Hood in Heaven

"A man I liked was Raymond Hood. . . . Even if you look down the list through the ages Raymond Hood will stand out among the architects of all time as one who had the fortune and the genius to conduct radical experimentation with mass and color. Many have had this privilege on canvas or with clay, but it is rare for a man to be allowed to play around with steel and glass and stone in this fashion. . . .

"His buildings did not cumber the earth. Take, for instance, the Daily News Building and the Tribune Tower in Chicago. In both instances the passerby gets the effect that the structure is poised upon one toe and eager to float or fly. . . . Hood could do you a skyscraper which was ready for a fight or frolic. . . .

"I see no reason why he should not be one of the happiest inhabitants of heaven. There's so much work to be done. He will look at the streets of gold and the many mansions of jade and jasper and then if Hood carries with him something of his mortality he'll say 'Not that, let's have steel and glass.' And if he is still the man he was, which I most fervently believe, already the riveting machines have begun their fanfare within the pearly gates."

Thus last week wrote Columnist Heywood Broun of Raymond Mathewson Hood who at 40 was penniless and obscure and who, when he died of arthritis last week at 53, was as famed as any architect in the U. S. A childhood with religious parents in Pawtucket, R. I. made him so rigorous a Baptist that, when he entered the Beaux Arts in Paris, he refused even to look at Notre Dame because it was Catholic. Later he lost the vigor of his religious beliefs but never his lusty delight in arguments, his habit of sloppy dressing, his inordinate liking for cats.

Twelve years ago Hood was a clientless architect in Manhattan, married and $10,000 in debt. News came that a design he had drawn for the $7,000,000 Chicago Tribune Tower had won its $50,000 competition prize. He had to borrow to buy an overcoat to travel to Chicago and collect his money. Because he had submitted his design from the office of John Mead Howells he had to turn $40,000 of his prize over to that New York architect. Soon he had all the commissions he wanted. A strident exponent of functionalism, a reckless experimenter, he gave his black American Radiator Building (Manhattan) a gold-flecked top to suggest burning coal, proudly pointed out that windows which usually look like ugly black holes, become invisible in a black building. By putting orange shades on the windows of the Daily News Building he used them as a part of a vertical motif of alternating white and reddish stripes. His blue-green McGraw-Hill Building was almost all window. With Harvey Wiley Corbett and Benjamin Wistar Morris he was an architect for Rockefeller Center. He rejoiced that the average life of a Manhattan skyscraper is only 20 years because it gave architects "a chance to experiment."

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