbuilt skyscrapers, and included about 70 of his architectural drawings, photographs, models, and books.