Jens Fredrick Larson

Jens Fredrick Larson (10 August 1891 – 6 May 1981), sometimes credited as Jens Frederick Larson, was an American pilot and architect known for designing several Colonial Revival style college campuses: Dartmouth College, Bucknell University, Colby College, Wake Forest University, and others. He served as pursuit pilot and a flying ace in World War I.

Early life Born in Waltham, Massachusetts in 1891, the son of a Swedish immigrant, Larson worked at a Boston architecture firm and then won a scholarship to the Harvard architecture school, where he studied from 1910 to 1912, and where Harvard's Colonial/Georgian style campus may have influenced Larson's preferred architectural style. According to scholar Rod Andrew Miller, Larson's 1928 Baker Memorial Library at Dartmouth "garnered much attention"; Miller quoted a June 1930 letter to Larson from Princeton University librarian James T. Gerould that said: "The longer I study the Dartmouth building the more thoroughly convinced I am that, in its adaptation to purpose, it is the best building we have in the country." He became a member of the Association of American Colleges Commission on College Architecture, and in 1933 he coauthored with Archie Palmer the book Architectural Planning of the American College. In the 1930s he redesigned the campuses of the Little Ivy schools Bucknell University and Colby College. He was awarded the Legion of Honour in France for his design of the Maison Internationale at the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris, which opened in 1936. Lehigh University, University of Louisville, He completed a full design for the University of Louisville, but the project was quashed in part due to World War II. He eventually settled in North Carolina, where he designed the new Wake Forest College campus in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and he retired in 1971.

Other architects that Larson respected included Ralph Adams Cram and Charles A. Platt.