Perkins, G. Holmes (George Holmes)

G. Holmes Perkins was born in 1904 in Cambridge, MA, the son of Philadelphia natives George Howard and Josephine Schock Perkins. He was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard University (A.B. 1926; M. Arch. 1929).

After a year as instructor at the University of Michigan, Perkins returned to Harvard to teach. He established his own architectural office, and completed a number of residential projects in the greater Boston area. The direction of Harvard's architecture program moved away from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts tradition in 1936 when Joseph Hudnut was recruited as dean, with a mandate to move the curriculum toward emerging European modernist style and philosophy. That same year, architecture, landscape, and city planning programs were brought together to form the Graduate School of Design. In 1937, Walter Gropius was brought on as professor and chairman of the Department of Architecture. During World War II, Perkins took a leave of absence from Harvard from 1942 to 1945 to work in Washington, DC with the National Housing Agency; during his final year he served as acting director of its Urban Development Division. He returned to Harvard in 1945 as the Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and chairman of his department.

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