John Russell Pope

Medal record
Art competitions
Representing the  United States
Olympic Games
	1932 Los Angeles	Architectural design

John Russell Pope (April 24, 1874 – August 27, 1937) was an American architect whose firm is widely known for designing of the National Archives and Records Administration building (completed in 1935), the Jefferson Memorial (completed in 1943) and the West Building of the National Gallery of Art (completed in 1941), all in Washington, DC.

Pope was born in New York in 1874, the son of a successful portrait painter. He studied architecture at Columbia University and graduated in 1894. He was the first recipient of the Rome Prize to attend the newly founded American Academy in Rome, a training ground for the designers of the "American Renaissance." He would remain involved with the Academy until his death.

Pope traveled for two years through Italy and Greece, where he studied, sketched and made measured drawings of more Romanesque, Gothic, and Renaissance structures than he did of the remains of ancient buildings. Pope was one of the first architectural students to master the use of the large-format camera, with glass negatives. Pope attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1896, honing his Beaux-Arts style. After returning to New York in 1900, he worked for a few years in the office of Bruce Price before opening his own practice.

Throughout his career, Pope designed private houses such as Vanderbilt houses, his personal residence at Newport, Rhode Island, and other public buildings besides the Jefferson Memorial and the National Gallery, such as the massive Masonic House of the Temple (1911–15), also in Washington, and the triumphal-arch Theodore Roosevelt Memorial (1936) at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. He also designed the extension of the Henry Clay Frick mansion in New York City that created the Garden Court and music room among other features as it was expanded to become a museum.

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