Charles Evans Hughes III

Charles Evans Hughes III
BornMarch 14, 1915
New York City, U.S.
DiedJanuary 7, 1985 (aged 69)
OccupationArchitect
Charles Evans Hughes with his wife, children, grandchildren, and daughter-in-law, 1916.

Charles Evans Hughes III (March 14, 1915 – January 7, 1985) was an American architect. One of his most notable works was the Manufacturers Trust Company Building in New York City.

Family

Hughes was the grandson of Chief Justice of the United States and 1916 Republican presidential nominee Charles Evans Hughes. He was the son of Charles Evans Hughes Jr., who served as United States Solicitor General in 1929 and 1930 under President Herbert Hoover.[1]

Early life

Hughes was born in New York City and was a resident of that city's Riverdale, Bronx.[2] As a four year old boy, for Christmas 1919, Hughes visited his family in Glens Falls, New York; his aunt was gravely ill from diabetes, but treated him to newly-fashionable candy canes.[3]

Hughes attended Brown University, where he won a major student speech prize in 1937, and was thus named one of the student speakers of his class at his graduation, as had been his father and grandfather.[4] His grandfather gave an important speech at the same ceremony where he would receive his A.B., on the issue of authoritarianism, implicitly calling President Franklin D. Roosevelt a totalitarian due to the President's court-packing plan to force the Supreme Court of the United States to allow the New Deal to be ruled constitutional.[5]

The younger Hughes later attended the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In World War II, He served as the gunnery officer on the USS Mullany (DD-528).

Career

He was an architect with offices at East 61 Street, and mentored many other architects, who were nicknamed "his minions", including Norval White, co-author of the AIA Guide to NYC.[6]

He was elected as an Associate of the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 1941.[7]

His best-known work is probably the Manufacturers Trust Company Building on Fifth Avenue and 43rd Street in Manhattan, New York City. According to the Real Estate News, "the revolution it inaugurated in bank design proved so successful throughout the world that one almost requires an act of historical imagination to realize what things were like before it was completed in 1954, according to designs by Gordon Bunshaft and Charles Evans Hughes III of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill."[8] His first draft was "essentially what was built" of the visionary building.[9] Norval White and his co-writers called it, "The building that led the banking profession out of the cellar and onto the street; a glass-sheathed supermarket of dollars," noting that Hughes had won an international award for his design.[10] Hughes "received [a] $35 prize and credit for proposing a concept that changed the basis of bank hall design from ornate, bulky masses to the pristine lightness of the glass box."[11]

One of his now historic commissions was the 1976 re-erection of the New York City Titanic Memorial.[12]

Private life

Hughes married a second time in December 1964, at the age of 49, to Kimberly Jean Wiss, 40, a freelance sportswriter and record-holding competitive fisher.[13]

He was a longtime resident of Riverdale,[2] at Independence Avenue and 252nd Street, where he was also a member of the Riverdale Yacht Club.[14]

References

  1. ↑ "National Affairs: General Hughes". Time.com. May 13, 1929. Retrieved May 10, 2026. The new Solicitor General has a small son, Charles Evans Hughes III.
  2. 1 2 Goldberger, Paul. "CHARLES E. HUGHES 3D DEAD; LEADER IN BANK ARCHITECTURE", The New York Times, January 10, 1985. Accessed May 4, 2008. "Mr. Hughes, who lived in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, was the grandson of Charles Evans Hughes, the former Chief Justice of the United States."
  3. ↑ Cooper, Thea; Ainsberg, Arthur (2010). Breakthrough:Elizabeth Hughes, the Discovery of Insulin, and the Making of a Medical Miracle (ebook). St. Martin's Press. pp. 45–46. Retrieved May 10, 2026.
  4. ↑ "People, Apr. 26, 1937". time.com. April 26, 1937. Retrieved May 10, 2026. At Brown University Charles Evans Hughes III won the $150 Gaston Prize in oratory with a speech on The United States and the Next War, was thereby entitled to deliver one of the student addresses at Commencement this June, as were his father and grandfather, the Chief Justice, at their Brown Commencements
  5. ↑ Simon, James F. (2012). FDR and Chief Justice Hughes: The President, the Supreme Court, and the Epic Battle Over the New Deal (ebook). Simon & Schuster. p. 340. ISBN 9781416578895. Retrieved May 10, 2026.
  6. ↑ "Norval White: A former leader of the Action Group for Better Architecture in New York discusses his and the group's efforts to save Pennsylvania Station from demolition in the 1960s". New York Preservation Archive Project. April 20, 2006. Retrieved May 10, 2026. I shared offices for my architectural practice with Charlie Hughes [Charles Evans Hughes III] and his minions, with rooms at the front for Jan Rowan and myself—on the parlor floor of a brownstone at 33 East Sixty-First Street, a front room with a bay window, a rear room with a courtyard view and an extension with a small conference room for us both. It was in these rooms and in the conference room way in the rear that we held the meetings to create AGBANY [Action Group for Better Architecture in New York], and to start the organization to picket and make noise about the demolition of Pennsylvania Station.
  7. ↑ Clay, Albert G. (December 1, 1941). "The Oculus, volume IV, number 4, page 2: Memberships" (PDF). US Modernist. Retrieved May 10, 2026.
  8. ↑ Gardner, James (October 20, 2011). "City must preserve integrity of Manufacturers Hanover Trust Branch Bank". Retrieved May 10, 2026. Since then, this model has been replicated so often that most people who pass the building hardly glance at it. It looks like just another Midtown bank. That is the first sense in which it is a victim of its success.
  9. ↑ Adams, Nicholas (2019). Gordon Bunshaft and SOM: Building Corporate Modernism. Yale University Press. p. 59. ISBN 9780300227475. Retrieved May 10, 2026.
  10. ↑ White, Norval; Willensky, Elliot; Leadon, Fran (2010). AIA Guide to New York City. Oxford University Press. p. 271. ISBN 9780199772919. Retrieved May 10, 2026.
  11. ↑ Slavin, Maeve; Allen, Davis Brewster (1990). Davis Allen: Forty Years of Interior Design at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Rizzoli. p. 18. ISBN 9780847812554. Retrieved May 10, 2026.
  12. ↑ "Titanic Memorial Lighthouse: New York City, New York: Memorial". Retrieved May 10, 2026. Architect: Charles Evans Hughes III; Description: The Memorial Lighthouse was re-erected in 1976. Constructed, 1913
  13. ↑ "Milestones: Dec. 25, 1964". time.com. December 25, 1964. Retrieved May 10, 2026.
  14. ↑ Mendez, Ruben P. (2008). A History of the Riverdale Yacht Club. pp. 89–90. Retrieved May 10, 2026.
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