RAYMOND HOOD
Arthur Tappan North
Arthur Tappan North: RAYMOND HOOD. New York: Whittlesey House, 1931. First edition [Contemporary American Architects series]. Quarto. Orange fabricoid covered boards printed in black. Decorated endpapers. 120 pp. 123 black and white plates. Corners bruised and covers very lightly worn. Interior unmarked and clean. Out-of-print and rather uncommon.A very good or better copy of this fragile, elegant production.
7.75 x 9.75 hardcover book with 120 pages and 123 black and white plates, photographic profiles of thirty of Raymond Hood's early commissions up to 1931. Endpapers feature a Hood decoration motif printed in light green: a beautifully-realized Art Deco Architectural monograph printed on matte paper.
The first monograph on the "Brilliant bad boy of architecture." Hood, winner of the Chicago Tribune competition, also designed New York's Daily News Building, the McGraw-Hill Building, the American Radiator Building, and much of Rockefeller Center.
Excellent vintage snapshot of the machine age aesthetic as applied to the towering symbol of the age-- the skyscraper -- which was a step towards Hood's goal of the city of the future, a city of towers. Hood, winner of the Chicago Tribune competition, also designed New York's Daily News Building, the McGraw-Hill Building, the American Radiator Building, and much of Rockefeller Center.
Hood's crowning achievement (and on of the most significant events in the history of modern architecture) was the Tribune Tower international competition in 1922 when the Chicago Tribune, the city's oldest and most important newspaper, offered a $50,000 prize for the winning design. 260 (some sources say 263) entries were submitted, including not only the more "modern" second-place entry by Eliel Saarinen and designs by Gropius and Holabird and Roch but also some outrageous designs--Adolf Loos's apparently serious Doric-column- as-skyscraper and another entry--a tower topped with the head of an American Indian.
Spreads from this volume can be viewed here.
out of stock