Robert S. Hutchins received his undergraduate education at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating in 1928. He then pursued architectural studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, earning degrees in 1929 and 1930. In 1937, with John C. B. Moore, he established the firm of Moore and Hutchins in New York. Expansion of the firm in 1967 was signaled by the change of name to the Moore and Hutchins Partnership; in 1972 it was reorganized as Hutchins, Evans and Lefferts.
In 1938 Hutchins and Moore won a national competition to design a new campus for Goucher College, Towson, Maryland. Other major Hutchins works include Village Hall, Garden City, New York (1950), another commission that resulted from a competition; and the U.S. Military Cemetery at Carthage, near Tunis in North Africa. His firm was particularly noted for its design of academic institutions: public and private schools, from elementary through graduate-university level. The firm undertook overall campus planning as well as the construction of individual buildings and renovation of existing structures. These projects include: campus planning and construction of the State University of New York at Binghamton (1958-87) and of Saint Timothy's School, Stevenson, Maryland (1951-64); four elementary schools for the town of Great Neck, New York (1952-67); a house for the Eastman Visiting Professor, Balliol College, Oxford, England (1958); the Woolworth Center of Musical Studies, Princeton University (1963); and Uris Hall, housing the Graduate School of Business Administration, Columbia University, New York (1964).
Hutchins was a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and served as a trustee of the New York State Historical Association, Cooperstown, and of Barnard College and the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, both in New York. He was first elected to the Academy Council in 1974; at the expiration of the three-year term in 1977, he was elected president. The Academy returned him to that office in the eleven succeeding annual elections, a period during which the institution's programs and its participation in the artistic life of New York saw significant expansion.
