Hart Wood (1880–1957) was an American architect who flourished during the "Golden Age" of Hawaiian architecture. He was one of the principal proponents of a distinctive "Hawaiian style" of architecture appropriate to the local environment and reflective of the cultural heritage of the islands. He was one of the three founders (in 1926) of the Honolulu Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, and the only one of its fourteen charter members to be elected a Fellow of the AIA. He served as territorial architect during World War II.
Early years
Hart Wood was born December 26, 1880, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Hart's grandfather Samuel Wood, father Thomas Hart Benton Wood, and uncle Louis M. H. Wood were all in the building trades. His Uncle Louis had studied architecture at Cornell University, sought work in Chicago after the Great Fire of 1871, then settled in Kansas in 1873, working until 1887 with architect John G. Haskell, whose commissions included the Kansas State Capitol, Chase County Courthouse, and buildings for the University of Kansas, Washburn University, Haskell Institute, and federal schools for tribes in the neighboring Indian Territory. Thomas moved his family west in the early 1880s, settling for a time in Hays, Kansas. By 1890, both brothers had moved to a booming Denver, Colorado, awash with architects and civic art clubs and rapidly filling with Richardsonian Romanesque buildings downtown.
Hart began his architectural career in Denver, finding work in 1898 as a draftsman for the firm of Willis A. Marean and Albert J. Norton, who later designed the Colorado Governor's Mansion (1908). In 1900, he joined Frank E. Edbrooke & Company, who had designed the Brown Palace Hotel (1892). By 1902, he had moved to California, where he spent a year drafting plans for new campus building of Stanford University, where conservative Richardsonian Romanesque detail adorned newly evolving California Mission Revival Style architecture under the guidance of Boston-based Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge. At Stanford, he was also exposed to the landscape architecture of Frederick Law Olmsted. He then spent a year working for the young firm of Meyer and O'Brien before joining the firm of Bliss and Faville just in time to work on their most famous project, the St. Francis Hotel, and other major buildings arising from the ashes of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, including the Neoclassical architecture of the Bank of California and the more Beaux-Arts style of the Union Savings Bank (1909), the Columbia (now Geary) Theater (1909), and the Masonic Temple (1912).
In 1904, he moved to the more rural East Bay area around Oakland, California, home to distinctive architects including Bernard Maybeck, known for designing individualistic rustic homes. Wood married Jessie Spangler on November 21, 1906, in Berkeley, California. In 1910, he founded the Oakland Architectural Club and served as its first president (1910–1912). Other members included John Galen Howard, Louis Christian Mullgardt, and Oswald Spier. In 1911 he became a licensed architect, no longer just a draftsman, and the following year designed his own home on a steep hillside in Piedmont, California, a modest but well-crafted, wood-shingled house with rustic features worthy of Maybeck, including porch columns of bark-sheathed redwood. Also in 1912 Bliss and Faville was chosen as one of five San Francisco architectural firms to work on the Panama–Pacific International Exposition. As their chief draftsman, Wood was heavily involved, especially in designing the exposition's landscaping and Great Wall. He also worked with John McLaren, the horticulturist who designed Golden Gate Park, on a unique long, towering fence frame covered with iceplants along the main entrance of the exposition.
