Henry-Russell Hitchcock (1903-1987) was the leading American architectural historian of his generation. A long-time professor at Smith College and New York University, he is best known for writings that helped to define Modern architecture.
Henry-Russell Hitchcock was born in Boston and educated at the Middlesex School and Harvard University, receiving his A.B. in 1924 and his M.A. in 1927.
In the early 1930s, at the request of Alfred Barr, Hitchcock collaborated with Philip Johnson (and Lewis Mumford) on "Modern Architecture: International Exhibition" at the Museum of Modern Art (1932), the exhibition that presented the new "International Style" architecture of Europe to an American audience. Hitchcock and Johnson's co-authored book The International Style: Architecture Since 1922 was published simultaneously with the MOMA exhibit.
Four years later Hitchcock's book, The Architecture of H. H. Richardson and His Times (1936) brought the career of American architect Henry Hobson Richardson out of obscurity while also arguing that the distant roots of European Modernism were actually to be found in the United States. Hitchcock's In the Nature of Materials (1942) continued to emphasize the American roots of Modern architecture, in this case by focusing on the career of Frank Lloyd Wright.
Hitchcock taught at a number of colleges and universities, but primarily at Smith College (where he was also Director of the Smith College Museum of Art from 1949 to 1955). In 1968 he moved to New York City and thereafter taught at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.
Over the course of Hitchock's career, he produced more than a dozen books on architecture. His Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1958) is an exhaustive study of more than 150 years of architecture that was widely used as a textbook in architectural history courses from the 1960s to the 1980s, and is still a useful reference today.
He was also a founding member of The Victorian Society in Great Britain and an early president of the Victorian Society in America. One of that Society's book awards is the "Henry-Russell Hitchcock Award." The "Alice Davis Hitchcock Award" of the Society of Architectural Historians is named after Hitchcock's mother.
Hitchcock died of cancer at age 83.
Hitchcock focused primarily on the formal aspects of design and he regarded the individual architect as the chief determinant in architectural history. Hitchcock's work tended to diminish the role of broader social forces. He has sometimes been criticised for this "great man" or "genealogical" approach.
Hitchcock, Henry Russell, American Architectural Books: A List of Books, Portfolios, and Pamphlets on Architecture and Related Subjects published in America before 1895, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1962
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Penguin Books, Baltimore 1958; second ed. 1963; fourth ed. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth England, and New York 1977, ISBN 0140561153
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, The Architecture of H. H. Richardson and His Times, Museum of Modern Art, New York 1936; second ed. Archon Books, Hampden CT 1961; MIT Press, Cambridge MA 1966 [paperback]
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, Boston Architecture, 1637-1954; including Other Communities within Easy Driving Distance, Reinhold Pub. Corp., New York 1954.
Hitchcock, Henry Russell, and Drexler, Arthur, editors, Built in USA: Post-war Architecture, Museum of Modern Art (Simon & Schuster), New York 1952.
Hitchcock, Henry Russell, Early Victorian architecture in Britain, Yale University Press, New Haven 1954
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, German Renaissance Architecture, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ 1981, ISBN 0691039593
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, In the Nature of Materials, 1887-1941: The Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright, Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New York 1942; Da Capo Press, New York 1975 (paperback), ISBN 0306800195
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, and Hitchcock, Philip C., The International Style: Architecture since 1922, W. W. Norton & Company, New York 1932, second edition 1966; reprint of 1932 edition 1996, ISBN 0393036510
Hitchcock, Henry Russell, Latin American Architecture since 1945, Museum of Modern Art, New York 1955
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, Modern Architecture in England, Museum of Modern Art, New York 1937
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration, Payson & Clarke Ltd., New York 1929
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, and others, The Rise of an American Architecture, Praeger in association with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 1970.
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, Rococo Architecture in Southern Germany, Phaidon, London 1968, ISBN 0714813397
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, and Seale, William, Temples of Democracy: The State Capitols of the U.S.A., Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York 1976, ISBN 0151885362
