We are excited to announce Historic New England has awarded the inaugural Henry B. Hoover Fellowship to Ava Violich Kennedy, a designer and researcher based in Boston.
A year before Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius built his 1938 home in Lincoln, Massachusetts, architect Henry B. Hoover brought Modern design to town. Hoover worked primarily in New England, and he was not affiliated with an architecture school, so he isn’t as widely remembered as his more famous neighbor. “He didn’t talk much,” his son, Harry Hoover, recalls. “He didn’t write much. He was a doer.” Hoover was also prolific: His 1937 family home was the first of fifty he designed in Lincoln, and today it is protected by Historic New England through a preservation easement.
Harry, with his sisters Lucretia Hoover Giese (and her husband Paul Giese) and Elizabeth Hoover Norman, endowed the Henry B. Hoover Fellowship in their father’s honor. The Hoover Fellowship supports an architecture and landscape fellow every other year. Hoover fellows will learn about our preservation philosophy while helping us update site interpretation, improve accessibility, and advance our ambitious climate action goals.
Hoover’s time working with renowned Boston-based landscape architect Fletcher Steele made him especially sensitive to the relationship between landscape and architecture. Fittingly, our inaugural Hoover fellow will concentrate on cultural landscapes at our sites, beginning with a historic garden restoration at Hamilton House in South Berwick, Maine. In the 1990s, we conducted historical research on Hamilton House and developed garden restoration plans, many of which have been implemented. We now aim to reassess progress and plan the next phase, focusing on accessibility.
Hoover fellow Ava Violich Kennedy received her undergraduate degree in History and Literature from Harvard College and her graduate degree in architecture with distinction from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her current work is focused on architecture’s larger relationship with coastal and riparian ecologies, infrastructures, and communities, with a special interest in how historical research, material sensitivity, and attention to place inform design.
We are thrilled to welcome Ava and look forward to sharing her work with you as it progresses.
To learn more about Hoover’s life and work, read Breaking Ground: Henry B. Hoover, New England Modern Architect, by his children Lucretia and Harry.
Written by Ben Haavik, Team Leader for Property Care
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