(b Cambridge, MA, 14 Aug 1868; d New York, 22 Sept 1959). American architect and architectural historian. A son of the novelist William Dean Howells, he studied architecture at Harvard University (1891–4) and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris (1895–7), where his fellow students included two of his future collaborators: I. N. Phelps Stokes (1867–1944) and Raymond Hood. In 1897 Howells and Stokes formed a partnership in New York. Notable examples of their work include the Neo-classical style St Paul’s Chapel (1904–7) at Columbia University, New York, a design proposal (1908) for the New York Municipal Building, and the Paint Hall (1913) music building at Harvard University. Thereafter Howells’s interest in commercial skyscraper architecture came to dominate the partnership, while Stokes contributed to low-cost public housing projects in New York.

• Howells, John Mead
  • collaboration
    • Hood, Raymond
    • Skyscraper, §2(i): History and development, before 1945
    • USA, §II, 4: Archit.: Chicago school, Prairie school, academic eclecticism & rise of Modernism
  • competitions
    • Competition, §I, 4: Architecture, after 1900
  • groups and movements
    • Gothic Revival, §I, 1(iv): Architecture: Later developments
  • works
    • Terracotta, §II, 2(ii)(d): History and uses in the Western world: Architecture, c 1890–c 1930