Robert R. Taylor and Tuskegee: An African American Architect Designs for Booker T. Washington by Ellen Weiss (review)

Architectural biographies of regional or local practitioners, although becoming more common, are still scarce and hard to research, write, and publish. This challenge becomes all the more difficult for African American architects, even one with the status and fame of Robert R. Taylor (1868–1942). By focusing on Taylor’s work at Tuskegee, founded in 1881 by Booker T. Washington as the Tuskegee State Normal School for Colored Teachers, Ellen Weiss has done a noble job of unveiling the work of an important architect in the context of the racial politics of the South during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Growing up in the relatively racially progressive city of Wilmington, North Carolina, as the son of a successful carpenter and merchant, Robert R. Taylor was one of the first African Americans to attend, and the first black architect to graduate from, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Upon his graduation in 1892 he was offered employment as director of industrial work at five schools but apparently chose to practice in Cleveland for a short period before accepting a position at Tuskegee as an architect, builder, and teacher. Except for another brief Cleveland interlude, for the next forty years Taylor worked on the campus, eventually becoming the Director of Industries and often acting as Principal in the absence of Washington and his successor Robert Russa Moton. Although Taylor designed other structures—in Cleveland, his native Wilmington, and several southern states, including prototype designs for rural county schools—his life’s work was on the campus that Washington built in Alabama. The subtitle of the book—An African American Architect Designs for Booker T. Washington—emphasizes the core of Taylor’s career and the focus of Weiss’s study.

Central to the discussion of Taylor’s career and his work at Tuskegee is what Weiss has termed “The Plight of Black Architects,” which she broaches in the introduction (xv–xviii) and then revisits later in the text (146–47). Only a few African American architects—most notably Paul R. Williams but also Clarence W. Wigington and Julian F. Abele—achieved national success during the era of segregation and Jim Crow laws. Few major structures financed and built by blacks required architectural skills, and crossing racial barriers to white patronage was difficult; hence “buildings by black architects for African Americans are important because they sheltered precious institutions and because their presence signaled success by helping generate it” (xvi). However, the buildings in and of themselves do not necessarily convey their maker’s race; rather, the context in which they were built becomes key to interpretation and analysis. As Weiss eloquently states, “Taylor’s architecture and campus are not racially coded, but they grew out of racial conditions” (xix).

In this light, one of the more insightful aspects of Weiss’s presentation is the linkage between Booker T. Washington’s pedagogy and Robert R. Taylor’s practice. Washington saw his institution as an instrument for the advancement of “colored men and women” through learning marketable industrial skills such as wood- and metalworking and brick-making and -laying. The lands near the campus proved to be a rich source of clay as well as an ample woodlot for fuel, and the students not only dug the clay and fired the kilns to burn the bricks but also built the buildings where they were housed and instructed. Taylor first taught and later supervised industrial design classes, which included exercises such as the mathematics of calculating how many bricks were in a wall. His designs, in turn, featured simple classical elements and proportions well within the range of students’ abilities in terms of both design and execution. Indeed, it was not until late in his career that Taylor, in association with other architects, designed buildings of greater scope and more challenging construction, such as structural...