When you fly into the Los Angeles airport LAX, a spindly space-age contraption is the first thing that greets your eyes outside the window. Built in the early 1960s, the Theme Building – which once attracted travelers to its in-house restaurant, designed by Walt Disney Imagineering, towering above airfields – was built by a supergroup of architects whose structures helped define the city’s midcentury aesthetic: William Pereira, Welton Becket, Charles Luckman and Paul Revere Williams.
Of these architects, Williams, the first licensed Black architect in California, arguably shaped the contours of Los Angeles most deeply. In the six decades before his death in 1980, Williams completed an estimated 3,000 projects ranging from single-family residences, commercial buildings, affordable housing projects, the Los Angeles county courthouse, a reimagining of the now-razed Ambassador hotel and opulent homes for celebrities including Frank Sinatra, Barbara Stanwyck and Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. Perhaps most iconic of all is the Beverly Hills hotel; Williams led its renovation, and its recognizable curlicued sign is scrawled in Williams’s own handwriting.
Without him, LA’s crown jewel of Case Study homes (a program that commissioned architects to study and build well-designed, single-family homes in an attempt to help shore up housing during the post-second world war boom), Stahl House, might have never been funded. “It was a torrid pace,” says Milton S F Curry, professor and senior associate dean, Cornell University. “I don’t know that many of the starchitects today would have that many projects.”
Despite his prolific output and outsized role in sculpting Los Angeles, Williams’s name has, until recently, been a footnote within architecture. Beyond the distinction of being one of the first Black architects licensed in the US, Williams was known for the breadth of projects he took on, as well as the meticulousness and skill he imbued into these varied buildings. “The work is worthy of entering into the canon of major architects [such as]: Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Thom Mayne, Frank Gehry,” says Curry. “They deserve to be in [Williams’s] company, I’ll put it that way.”
Williams is the subject of a forthcoming exhibition spread across three institutions in Los Angeles, with each show – the first of which opens on 18 August at the USC Fisher Museum of Art – focusing on a distinct facet of Williams’s life, career trajectory and societal impact. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s exhibition tracks the overarching scope of Williams’s work; the Getty Research Institute’s entry will tackle how Williams helped construct core components of Black Los Angeles; and USC Fisher will showcase many of his archival drawings in conversation with pieces by contemporary artists and architects. USC’s inclusion bears another significance: Williams graduated from the university’s school of architecture in 1919.
Born in 1894, Williams knew he wanted to pursue architecture by the time he was in high school. As Williams later described in the 1937 essay he wrote for The American Magazine, I Am a Negro, one of his teachers dismissed his aspirations in the field “with as much astonishment as he would have displayed had I proposed a rocket flight to Mars. ‘Who ever heard of a Negro being an architect?’ he demanded, with justice.” Williams added: “It was apparent that my personal ability weighed less in his estimation than the burden of my color. His advice – if such blank discouragement can be termed advice – was an invitation to thought.”
Early in his career, Williams first became a draftsperson, then applied for and won a series of grants that didn’t disclose his race. Around the time Williams entered the field, Los Angeles’s population surged; housing construction charged ahead at a steady clip to meet demand. Williams, who began his own office, was hired to build homes in a burgeoning development, and, later, by a bevy of wealthy Angelenos, including Cary Grant, for their stately homes. Williams was known as someone who could deliver on his clients’ specifications and quirks without sacrificing quality: Sinatra, for instance, wanted the architect to build him a bachelor pad that had a button that could roll his bed out from the bedroom on to the patio. Williams’s talents extended far beyond those projects, yet a stubborn myth has long persisted that he only built single-family mansions to the stars. What truly distinguishes Williams as an architect is his attention to craftsmanship.
When Curry first saw the trove of Williams’s architectural drawings, which are featured in the retrospective, he was stunned by their detail. “The craft and the quality of the work is extraordinary,” says Curry, who helped curate the USC exhibition and, when he was the dean of the university’s school of architecture years back, acquired Williams’s archives there. “Clearly he had a deep knowledge of construction, constructability and material power.” In an unusual turn for architects at the time, Williams worked across multiple genres simultaneously and bore a penchant for distinctive eclecticism. (He also came to be known for his striking take on spiral staircases). “It’s a dimension of him and the work that deserves to be brought into focus,” says Curry. “And becomes a part of the total story and the arc of his career.”
Additionally, Williams helped build one of the first public housing projects in the US, Langston Terrace Dwellings; advocated for multifamily housing projects; and tinkered with aluminum prototypes considered experimental at the time. He also worked to deliver affordable housing to an emerging Black middle class, and to Black GIs, during a time of racist redlining policies.
The trio of Williams shows constitute the first major retrospective of any Black architect. To Curry, it’s indicative of “how far behind we are in understanding, recognizing, analyzing, theorizing about the legacy of Black people’s contributions to the built environment in this country, in a time where we’re facing efforts to extinguish Black cultural production”. While reintroducing Williams to the public, the exhibition aims to make his archives accessible so that scholarly research might yield as-yet-unrealized dimensions to his work – such as his inventive use of color and the furniture he designed. “Whenever you open up archives, unexpected things happen,” says Curry. “Stories and narratives emerge that you didn’t know about.”
-
Paul R Williams: An Architect Considered is at USC Fisher Museum of Art in Los Angeles until 13 March 2027
