HUNT, Richard Morris

(1827-1895)

   Born in Vermont, Richard Morris Hunt was the first American-born architect to train at the famed École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. From there, he returned to the United States with a desire to elevate architectural standards by emulating the more lavish European styles. In the United States, the blending of Romanesque, Renaissance, Baroque, and Rococo came to be called the Beaux-Arts style, and this historicized style reflected the taste of the new wealthy class of the "Gilded Age." This period, from around 1885 to 1925, is characterized by a new prosperity, although the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 dampened in part the enthusiasm for such excess. Hunt opened the first American architectural school and helped to elevate the status of architects through his connections with wealthy American industrialists. As their favored architect, Hunt built more than six houses in Newport, Rhode Island, including the mansion for William Kissam Vanderbilt in 1888-1892. In the 1890s, for Cornelius Vanderbilt he constructed The Breakers, a 70-room Italianate mansion overlooking the ocean at Newport, and the famous Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina, the largest private mansion in the United States.

   In 1893, Hunt was in charge of a group of architects hired to design the architectural setting for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. This massive festival, very important in American popular culture at the time, celebrated Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Americas 400 years earlier and showcased every American invention and new trend of the time. Unlike the more structurally experimental buildings constructed at earlier world fairs, Hunt wanted to use a coherent Neo-Classicism to suggest permanence in these temporary buildings and to showcase the greatness of the United States and its democratic ideals, which hark back to classical Athenian values. The vast Court of Honor, created with a large pond in its center, was lined with Neo-Classical structures made of plaster and built on a scale that rivaled those of Ancient Rome. At the end of the broad vista of the Court of Honor, Hunt's Administrative Building, built to suggest a new "Renaissance" in the United States after the conclusion of the Civil War, dominated the skyline with its massive dome. This temporary city was clean, well organized, and beautiful, and demonstrated a new model for the increasingly crowded and industrialized American cities of the time. Frederick Law Olmsted, who had designed Central Park in New York City, oversaw the Exposition's landscape plans, which he used as a model of city park design.

   Many of Richard Morris Hunt's buildings are open to the public today, and, as museums, they are monuments to the aspirations of this prosperous time in American history when the country began to develop into a world power.

   See also ROMANTIC ARCHITECTURE.