Hugh Howard (born 1952) is an American historian, writer, and speaker. He has written numerous books about architecture, art, and American presidents, but describes himself as a narrative historian: he seeks to use stories to capture the sweep of history, with facts, personalities, and places adding texture to events.
His most recent book, Architects of an American Landscape, published by Atlantic Monthly Press in 2022, examines the creative friendship of Frederick Law Olmsted , the co-designer of Central Park and founder of the discipline of landscape architecture, and Henry Hobson Richardson , the most admired American architect of the nineteenth century.
Previous books include Architecture's Odd Couple (Bloomsbury, 2015), also a dual biography, which looked at the careers of Frank Lloyd Wright and Philip Johnson , architects who bracketed the twentieth century and who had a complicated relationship as "frienemies." Howard has written two books concerning the architectural work of Thomas Jefferson , Thomas Jefferson, Architect (Rizzoli, 2003) and Dr. Kimball and Mr. Jefferson (Bloomsbury 2006), as well as a book about the birthing of American painting by the many who painted portraits of George Washington , The Painter's Chair (Bloomsbury, 2009).
He has also collaborated with photographer Roger Straus III on a series of large-format volumes, including Houses of the Founding Fathers (Workman, 2007), Houses of the Presidents and Houses of Civil War America (Little, Brown, 2012 and 2014, respectively).
Aside from writing books, Howard has written for dozens of publications including Smithsonian , The New York Times , The Washington Post , House Beautiful , Preservation , Early American Life, Traditional Homes, and others. He was the researcher, writer, and scout for a series of television specials produced by the A&E Network In Search of Palladio. [1]
Prior to becoming a full-time writer, he was Vice President of the New York Times Book Company, Inc. In 2011, he was an Attingham scholar. [1] [2] He has served as a board member at various historical sites, including Mark Twain House and Museum, the Edna St. Vincent Millay Society, Cheekwood Estate and Gardens, and the Historic Eastfield Foundation, where he was the founding editor of The Eastfield Record.
Howard divides his time between the Hudson Valley in New New York and New Hampshire's Upper Valley. He and his wife, Betsy, have two adult daughters. [3] His memoir House-Dreams (Algonquin, 2003) recounts he design and construction of a Federal Revival-style home for his family in the mid-1990s.
Frank Lloyd Wright was an American architect, designer, writer, and educator. He designed more than 1,000 structures over a creative period of 70 years. Wright played a key role in the architectural movements of the twentieth century, influencing architects worldwide through his works and hundreds of apprentices in his Taliesin Fellowship. Wright believed in designing in harmony with humanity and the environment, a philosophy he called organic architecture. This philosophy was exemplified in Fallingwater (1935), which has been called "the best all-time work of American architecture".
Frederick Law Olmsted was an American landscape architect, journalist, social critic, and public administrator. He is considered to be the father of landscape architecture. Olmsted was famous for co-designing many well-known urban parks with his partner Calvert Vaux. Olmsted and Vaux's first project was Central Park, which led to many other urban park designs, including Prospect Park in what was then the City of Brooklyn and Cadwalader Park in Trenton. He headed the preeminent landscape architecture and planning consultancy of late nineteenth-century America, which was carried on and expanded by his sons, Frederick Jr. and John C., under the name Olmsted Brothers.
The architecture of the United States demonstrates a broad variety of architectural styles and built forms over the country's history of over two centuries of independence and former Spanish and British rule.
Henry Hobson Richardson, FAIA was an American architect, best known for his work in a style that became known as Richardsonian Romanesque. Along with Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, Richardson is one of "the recognized trinity of American architecture".
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG) is an American book publishing company, founded in 1946 by Roger Williams Straus Jr. and John C. Farrar. FSG is known for publishing literary books, and its authors have won numerous awards, including Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, and Nobel Prizes. As of 2016 the publisher is a division of Macmillan, whose parent company is the German publishing conglomerate Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.
Calvert Vaux was an English-American architect and landscape designer, best known as the co-designer, along with his protégé and junior partner Frederick Law Olmsted, of what would become New York City's Central Park.
Frank Lloyd Wright Jr., commonly known as Lloyd Wright, was an American architect, active primarily in Los Angeles and Southern California. He was a landscape architect for various Los Angeles projects (1922–24), provided the shells for the Hollywood Bowl (1926–28), and produced the Swedenborg Memorial Chapel at Rancho Palos Verdes, California (1946–71). His name is frequently confused with that of his more famous father, Frank Lloyd Wright.
Broadacre City was an urban or suburban development concept proposed by Frank Lloyd Wright throughout most of his lifetime. He presented the idea in his book The Disappearing City in 1932. A few years later he unveiled a very detailed twelve-by-twelve-foot scale model representing a hypothetical four-square-mile (10 km2) community. The model was crafted by the student interns who worked for him at Taliesin, and financed by Edgar Kaufmann. It was initially displayed at an Industrial Arts Exposition in the Forum at the Rockefeller Center starting on April 15, 1935. After the New York exposition, Kaufmann arranged to have the model displayed in Pittsburgh at an exposition titled "New Homes for Old", sponsored by the Federal Housing Administration. The exposition opened on June 18 on the 11th floor of Kaufmann's store. Wright went on to refine the concept in later books and in articles until his death in 1959.
Charles Alexander Jencks was an American cultural theorist, landscape designer, architectural historian, and co-founder of the Maggie’s Cancer Care Centres. He published over thirty books and became famous in the 1980s as a theorist of Postmodernism. Jencks devoted time to landform architecture, especially in Scotland. These landscapes include the Garden of Cosmic Speculation and earthworks at Jupiter Artland outside Edinburgh. His continuing project Crawick Multiverse, commissioned by the Duke of Buccleuch, opened in 2015 near Sanquhar.
The Olmsted Brothers company was a landscape architectural firm in the United States, established in 1898 by brothers John Charles Olmsted (1852–1920) and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. (1870–1957), sons of the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted.
Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. was an American landscape architect and city planner known for his wildlife conservation efforts. He had a lifetime commitment to national parks, and worked on projects in Acadia, the Everglades and Yosemite National Park. He gained national recognition by filling in for his father on the Park Improvement Commission for the District of Columbia beginning in 1901, and by contributing to the famous McMillan Commission Plan for redesigning Washington according to a revised version of the original L’Enfant plan. Olmsted Point in Yosemite and Olmsted Island at Great Falls of the Potomac River in Maryland are named after him.
The Richardson Olmsted Campus in Buffalo, New York, United States, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1986. The site was designed by the American architect Henry Hobson Richardson in concert with the famed landscape team of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in the late 1800s, incorporating a system of enlightened treatment for people with mental illness developed by Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride. Over the years, as mental health treatment changed and resources were diverted, the buildings and grounds began a slow deterioration. In 2006, the Richardson Center Corporation was formed to restore the buildings.
McKim, Mead & White was an American architectural firm that came to define architectural practice, urbanism, and the ideals of the American Renaissance in fin de siècle New York. The firm's founding partners Charles Follen McKim (1847–1909), William Rutherford Mead (1846–1928) and Stanford White (1853–1906) were giants in the architecture of their time, and remain important as innovators and leaders in the development of modern architecture worldwide. They formed a school of classically trained, technologically skilled designers who practiced well into the mid-twentieth century. According to Robert A. M. Stern, only Frank Lloyd Wright was more important to the identity and character of modern American architecture.
Aaron Betsky, born 1958 in Missoula, Montana, is an American critic on art, architecture and design. He was the director of Virginia Tech's School of Architecture + Design until early 2022. Trained as an architect and in the humanities at Yale University, he is the author of over a dozen books, including Architecture Matters, Making It Modern, Landscrapers: Building With the Land, Scanning: The Aberrant Architectures of Diller + Scofidio, Queer Space, Revelatory Landscapes, and Architecture Must Burn. Internationally known as a lecturer, curator, reviewer and commentator, he writes the blog "Beyond Buildings" for Architect Magazine. Director of the 11th Venice Architecture Biennale, he has also been president and Dean of the School of Architecture at Taliesin, director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute (2001-2006) the Cincinnati Art Museum (2006-2014), and was founding Curator of Architecture, Design and Digital Projects at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1995-2001). As an unlicensed architect, he worked for Frank O. Gehry & Associates and Hodgetts + Fung. In 2003, he co-curated "Scanning: The Aberrant Architectures of Diller + Scofidio" at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Alan Hess is an American architect, author, lecturer and advocate for twentieth-century architectural preservation.
Sidney Fiske Kimball was an American architect, architectural historian and museum director. A pioneer in the field of architectural preservation in the United States, he played a leading part in the restoration of Monticello and Stratford Hall Plantation in Virginia.
The Architecture of Buffalo, New York, particularly the buildings constructed between the American Civil War and the Great Depression, is said to have created a new, distinctly American form of architecture and to have influenced design throughout the world.
Esther Baum Born was an American architect, author and architectural photographer who lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, and Mexico. With her husband, Ernest Born, she wrote The New Architecture in Mexico, which also includes an article on the painting and sculpture by Justino Fernández. She traveled in Mexico for 10 months, photographing and drawing historic and modern buildings, ultimately attracting global attention to the dawn of Mexico's modern architecture. Working mostly behind the scenes, she was integral to the success of the Ernest Born architecture firm.
Robert Swan Sturtevant was an American landscape architect and iris breeder. He taught for many years at the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture, and he helped to found the American Iris Society.
Hillside Home School I, also known as the Hillside Home Building, was a Shingle Style building that architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed in 1887 for his aunts, Ellen and Jane Lloyd Jones for their Hillside Home School in the town of Wyoming, Wisconsin. The building functioned as a dormitory and library. Wright had the building demolished in 1950.