Guy Lowell

Guy Lowell (1870-1927) was an American architect and landscape architect. He was a member of Boston's well-known Lowell family, and in this role as Percival Lowell's third cousin, became the sole trustee of the Lowell Observatory after his cousin's death. His combined practice of architecture and landscape design was perhaps sparked by his father-in-law, Charles Sprague Sargent, the first director of the Arnold Arboretum.

Lowell graduated from Harvard College in 1892, and received his degree in architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1894. He then studied landscape and horticulture at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and architectural history and landscape architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, with diplome in 1899.

Returning to the United States, Lowell opened his own practice in Boston. He was successful immediately. By 1906, he had opened a branch office in New York, and later split each week between New York and Boston. His commissions included large public, academic and commercial buildings, and many distinctive residences, country estates and formal gardens, as well as the Charles River esplanades in collaboration with Charles Eliot, but he is perhaps most famous for his design of two public buildings, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (1906-09, plus later additions) and the New York County Courthouse on Foley Square in Manhattan (1912-14 and 1919-27), Lowell Lecture Hall at Harvard, and academic buildings at Phillips Andover Academy, Simmons College, and Brown University.

Lowell published several books including American Gardens (1902), Smaller Italian Villas and Farmhouses (1916), and More Small Italian Villas and Farmhouses (1920). He also contributed to American Gardens, a photographic magazine.

Major buildings and gardens

• 1902 Lowell Lecture Hall, Harvard University
• 1904 Emerson Hall, Harvard University
• 1909 Boston Museum of Fine Arts
• 1912 Natirar
• 1913 New York State Supreme Courthouse
• 1913 Planting Fields Arboretum
• 1929 Grosse Pointe Yacht Club

Selected other buildings

• 1906 44 Boylston Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts
• 1911 President's House, Harvard University
• 1922 Fuller Memorial Bell Tower, Phillips Andover Academy
• 13 Follen Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts