Pioneer Information
Born in Boston, Massachusetts to a prominent family, Lowell graduated from Harvard College in 1892 and received a degree in architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1894. He traveled to Europe for further study in landscape architecture at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and in the atelier of Jean-Louis Pascal at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In 1898, he married Henrietta Sargent, daughter of Charles S. Sargent, the director of Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum. Lowell returned to Boston in 1899 and opened his own architectural practice. He quickly found success designing commercial and institutional buildings, along with private estates and formal gardens, and opened a second office in New York in 1906. He is best known for designing the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the New York State Supreme Court, and for his work on the Charles River Dam project constructed in 1910. As the architect and landscape architect for the latter project, Lowell oversaw the damming of the tidal river to form the Charles River Basin and built five structures on the dam, including a boathouse, pavilion, and stables. Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr.’s 1892 plan for Charlesbank was redesigned by Lowell in 1908 to extend from Charles Circle to the Harvard Bridge, now known as the Esplanade. Lowell occasionally worked with his brother-in-law Andrew Sargent, including on the Coe estate, (now Planting Fields), in Oyster Bay, New York. Lowell designed the estate’s conservatory and collaborated with Sargent on the estate’s plantings, but the project was continued by the Olmsted Brothers following Sargent’s death in 1918.
Lowell founded a short-lived landscape architecture program at MIT, which ran from 1900-1910. He donated his time as a teacher and made a point of extending educational opportunities to women at a time when few were available. He is also remembered for serving as the sole trustee of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. An enthusiast of yacht racing, Lowell died at sea in the Madeira Islands in 1927.
