Early Life and Education

A full-page newspaper spread. A large central image shows a low, U-shaped building with a tower rising from within the U. The tower is rounded and is topped by a dome. Surrounding this are smaller images and the text of the newspaper article. Clockwise, from the top right are: a portrait photograph of Raymond hood; an elevation drawing of the tower complex housing the Courthouse, Federal, and Municipal offices; a rectangular floor plan of the main level of the entire structure; a round floor plan of one level of the tower; and a detail view of the main entrance of the courthouse at the base of the central tower. The central headline reads: A striking plan for dignifying City Center.

Raymond Hood
“A Striking Plan for Dignifying Civic Centre”
Providence Sunday Journal, March 19, 1916
20½" × 16"

In 1916 the Providence Journal published Hood’s proposal for a group of buildings in downtown Providence, which included a six-hundred-foot central tower rising between Westminster Street and Exchange Place, the current site of the Industrial Trust Tower (the so-called “Superman Building”).

The buildings would accommodate courtrooms, judges’ chambers, a law library, a panoptic prison, a customhouse, and municipal offices.

The shaft of the spire resembles a fluted column, with strong, protruding vertical bands extending across many floors and alternating with recessed areas for windows—a motif that Hood would repeat in nearly all of his later skyscrapers, which visibly announced the presence of the steel frame.