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.[2]: 5 After Harvard, he worked for the architectural firm Brown & Vallance in Montreal.[2]: 6 During this time he spent about a year in Great Britain, where he apprenticed with Sir John James Burnet in Glasgow and then with Thomas Edward Colcutt in London, and then returned to Montreal.[2]: 7
Military service
After the outbreak of World War I, Larson joined the Canadian Army, where he was known as "Swede".[4] After service with the field artillery for nineteen months, he transferred to the Royal Flying Corps on 19 October 1916.[3] He served with the 24 and 34 Training Squadrons.[3] On 31 July 1917, he became one of the original pilots of No. 84 Squadron, equipped with SE-5s.[3] He earned nine official victories, the last of which was an LVG twin-seater which crashed inside Allied lines after he knocked out the observer.[3] Larson was hospitalized in 1918 and did not see any further combat service.[3]
Trinity Lutheran Church in Worcester, Massachusetts, begun 1948 and completed in 1951. The design was heavily influenced by Scandinavian church architecture.[19][20]
^ abcdefgMiller, Rod Andrew (May 1998). Jens Fredrick Larson and American collegiate Georgian architecture (Ph.D. thesis). Louisville, KY: University of Louisville. OCLC53164611. ProQuest304428822. For an extensive list of campuses and buildings that Larson designed, see Appendix I, pp. 96–105.
^ abcdefFranks, Norman L. R.; Bailey, Frank W. (1992). Over the Front: A Complete Record of the Fighter Aces and Units of the United States and French Air Services, 1914–1918. London. ISBN0948817542. OCLC28223455.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
^ abcdefgMiller, Rod Andrew (2006). "Jens Fredrick Larson and colonial revival". In Wilson, Richard Guy; Eyring, Shaun; Marotta, Kenny (eds.). Re-creating the American Past: Essays on the Colonial Revival. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. pp. 53–66. ISBN0813923484. OCLC61362746.