Harold Frank Hoar, FRIBA (13 September 1909 – 3 October 1976) was a British architect, artist, academic and architectural historian. Hoar first came to public prominence when, at the age of 25, he won a competition to design the first terminal building at London's Gatwick Airport in the 1930s. His architectural career focused increasingly on town planning in the post war years, when he also became a well known public commentator on domestic architecture in that era of reconstruction. A senior lecturer at University College London, Hoar was an expert on the Bavarian Baroque and wrote histories of English and European architecture at a time when architectural modernism decried the value of an historical approach to architecture. He was also an accomplished watercolour painter, his work on architectural themes having often been exhibited in the Royal Academy in the 1950s and 1960s.
In a wide-ranging career Hoar was probably best known as the cartoonist "Acanthus", where his work appeared in Punch, the Sunday Telegraph, The New Yorker and The Builder magazine; and as "Hope" in the Sunday Express. His cartoons reflected on the home front during the Second World War and were often accompanied by great architectural backdrops. As a cartoonist during the war, Hoar's political cartoons contemplated the long term direction of the war and of the perpetrators of its worst atrocities.
Background and early life
Hoar was born in Faizabad, Oudh then a part of the Indian Empire, to Harold Hoar and Frances (née) Harry, where his father was stationed with the Army Educational Corps. The Hoars were an old Hampshire family, settled in Catherington from the reign of Henry VIII and Lords of the Manor of Lovedean, near Catherington, in the 17th century. Harold Hoar's great uncle, John Jeans, was the Professor of Nautical Astronomy at the Royal Naval College, Portsmouth. The Harry family descend in the male line from the Owens of Lllullo and, ultimately, from Hywel Dda and Rhodri Mawr, 10th-century Kings of Wales. Through that family, Hoar was a kinsman of Richard Nixon, 37th President of the United States.
On the family's return to England, they settled in Devon, where Hoar was educated at Plymouth College. At the age of 15, he won a scholarship to the Bartlett School of Building at University College London (UCL), with which he was to be associated for the best part of his life. Studying under Sir Albert Richardson, PRA, Hoar qualified as an ARIBA in 1931, and was awarded a diploma in Town Planning, having been awarded the Owen Jones Student Medal by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) whilst an undergraduate. Hoar's interest in architectural history developed during his student years, where he was awarded the Roland Jones prize for the history of Medieval architecture in his second year.
Hoar was a keen rugby player, playing for Saracens 1st XV between 1934 and 1937.
Architectural Practice
Gatwick Airport
Hoar's entry into the competition for the design of the first Gatwick Airport terminal building was as the leading member of a team of three architectural research students. In the early 1930s, at the beginning of the era of commercial flight, Morris Jackaman had had the idea of a circular terminal, which was well suited to the developing air traffic needs of the time, allowing sufficient aircraft to be positioned in close proximity to the terminal building. Hoar's design catered for these needs by surrounding the round terminal with five ramps, each of which connected to aircraft. The terminal was entered by a tunnel subway connected, in turn, to the railway station. Hoar's designs were commissioned in 1935 and the building still exists, affectionately known as "The Beehive". A model of Hoar's design was included in the gallery of architectural history at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2004.
War Years and post-war Reconstruction
Following this success, Hoar built an architectural practice in which he was often engaged to design civic buildings, especially in the 1940s and '50s. He was commissioned into the Royal Engineers in Egypt and North Africa during the Second World War where he was mainly engaged on the design of bridges. During his period with the RE, a newspaper reported that he was being considered for an army secondment to the government of Nairobi, where he would work on the re-development of the city, although this approach did not come to fruition.