Henry-Russell Hitchcock

Over the course of Hitchcock's career, he wrote 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.

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. He also taught at Wesleyan University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale University, Harvard University, and Cambridge University.

In 1948, Hitchcock wrote an essay for the exhibition catalogue Painting toward architecture: The Miller Company Collection of Abstract Art).

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.

While teaching at Wesleyan University in the 1930s, Hitchcock curated an exhibition of Berenice Abbott's photographs of urban vernacular American architecture.

In the early 1930s, at the request of Alfred Barr, the director of the Museum of Modern Art, Hitchcock collaborated with Philip Johnson and Lewis Mumford on the museum's exhibition "Modern Architecture: International Exhibition" (1932). The exhibition introduced the European International Style of architecture to an American audience. Hitchcock and Johnson co-authored the book The International Style: Architecture Since 1922, published simultaneously with the exhibit.

Henry-Russell Hitchcock (1903–1987) was an American architectural historian, and for many years a professor at Smith College and New York University. His writings helped to define the characteristics of modernist architecture.

Henry-Russell Hitchcock Jr. was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on June 3, 1903, the son of Dr. Henry Russell Hitchcock, a physician and graduate of the Harvard Medical School, class of 1890, and his wife, Alice Davis. The hyphenation of the son's given names was probably an affectation. He was educated at Middlesex School and Harvard University, receiving his A.B. in 1924 and his M.A. in 1927.