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A. E. Hanson

American landscape architect and landscape designer

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionOct 5, 2025
Entity authorityQ16011578 ↗
Source-derived summary

A. E. Hanson (1893–1986) was an American landscape architect and real estate developer in Southern California. He designed gardens on the campus of the University of Southern California as well as in Bel Air. He developed two gated communities near Los Angeles, California: Rolling Hills and Hidden Hills.

Early life

Archibald Elexis Hanson was born on December 20, 1893, in Chino, California. His father was a Canadian who migrated to the United States in 1885 and worked as a real estate developer, selling orange groves to Midwesterners. He only attended high school for two years, before he started working.

Career

Hanson started his career by working for landscape architects Theodore Payne and, by 1915, Paul Howard. In 1916, he started his own architectural firm.

In 1921, Hanson designed the gardens of the Getty House in Los Angeles, which serves as the official residence of the Mayor of Los Angeles. From 1925 to 1929, he designed the 4.75-acre gardens of the Harold Lloyd Estate in Beverly Hills, California.

Editorial summary

“A. E. Hanson” enters the record as american landscape architect and landscape designer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Hanson, American and landscape can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA productive starting point for separating a subject’s documented career from later reputation and commemoration. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1893, 1986, 1885, 1915—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1893-12-20. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Hanson, American and landscape.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“A. E. Hanson” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Hanson, American and landscape provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 5, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q16011578. VIAF identifies the subject as 57415087. The Library of Congress control number is n84214024. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1893, 1986, 1885 and 1915.

Critical limits

Public reputation and documentary evidence do not always develop together; absence from a summary is not evidence of historical absence. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “A. E. Hanson”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow A. E. Hanson primary sources, A. E. Hanson archive and Hanson research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “A. E. Hanson”?
  2. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
  3. Which claims depend on a single source or contested interpretation?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “A. E. Hanson” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.