Raymond Hood defined the American skyscrapers of the early 20th century

Our next Art Deco Centenary profile looks at American architect Raymond Hood, whose knack for skyscrapers led to him being branded the "brilliant bad boy of architecture".

Hood's buildings include Chicago's Tribune Tower and New York's Rockefeller Center. Built during the proliferation of American skyscrapers in the early 20th century, they represent attempts to harness engineering breakthroughs to find a mode of building that represented America's ascendant private sector.

The skyscrapers he produced over his career vary dramatically, mirroring massive stylistic shifts taking place in US cities as the nation reckoned with rapid industrialisation and architectural thought imported from Europe.

"[Hood's] personal stature among modernist architects of the 1920s and 1930s, his midtown office buildings, and his involvement in the design of Rockefeller Center, make him perhaps the single most prominent figure of the [art deco] movement," wrote historian Anthony W Robins in the early 1980s.

"Yet the four New York skyscrapers… are each works of such great individuality, so highly idiosyncratic, that they seem to comprise a style all their own."

However, as Robins points out, Hood's use of geometric ornamentation and long windows to increase the verticality of his structures was paradigmatically art deco.

Hood's place in the art deco canon – and indeed that of American 20th century architecture – rests heavily on his astute navigation of the urban and economic landscape in which he was working.

His designs would come to define a new way for newly ascendent capitalists and new-media moguls to present themselves as distinct from the neo-classical government structures and neo-gothic universities, the other seats of authority at a time of massive change in the United States as it transitioned from peripheral contender to a political and industrial powerhouse.

Frustrated and in debt

"If there is any architect whose career proved that idealism need not be at the expense of pragmatism, it was Raymond Hood, perhaps the 20th-century's greatest molder of skyscraper form," wrote The New York Times critic Paul Goldberger in 1984.

However, Hood today does not have the same sort of name recognition as some of his contemporaries, such as Frank Lloyd Wright.

Like many art deco architects, his buildings are much more famous than he is, perhaps because of the relatively short-lived nature of the style when compared with post-war modernism.

Hood was born in Rhode Island in 1881, when industrial building technology was changing how architects and engineers worked on urban scales. The Brooklyn Bridge, with its unprecedented height and metal lengths, was completed in 1883.

He viewed the first Chicago World's Fair in 1893 and became the consulting architect of the second, in 1934. By the time he died that same year, at 53, American cities had transformed from his youth, with Hood playing a not-insignificant role.

Raised by minor capitalists in Pawtucket, Hood was educated first at Brown and then MIT, where he studied under Beaux-Arts architect Constant-Désiré Despradelle, before heading to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

After his stint in Europe, Hood returned to the United States to work at the office of Henry Hornbostel in Pittsburgh. In the first two decades of the century, Hood was by all accounts frustrated and in debt.

"Hood builds what Hood himself feels"

However, in 1922, after an offer of collaboration from architect John Mead Howells, he won the commission for Chicago's Tribune Tower for newspaper magnate Robert Rutherford McCormick, beating out Finnish-American modernist Eliel Saarinen, whose second-place design has been said to have influenced Hood in his later skyscrapers.

Still standing today, the Tribune Tower exemplifies the neo-gothic styles still popular at the time, complete with flying balustrades and parapets at the top. The body of the structure is decidedly modern, shorn of ornamentation, with tall windows and long, smooth limestone.

Before the Tribune Tower was complete, Hood was commissioned for the American Radiator skyscraper in New York, noteworthy for its setback, which allowed it to appear separate from the surrounding block and its black-and-gold colour palette.

Gothic elements are still present in the structure, with its parapets and setbacks as it rises. The cornice and modillion detailing shift between the figural and geometric, with the gold-painted cornices rendered in smooth geometric caps.

By the early 1930s, Hood's public profile was well established. An oft-quoted New Yorker profile written in 1931 branded him the "brilliant bad boy of architecture", with an uncompromising vision that shook up the "fine old gentleman" architects of the Beaux-Arts.

"Hood builds what Hood himself feels," said the profile. It was a prefiguring of the modern starchitect, though Hood was perhaps more than anything a product of the times, adjusting styles to meet the needs of public-facing corporations.

Architecture historian Kenneth Frampton contextualized Hood's fusion of historical influences with modern ideas as tied intrinsically to America's status in the aftermath of world war one.

"The synthesis of the art deco or the modernistic style in the States had just as many roots in the mainstream of the modern movement as it did in the historicism of the turn of the century," wrote Frampton.

"From the American point of view the first world war had been favourably concluded; America had emerged a creditor nation and the boom of the 1920s was about to start," he added. "In what style could such an enthusiasm for 'progress' be expressed?"

Frampton pinpoints the Rockefeller Center as a textbook example of this blending of styles in an expression of post-war progress.

Designed during the Great Depression by a consortium of architects led by Hood, the centre was conceived as a city within a city dedicated to entertainment and the burgeoning radio industry.

Anchored by Hood's 66-storey-tall 30 Rockefeller Plaza (formerly called the RCA Building), the complex featured 14 art deco buildings with impressive setbacks commissioned by the Rockefeller family.

"American business optimism"

Originally meant for the Metropolitan Opera, the complex eventually was filled by televisual and radio companies, such as NBC.

Shorn of the historical detail of Tribune Tower or the expressive colour of the 1931 McGraw Hill skyscraper, the buildings featured tall vertical windows and art deco details such as slightly abstract bas-reliefs and sculptures.

Writing of the structure in 1928 for Architectural Record, Hood noted that the developers and radio executives wished to express a sense of optimism and the "powers" behind the building.

"The problem, therefore, was as modern as a problem could be," he wrote. "It was built around the latest marvel of our electrical age and on a foundation in which faith and American business optimism had to play a large part."

However, Hood was a man with his finger on the pulse, and despite dying well before art deco he had already moved on by the end of his career.

In his writing, he prioritized function and architecture as shelter, remarking that the architect's role was not to collaborate with artists, but with engineers, and ultimately to provide shelter.

His Daily News building was considered an early example of the International Style, which would come to dominate the American city through the mid-century.

On its exterior, the tall, gridded building was almost complete shorn of figurative or historical detail, clad with geometric spandrel panels, and was included in the Architecture for a Modern Age MoMA exhibition curated by uncompromising modernists Philip Johnson and Henry-Russel Hitchcock.

Hitchcock, writing about Hood's contribution, bemoaned some of the regressive impulses of the structures such as the American Raditator Building, but thought him modern enough to include, placing him in a similar camp to the European functionalists.

"Hood's development illustrates the inevitability of modern conceptions of architecture rather than any basic originality or aesthetic conversion," he wrote.

"His approach is above all that of the business man."

The top illustration is by Vesa Sammalisto.

Art Deco Centenary

This article is part of Dezeen's Art Deco Centenary series, which explores art deco architecture and design 100 years on from the "arts décoratifs" exposition in Paris that later gave the style its name.

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