Raymond Hood - Hood in Fiction

Hood in Fiction

Frank Heynick has argued from a study of the journal notes of Ayn Rand made in the late 1930s and of incidents in her 1943 novel The Fountainhead, that Raymond Hood's career and works provided fodder for her fictional architect Peter Keating. This major figure in The Fountainhead epitomized the "second-hander" who – in stark opposition to the uncompromising and innovative hero of the novel, Howard Roark, and exemplified in real life by Frank Lloyd Wright, whom Rand idolized – adapts the classicist and historicist Old World architectural styles to the new American medium of the skyscraper, and then goes on to adopt modernism as soon as this becomes safely fashionable. Certain specific incidents in the fictional Keating's career are pointed to by Heynick as having been drawn from Hood's real-life career, such as their both suddenly gaining national fame by winning the highly-publicized skyscraper contest for a media corporation in the early 1920s with a design in the historicist style, and their both heading the committee for a "modernistic" World's Fair in the 1930s from which the hero architect (Howard Roark in the novel, Frank Lloyd Wright in real-life) was excluded.

Nevertheless, with regard to Rockefeller Center, of which Hood was the chief designer, Rand, despite her earlier negative comments in her journals, was subsequently cited as having some good words for the RCA Building. More intriguingly, as Heynick points out, Rand is quoted in a 1943 newspaper interview as referring to Hood's McGraw-Hill Building as the most beautiful in New York, thus, apparently, seeing Hood in a different light. This, Heynick argues, was justly so. Rand's creating of the negative fictional character of Peter Keating required her to draw exclusively upon the negative aspects of Hood's career as she perceived it. But particularly with reference to the Art Deco mode – a style which goes unmentioned in Rand's novel – Hood in fact showed his creative versatility in designing two Deco skyscrapers so radically distinct from one another as the RCA Building and the McGraw-Hill Building.