In announcing its three highest honors for 2017, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) has given us some food for thought – and discussion. It is bestowing its one-honoree-per-year Gold Medal on Paul Revere Williams, the first African American architect to be so honored. During a career spanning five decades, Mr. Williams became the go-to architect for Hollywood executives and film stars, among many others, and designed nearly 3,000 works.
This much-belated recognition for Mr. Williams follows the same pattern as the 2014 award of the Gold Medal to Julia Morgan, the first woman recipient, also an exceptionally talented architect with a prolific practice. But while the Gold Medal is almost always awarded to a living architect (in a few cases one recently deceased), both Williams and Ms. Morgan were honored decades after their deaths.
It is commendable that the AIA has finally awarded its highest honor to an African American architect, as it did to one who was female. But its posthumous recognition highlights the fact that no living black architect has yet been deemed worthy of this honor. (In 2016, the AIA Gold Medal finally did go to a living woman, Denise Scott Brown; not to her alone but jointly with her partner-husband Robert Venturi.)
Beyond the significance of this award as another indication of the profession’s snail-paced integration, it is encouraging to survey what Williams did accomplish. Born in 1894 in Southern California, he was orphaned at the age of three. Overriding the discouragement of his early teachers, he was determined to become an architect. He earned an architecture degree from UCLA in 1919 and capped that with two years of study at the Beaux Arts Institute in New York.
Returning to Los Angeles, Williams went through the obligatory apprenticeship years successfully and with timely promotions, then established his own practice in 1923. Although the area’s potential clients, essentially all white, hesitated to commission him, his personal charm and apparent skill – combined with the powerful 1920s L.A. area building boom – allowed him to get foothold commissions and complete buildings that were widely noticed. He also became known for impressing clients by sketching seductive designs as he met with them, drawing upside-down as they sat across from him – an arrangement that acknowledged the prevailing racial divide.
As his career flourished, Williams designed houses for business magnates, including a much admired 1935 mansion for Jay Paley, a leader of the CBS network. That success was followed by a string of elegant homes for mid-century Hollywood stars, including Cary Grant, Barbara Stanwyck, Frank Sinatra, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and America’s long-favorite TV couple, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. Along with some of his white contemporaries, Williams set the house styles for the most successful Angelenos – informally sprawling villas in updated Mediterranean and “Hollywood Regency” styles.
Along the way, his 1949 renovations of the Beverly Hills hotel yielded treasured interiors such as the iconic Polo Lounge, a destination for generations of entertainment notables and tourists. He also designed some notable office and institutional buildings and collaborated on the design of the 1961 theme structure at the center of the L.A. International Airport, another iconic object of preservation.
Williams was accorded recognition by his fellow architects during his lifetime. He was the first black architect to become a member of the AIA and the first to be inducted into the organization’s College of Fellows. In supporting his Gold Medal nomination, architect William J. Bates expressed hope that it will encourage other African Americans to “cross the chasm of historic biases” that has limited their participation in the design professions. May it also further encourage greater effort by architectural firms to bridge that chasm.
Firm Award to Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects
The 2017 Firm Award, another one-per-year AIA honor, is going to Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects, a San Francisco firm whose three decades of accomplishment is notable for addressing “issues of social consciousness and environmental responsibility.”
This relatively small firm of 21 designers, says the AIA announcement of the award, demonstrates “that architects can help their communities to adapt to a complex and rapidly changing world.” Their portfolio is notable for its focus on affordable housing, adaptive reuse of existing structures, and facilities for the variously disadvantaged. And however notable their social and environmental attributes, and despite what must be stringent budgets, their projects show a notable elegance of form and detail.
Architects – Leddy Maytum Stacy
The firm’s Plaza Apartments, designed in association with Paulett Taggart Architects, were San Francisco’s first permanent housing for the chronically homeless, accommodating 106 residents and providing onsite health and social services. The pinwheel plan of its apartment floors provides day-lighted corridors, and its accessibility strategies far exceed legal requirements.
Their Ed Roberts Campus in Berkeley is the first of its kind in the U.S., a community center for the disabled that is located at a regional transit hub and features a bold helical ramp that makes an occasion of movement between floors.
Twenty-five Year Award to Pei’s Grand Louvre
The AIA’s 2017 Twenty-five Year Award is a kind of vindication for architect I.M. Pei and his determined client, French Premier François Mitterand, who endured bitter denunciations when their renovations for the revered Louvre museum in Paris were made public in 1983. The glassy pyramid designed by Pei and his firm, Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, was widely denounced as the desecration of a hallowed landmark.
Completed in 1989, the pyramid has become the chief rival of the Eiffel Tower (also thought to be an eyesore when built just a century earlier) as a favored icon for both tourists and residents of Paris. At virtually all hours in all seasons, people can be seen taking photos and selfies around this pyramid.
The sleekly Modernist pyramid was not conceived as an extravagant and confrontational embellishment. It was placed in the Louvre’s central Cour Napoléon (previously used for parking) to give the sprawling Louvre the main entrance it had never had, at the hub of a system of underground passages that would vastly improve access to the museum’s labyrinthine galleries.
The technical execution of the pyramid was a major engineering and production challenge. To create the most transparent pyramid possible, the French glass manufacturer Saint-Gobain had to use a special sand with minimal mineral content, quarried near Paris in Fontainbleau. The almost 800 triangular and diamond shaped panes are held in place by 128 crisscrossing girders braced by a network of thin cables, all presenting the least possible obstruction to views in and out.
A pyramid is not the easiest geometrical shape in which to introduce doorways, and these are inserted with minimal interruption of the basic geometry. From the entrance the public descends by a spiral stairway or an elevator, both elegantly minimal, to the generously daylighted ticketing and orientation space below. Since the number of visitors to the Louvre has tripled since the pyramid’s completion, an increase it made possible, the museum recently undertook the first renovation of this reception area, taking special care to maintain the integrity of the Pei Cobb Freed design.