Editor's Note

Abstract

Editor's Note Mark Reinberger Southern Modernism. I have lived in places where the phrase would have prompted snarky comments about an oxymoron, with emphasis on the last syllable. But the Old South did accept modernism, perhaps a little more slowly and grudgingly than other parts of the United States, but not much. To give only a few early examples: Frank Lloyd Wright designed Florida Southern College beginning in 1941. The Sarasota School also emerged in 1941 when its founder, Ralph Twitchell, began designing houses under the influence of Wright and Le Corbusier. After World War II Paul Rudolph, raised in the South and fresh from Walter Gropius's Harvard, joined Twitchell. The North Carolina State College of Design has been known since its founding in 1947 as a bastion of modernism, beginning with its first head, Henry L. Kamphoefner, who had studied at the University of Illinois, one of the earliest American schools teaching modern architecture. Faculty at NC State designed many buildings in the southeast and strongly influenced the region's architecture, with noted modernists Matthew Nowicki and Eduardo Catalano heading the architecture program early on. Farther south Richard Aeck (whose firm still exists) designed modern structures in Atlanta from 1948 onward. Finally, Edward Larabee Barnes designed modern houses in Texas starting in 1950; also by 1950 many public schools in the South were modern in style. So yes, the South did embrace modernism, and this issue of Arris explores several aspects of it. The issue begins with an essay by Michael Fazio, autobiographical but enlightened by scholarly research and long experience. Fazio, professor emeritus at Mississippi State University, one of SESAH's longest standing members, and lauded for his scholarship and professional service, examines the vicissitudes of his own modernist architectural education at Auburn University in the early 1960s, placing it within the context of early modernist education at the Bauhaus and elsewhere. There then follow three articles: • Carter Hudgins, Amalia Leifeste, and Brittany Lavelle Tulla, all connected with the Graduate Program in Historic Preservation at Clemson University and the College of Charleston, look at the work of the South Carolina architect, Joseph H. Croxton, at Kings Mountain National Park for the National Park Service in the 1930s. Although not about modernism per se, the article focuses attention on the predominance in Croxton's work of two fundamental concerns of modernism, function and materials, especially materials used honestly and directly. • In the second article, Martha Teall, a consulting preservationist and architectural historian in Atlanta, takes an in-depth look at Waluhaje, a modern apartment hotel built in Atlanta in 1951 by developer Walter Aiken. Aiken, who deserves to be better known, was one of the city's African American leaders and an advocate of civil rights. Teall shows how Waluhaje constitutes an essential part and symbol of the civil rights movement and the emergence of black entrepreneurship in the post-World War II era. • Finally, Mason Toms, with the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program, brings home the issue with an article on the work of James William Oglesby III, a little-known modernist of Arkansas. Oglesby's fine buildings, mostly residences designed between 1949 and 1970, place him squarely in the mainstream of American modernism and deserve more attention than they have received up until now. All the articles address forgotten modernists, or rather forgotten architectural designers and builders in general, creators outside of the traditional canon. Exploring lesser-known work is an essential task of all historical scholarship and provides the building blocks for a more comprehensive and accurate picture of whatever time and place is being studied. If all politics is local, and one of the goals of ecology is to act locally, the same is true for architecture and its preservation. One of the great achievements of architectural design and history of the past forty years has been to stop seeing buildings as isolated objects and regard them as elements situated within many contexts. These contexts always involve many [End Page 4] players not considered before in the historical record, be they developers, designers, builders, owners, or whoever affects the built environment. Neither the editors of Arris nor the SESAH leadership planned an issue on...