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Raymond Hood 1881-1934

130 McGraw-Hill Building

 It was Hood's success with the Chicago Tribune Tower competition in 1922 that clinched his fame. Well over 200 international entries were submitted in competition for the project by luminaries such as Walter Gropuis, Adolf Loos, and Eliel Saarinen. Their submissions were striking and perhaps too "foreign" for the judges taste. Hood's entry, with its Gothic shell, was advanced technologically but seen by many as regressive.

Hood's use of the Gothic mode can also be seen in his thesis drawing for A Parish Church in the Gothic Style. While vastly overscaled for its suggested purpose, a careful study of Gothic detailing is evident in the drawing. Later, with his design for the McGraw-Hill Building in 1930, Hood eliminated the historical references quoted in the Tribune Tower.

Raymond Hood was born in Rhode Island in 1881. He studied at Brown University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After working for the firm of Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson in Boston, he left to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. He travelled extensively between Europe and America before establishing a practice in New York in 1914.

Hood did not receive his first major commission (with John Howells) until eight years later when he designed The Chicago Tribune , a building with Gothic Revival detailing. Many commissions followed, each one moving further away from a Gothic vocabulary until his works had attained a simple geometric monumentality. His later buildings predict the Miesian tower blocks of the 1950s and 1960s.

Hood died in 1934.

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