Henri Jova, A Classical Intermezzo: An Architect's Life Book

Born to a wealthy, storied family of Spanish/French origins with Cuban connections, architect Henri Jova was educated at Cornell, served in the South Pacific in World War II, and spent three years at the American Academy in Rome before taking his first job in New York City. In 1954, hoping for a short respite from Manhattan's frantic pace, Jova came to Atlanta. To his own surprise and the city's good fortune, he went on to spend his entire career in Atlanta. Here, Jova and longtime companion David Roland Rinehart look back at the architect's life and career.

Jova arrived in Atlanta at the beginning of a period of great change. Over the next five decades, Jova and later his firm, Jova/Daniels/Busby, helped transform the state capital into a regional metropolis, designing some of its signature buildings and molding the face it would show to the world. As Stanley Abercrombie observes in his foreword, Jova/Daniels/Busby "was indisputably a producer of modern design, but I think we today can often see in that design an underlying symmetry and order." This timeless melding of the modern and the classic is evident in many of the city's landmark structures, including Colony Square, the original Underground Atlanta, the City Hall addition, and the Carter Presidential Center.