Harold H. Fisher
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Harold H. Fisher | |
| Personal information | |
|---|---|
| Name | Harold H. Fisher |
| Nationality |  U.S. |
| Birth date | October 28, 1901 |
| Birth place | Uniontown, Pennsylvania |
| Date of death | 2005 |
| Place of death | Grosse Pointe Woods, Michigan U.S. |
| Work | |
| Significant buildings | {{{significant_buildings}}} |
Harold H. Fisher (28 October 1901 – 2005) was an American church architect. He has been described as "a genius who designed over 500 churches with order, unity and beauty reflecting the majesty and transcendence of God".[citation needed]
Contents |
[edit] Biography
[edit] Early life
Fisher was born in 1901 in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, to Charles and Emma (McCoy) Fisher. He had a difficult childhood, being partially raised in an orphanage when his father was forced to leave the family to look for work and his mother could not feed her children.
Fisher was a precocious student who enjoyed drawing and painting.
[edit] Early professional years
Fisher was prolific in drawing and painting. His childhood oil paintings of biblical events attracted the attention of architect Ray Fulton who designed churches in forty-three of the then forty-eight states. In the fall of 1916, Fulton invited the fifteen-year-old Fisher to work as an apprentice draftsman in his Uniontown, Pennsylvania office for $2 per day. Although he presented his age as 27 so he could be hired. [1]He earned $2 a day as an apprentice, working six-day weeks and studied Beaux-Arts courses at night and on weekends at the Beaux Arts Institute of Design in New York. From there, he taught at Atelier Fulton in Pennsylvania for six years.
In 1922 he and a colleague, Charles Hines, started their own architectural office in Hagerstown, Maryland, but had to close his company after only a year and go back to Uniontown to work for Fulton until the Depression, when that office closed.
In the early 1940's he tried to establish his own firm once again but the war started. So he began working for the Austin company and Conover Engineering, supervising the conversion of Detroit's factories for wartime production. At the war's end, he finally fulfilled his dream of establishing an architectural firm devoted entirely to church architecture. That office - Harold H. Fisher & Associates - is now run by his sons.
