(b Pawtucket, RI, 21 March 1881; d Stamford, CT, 15 Aug 1934). American architect. The son of a prosperous box manufacturer in Rhode Island, he had a strict, religious and inhibiting upbringing that took some years to outgrow. He was educated locally, taking a first degree at Brown University, Providence, RI, before proceeding in 1899 to the architecture school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. In 1901 he joined the office of Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson, where he absorbed from Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue a feeling for the Gothic tradition in American architecture, which was to be an important supplement to his grounding in Beaux-Arts Classicism. In 1904 he went to study in Paris, enrolling in the Atelier Duquesne at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He spent much of the next seven years in Paris or travelling in Europe, apart from an interlude in 1906–8 when he worked in Pittsburgh and New York for his friend Henry Hornbostel (1867–1961). During this period he developed into a sharp, confident, ambitious, worldly and entertaining young architect of much potential, but with a conventional Beaux-Arts approach to style and planning. His early projects are impressive chiefly for their balance of Gothic and classical vocabularies.

• Hood, Raymond (Mathewson)
  • collaboration
    • Howells, John Mead
    • Skyscraper, §2(i): History and development, before 1945
    • USA, §II, 4: Archit.: Chicago school, Prairie school, academic eclecticism & rise of Modernism
  • competitions
    • Competition, §I, 4: Architecture, after 1900
  • groups and movements
    • Gothic Revival, §I, 1(iv): Architecture: Later developments
    • International Style
  • works
    • Building regulations, §3: Evolution
    • New York, §I, 4: History and urban development, c 1920–1945
    • Terracotta, §II, 2(ii)(d): History and uses in the Western world: Architecture, c 1890–c 1930