Architect. He was a prolific 19th-century American architect who is most remembered as the Architect of the Gilded Age, designing the Biltmore Estate in Ashville, North Carolina; the 1902 entrance façade and Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Fifth Avenue building; and the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Born one of five children of Jonathan Hunt, a prosperous lawyer and landowner who had served as a US Congressman, he was a four-and-half-year-old when his father contracted cholera and died. After private education in New Haven and Boston, he received his architectural training at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, being the first American to attend and graduate from the institution. Returning to the United States in May of 1855, he entered into practice in New York City. In 1857, he was active in founding the American Institute of Architects, later serving as the group's third president. In 1861, he married Catharine Clinton Howland. As a prominent member of the society of New York City, Hunt helped direct American taste toward European monometallism and finally to the Renaissance, invoking the glories of France and Italy. He created an outstanding body of work in his forty-year practice, and many of his buildings became national treasures. Among his other interesting projects are New York's Lenox Library, the Tribune Building, and the Administration Building for the World's Columbian Exposition. He designed a great number of remarkable private homes, many commissioned by members of the Vanderbilt family, including "The Breakers" for Cornelius Vanderbilt II at Newport, Rhode Island, and the "Biltmore Estate" for George W. Vanderbilt, which as a 175,000-square-foot French Renaissance château is the largest house built in the United States. Hunt suffered from chronic gout, which causes renal failure, and he died unexpectedly of heart failure at his summer residence at Newport while supervising the completion of Cornelius Vanderbilt's mansion, "The Breakers," in July of 1895. In 1893, he received the gold medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects for his designs at the World's Columbian Exposition. Nearly two dozen of his projects have been destroyed by fire or demolished for various reasons by the 21st century. He experienced personal loss with the suicide deaths of brothers Jonathan and William. His two sons, Richard and Joseph, continued his architecture business.