Sumner Hunt

Sumner P. Hunt
Born May 8, 1865
Brooklyn, New York
Died November 19, 1938
Los Angeles, California
Nationality American
Occupation Architect
Practice Sole practitioner, and in partnerships of:
Eisen and Hunt (1895−1899),
Hunt and Eager (1899−1908),
Hunt, Eager & Burns (1908-1910),
Hunt and Burns (1910−1930)
Buildings Bradbury Building, Southwest Museum
Projects Los Angeles region, California
Design Historicist−Revival architecture styles

Sumner P. Hunt (Brookly, NY, May 8, 1865 – Los Angeles, CA, November 19, 1938) was an architect in Los Angeles from 1889 to the 1930s. On January 21, 1892, he married Mary Hancock Chapman, January 21, 1892. They had a daughter Louise Hunt.

Hunt initially apprenticed with and worked for Clarence B. Cutler in Troy, NY from 1879-1887, and in Cutler’s office in New York, NY until 1889.

In Los Angeles, where he moved in 1889, he worked for Eugene Caulkin and Sidney I. Haas (designers of the 1888 Los Angeles City Hall) from 1889-1892. Hunt moved to his own practice in 1893, the year he was hired by Louis Bradbury to design the Bradbury Building. In 1895 Hunt formed a partnership with Theodore A. Eisen. Eisen & Hunt continued until 1899.

In 1899 Hunt went into partnership with A. Wesley Eager. Hunt & Eager lasted until 1908, at which point Silas Reese Burns joined the firm, which became Hunt, Eager & Burns. In 1910 Eager retired, and the firm became known as Hunt & Burns, a partnership that lasted until 1930.

In her essay on Hunt's early work, Karen J. Weitze notes that he may have been involved in the design of Sidney Haas’s Moorish- and Mission-revival designs for the California Building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Hunt adopted the Mission Revival style for the Froebel Institute, also known as Casa de Rosas (1893), and “became a leading proponent of Hispanicism, a fact that was clearly reflected in his Southern California Building at the California Midwinter Exhibition” in 1894.[1]

Hunt joined Charles Lummis and the architect Arthur B. Benton in 1894 to found the California Landmarks Club, with the purpose of saving Southern California’s mission buildings. The following year Lummis mentioned some of Hunt’s architecture in an article in Land of Sunshine, in which he advocated for turning Los Angeles from a beautiful city into a picturesque one. In the same article Lummis attributed the plan of the Bradbury building to Hunt.[2]

Automobile Club of Southern California headquarters, Exposition Park neighborhood, Los Angeles.

Practice

E.L. Doheny mansion, University Park, Los Angeles (1910).
Southwest Museum tower, Mount Washington, Los Angeles.

Projects designed by Hunt, and by his architectural partnerships, include: [3] [4]

The Press Reference Library (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Examiner, 1912), p,. 82, lists the following buildings for Hunt, although he very likely designed them in partnership:

Eisen and Hunt (1895−1899)
Hunt and Eager (1899−1908)

According to Our Architecture: Morgan & Walls, John Parkinson, Hunt & Eager, compiled by J. L. Le Berthon (Los Angeles, CA: J. L. Le Berthon, 1904), Hunt & Eager were responsible for the following structures:

Hunt and Burns (1910−1930)
Interior atrium of Bradbury Building, Downtown Los Angeles.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Karen J. Weitze, “Sumner P. Hunt” in Toward a Simpler Way of Life: The Arts & Crafts Architects of California, ed. Robert Winter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 184.
  2. ↑ Charles Fletcher Lumis, "The Lesson of the Adobve," Land of Sunshine 2 (March 1895), 67.
  3. ↑ Invisiblemanor.com: buildings by Sumner Hunt, with chronology
  4. ↑ Starr, Kevin (1991). Material Dreams: Southern California Through the 1920s. Oxford University Press. p. 202.

External links


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