Joseph Hudnut

Architect, scholar, and educator Joseph F. Hudnut received an undergraduate degree from Harvard University in 1909 and a bachelor of architecture from the University of Michigan in 1912. He taught at Alabama Polytechnic Institute from 1912 to 1916, leaving to study at Columbia University, where he received a master of science in 1917. He opened an architectural practice in New York in 1919 but left to return to academia in 1923, teaching architecture at the University of Virginia and serving as director of the university’s McIntyre School of Fine Arts. In 1926, Hudnut became a professor at Columbia University’s School of Architecture and the school’s dean in 1933. He became dean of the newly created Graduate School of Design at Harvard University in 1936, where he remained until retiring in 1953. Hudnut brought noted Bauhaus modernists Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer to the Harvard faculty. He also wrote several books on architecture and art, including Architecture and the Spirit of Man, Three Lamps of Modern Architecture, and Modern Sculpture, as well as numerous articles, and continued to lecture on architecture after his retirement.