Written by Jaden Parker
Every building around us has a story. Whether it be how it was constructed or where the materials came from, architecture is an intriguing avenue to dive into. For this post, we are going to explore six of the most influential African-American architects of the past. Stay tuned for next week’s post on modern African-American architects! Being the first of anything is always tough, and all of these architects know what that feels like.
Robert Robinson Taylor
Born in 1868 in Wilmington, North Carolina, Robert Robinson Taylor was the first black graduate at MIT. MIT’s School of Architecture had the first formal architectural curriculum in the United States and the first architecture program in the world. So, while Taylor as a young boy wanted to go to the prestigious Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, he chose to apply to MIT instead. According to MIT records, Taylor never failed one course and received honors in trigonometry, differential calculus, applied mechanics, and architectural history. It is also possible that he was the first recipient of the Loring Scholarship, a stipend for students who were academically successful and hardworking. Taylor’s thesis for his major was titled “Design for a Soldiers’ Home” and outlined plans for nursing homes for Civil War veterans.
In his last year of studying at MIT, a Mr. Booker T. Washington recruited him to come be a teacher at his school in the famous Tuskegee Institute of Alabama. After some time spent practicing architecture and designing buildings in 1892, Taylor accepted the offer. While at the Tuskegee Institute, the well-known building described in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man was built in 1898. The Chapel had a 105-foot tower and a seating capacity of 2,400. It was the very first building in Macon County, Alabama to have electrical lighting. Unfortunately, a fire destroyed The Chapel in 1957. The one that stands today was rebuilt in 1969. Besides The Chapel, Taylor also built Huntington Hall (named after Collis P. Huntington of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad), The Oaks (the school president’s house), and the Science Hall (renamed Thrasher Hall in honor of Max Bennett Thrasher) around this time.
By 1925, Taylor was made Vice-Principal of the Tuskegee Institute. Four years later, following the Mississippi Valley flood of 1927, Taylor was appointed to the Mississippi Valley Flood Relief Commission by President Herbert Hoover. During this year, he was awarded an honorary doctorate degree by Lincoln University (yes, the one previously mentioned!) for designing the Booker Washington Agricultural & Industrial Institute in Kakata, the first agricultural and vocational school in Liberia. In 1955, Robert Taylor collapsed in The Chapel and was rushed to the hospital; both buildings he had built. By then, he had designed well over 40 buildings at Tuskegee alone. Today, MIT honors him by endowing a chair for minority faculty in his name, the first in honor of an African-American. He is recognized as being the first Black architect in the nation.
William Sidney Pittman
William Sidney Pittman was born April 21, 1875 in Montgomery, Alabama. Like Robert Taylor, he started off apprenticing as a carpenter. Oddly enough, he enrolled at Tuskegee University the year Robert Taylor took the job as an educator in the architecture department. He studied mechanical and architectural drawing there. After his studies, he went on to attend the Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry with financial backing from Booker T. Washington. With an architectural drawing degree in hand, he became the first Black man to graduate from the Philadelphia-based institute in 1900. He returned to the Tuskegee Institute and was head of the department of architectural drawing for five years, overseeing a lot of the buildings Taylor designed during that time.
In 1905, he moved to Washington, D.C. and soon after married Booker T. Washington’s daughter, Portia Marshall. He started his own architectural firm and became the first Black architect awarded a federal contract in 1907 after winning a national competition to design the Negro Building at the Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition. It was in Washington D.C. that he designed the United State’s first Black YMCA.
From Washington D.C., Portia and William moved to Maryland and raised three children. During this time, he designed many buildings like the Garfield Elementary Public School. After this short stint in Maryland, he moved his family down to Texas, where he was the first practicing Black architect. His most well-known buildings out of the twelve built in Texas are the Knights of Pythias Temple and St. James AME Church in Dallas, the Joshua Chapel AME Church in Waxahachie, the Wesley Chapel AME Church in Houston, and the Allen Chapel AME Church in Fort Worth.
In 1928, Pittman felt the effects of racial segregation and struggled to keep a steady job as an architect. Portia left him after over 50 years of marriage, taking the children with her back to Tuskegee. While it is largely unknown what he did with the last couple of years of his life, we do know that he published a weekly paper called The Brotherhood Eyes and worked as a carpenter following his separation from Portia. Pittman used the newspaper to express his feelings about the Black community. He was a major supporter of supporting Black businesses, and he frequently criticized the Black middle class for going to White businesses instead of Black ones. He was sued in 1937 by one businessman and sentenced to five years in Leavenworth Penitentiary, being released early on parole in 1939. He died in Dallas in 1958.
McKissack & McKissack
The McKissack brothers Moses and Calvin started the very first black-owned professional architecture firm in the country, and it still runs today. According to their website, it has been “family-owned for more than 118 years.” Construction of any kind dates back to the very first Moses McKissack who was a master builder on the McKissack plantation in North Carolina. His 9th child out of fourteen, Gabriel Moses McKissack, learned building skills from his father and passed them on to his son Moses McKissack III, born in 1879.
Before partnering with his brother Calvin Lunsford McKissack (born in 1890), Moses III started his work in Alabama and Tennessee. From there, he moved to Nashville and opened his own business. His first project was to make homes for the faculty of Vanderbilt University, which led to commissions throughout Nashville’s West End. In 1908, he was commissioned to build the Carnegie Library at Fisk University, making it the first major structure designed by an African American architect in the United States. Calvin came to Nashville to assist his brother; and after Calvin got his degree at Fisk, both brothers got architecture degrees from MIT.
In 1922, they made history together after being the first Black registered architects in Tennessee. (Mind you, they had tried to receive their licenses in 1921, but they were denied their certifications despite passing the exams.) McKissack & McKissack was officially formed a year later, although they’d been working together for quite some time at that point. Throughout the 20s, the firm designed a lot of church architecture, as they were the ones most capable of affording an architect.
During World War II, they were given a $5.7 million contract to construct the air base for the Ninety-ninth Pursuit Squadron, an African American combat air unit in Tuskegee. Up to that time of 1942, this contract was the largest ever granted to an African American company by the government. During the Roosevelt administration, Moses III was brought in to the White House Conference on Housing Problems.
Moses McKissack III passed away in 1952 at the age of 73, leaving the company in the care of his brother Calvin. In 1954, the McKissack Middle School was built in Tennessee in his honor. Calvin continued on the business until his death in 1968. From him, it was passed down to Moses III’s son William DeBerry. When William suffered from a debilitating stroke, his wife Leatrice Buchanan took over. Her and her daughters kept the business running and were awarded the design for the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. It now has Cheryl McKissack Daniel as CEO in Tennessee and Deryl McKissack Greene with her own company in Washington D.C.
Paul Revere Williams
Paul Revere Williams racked up a lot of firsts in his lifetime in the world of architecture. He was born in 1894 in Los Angeles. However, he was separated from his brother in the foster care system at the age of four after he lost both of his parents to tuberculosis. Luckily, his foster mother recognized his artistic talents and made sure he got the best education he could receive at the time. He studied at the Los Angeles School of Art and Design and worked as a landscape architect before getting his degree in architectural engineering at the University of Southern California.
After becoming a certified architect in 1921 at the age of 27, he became the first African American to be inducted into the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in 1923. Williams faced a lot of blatant discrimination in his life due to his race, a lot of which he chronicled in his essay for the American Magazine, “I Am a Negro.” He taught himself to draw upside down so that white clients didn’t have to feel uncomfortable sitting next to a Black man. He also kept his hands clasped behind his back when he toured construction sites to avoid those who didn’t want to shake a Black man’s hand.
It is known, especially in California, that Williams left a stamp on the west coast. He designed over 3,000 projects and worked for well over 50 years. A lot of his most exciting work was the designing of celebrity homes for the likes of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and Humphrey Bogart. Besides these luxury homes, he also designed the Saks Fifth Avenue building in Beverly Hills, the St. Jude Children’s Hospital in Memphis, and the Los Angeles Superior Court.
In 1957, Williams was the very first African American elected a Fellow of the AIA. He passed away at the age of 85 from diabetes and was posthumously awarded USC Architecture’s Distinguished Alumni Award in 2017.
Beverly Loraine Greene
Beverly Greene was born in Chicago on October 4, 1915. She got her Bachelor of Science degree in architectural engineering from the University of Illinois and her Masters of Science a year later in city planning and housing. She was the only black and only female member of the university’s American Society of Civil Engineers’ student chapter, and she was also recognized by the National Council of Negro Women for her graduate achievements. She was an officially registered architect by the age of 27. In December 1937, she attended a dinner in Chicago for Paul R. Williams organized by Robert Robinson Taylor’s son. This led to her having a lot of connections in the world of architecture.
The first project Greene worked on as a professional architect was the Ida B. Wells housing project in Chicago. In 1944, the New York Amsterdam News released a column labelling Greene as the “only certified Negro woman architect” in America at the time. Beverly Greene worked under Isadore Rosenfield, Edward Durrell Stone, and Marcel Breuer before her early death in 1957. Before she died at the young age of 41, she had worked on the UNESCO Secretariat and Conference Hall in France, NYU’s campus project in the Bronx, and a part of the Sarah Lawrence College Arts Complex. Her memorial was in the Unity Funeral Home she had designed in Harlem.
Norma Merrick Sklarek
The first African American woman to be inducted into the AIA, Norma Merrick Sklarek was known as the “Rosa Parks of Architecture.” She was born in Harlem in the late 1920s and attended Barnard College before applying to Columbia University’s School of Architecture. She was one of few women accepted into the school, and she passed her licensing exam on the the first try. She is credited with being the first African American woman architect licensed in California and New York.
After being rejected from dozens of architecture firms, Sklarek found work in the Department of Public Works in 1950. She moved on to work at Gruen Associates where she got to manage projects like the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo and San Bernardino City Hall. She became the firm’s director in 1966. During this year was when she was inducted into the AIA, and she served on the architecture faculty at UCLA for six years until 1978. She moved on to work with Welton Becket as a project director for the expansion of LAX’s Terminal One.
Sklarek lived to be 85, but before her death she was awarded the Whitney M. Young Jr. Award by the AIA. In 1985, she teamed up with Margot Siegal and Katherine Diamond to make one of the biggest, female-owned architectural firms in the country called Siegal, Sklarek, Diamond, making her the first African-American woman to establish and manage a firm of her own. She died in 2012 from heart failure, and Howard University awards an architectural scholarship in her name. In her life, she worked on the Pacific Design Center in LA (an all-glass multi-use facility), the Fox Plaza in San Francisco, the Queens Fashion Mall in New York, and the Wilshire La Brea Metro Rail station.
