Albert Gardner Wood Jr. was a staff architect for Ford Motor Co. and the man credited with designing Henry Ford Hospital.
He was born May 2, 1886, in New York, and the son of a builder and cabinetmaker. Around the age of 15, Wood and his mother, Margaret, moved to Alaska as part of the gold rush. Though they didn’t strike it rich, the young Albert Wood put skills he learned from his father to use and built the family a log cabin. This sparked an interest in architecture, and following another failed gold-mining attempt in Colorado, Wood pursued an apprenticeship at a Seattle architecture firm when he was 16. He took a job as a supervising architect for the Vancouver Hotel in British Columbia with the Canadian Pacific Railway.
Wood returned to the Big Apple but was soon offered a job by his friend John Graham to join his architecture firm in Detroit, where they were working on Ford Motor’s Highland Park Plant. The automaker ended up bringing the entire staff onto the company’s payroll. Wood would be involved with a number of projects for the company, including plants in Ireland and England.
Meanwhile, ground was broken in 1912 for Detroit General Hospital. However, financial troubles shelved things until automotive pioneer Henry Ford offered to pick up the tab. In exchange, Ford would become president of the board and would be allowed to run the hospital his way - and he would get to pick the architect to build the rest of it. Apparently impressed with Wood’s work on the automaker’s car factories, the auto baron tapped Wood.
In addition to the hospital and factories, Wood designed model homes for Ford employees. He made six different designs, lettered A through F, of which 250 homes were built in 1919 and 1920. These homes are now part of the Ford Homes Historic District in Dearborn, Mich.
Wood resigned in 1921, the same year Henry Ford Hospital opened, He left Dearborn in 1925 for Grosse Pointe, where he built a large home for his family. He had an office on Woodward Avenue in Detroit, but his clients dried up after the Great Depression struck in 1929. The Wood family moved back to New York state, where he started a woodworking and furniture design company in 1932, Albert Wood & Five Sons.
Four of Wood’s five sons were drafted during World War II. Wood and his eldest son, Moyer, worked for Sperry Gyroscopes during the war, designing military instruments and machine parts. Following the war, Wood’s sons rejoined the family business, and they did woodwork for the United Nations, Guggenheim family and a number of religious institutions.
Wood died Aug. 20, 1973, and was buried at Manhasset Friends Meeting House Cemetery in Manhasset, N.Y.
Albert Wood & Five Sons stayed in business until 1989, when the last of his sons retired.
Special thanks to archivist Julia Pope of Henry Ford Hospital for her research in compiling this biography.