The Inflected Modernism of O’Neil Ford in Denton and San Antonio

Texas architect O’Neil Ford (1905–1982) remains largely unappreciated beyond his native state. However, he was a prolific architect who can be considered an “Inflected Modernist”: utopian and functionalist theoretical principles of twentieth-century Modernism are modulated and refracted in his work by historical considerations, indigenous circumstances, and clients’ needs.

This essay evaluates Ford’s design of two university chapels: the Little-Chapel-in-the-Woods of Texas Women’s University in Denton (1939–1941) and the Margarite B. Parker Chapel at Trinity University in San Antonio (1964–1966). Both buildings manifest the architect’s expression of the basilican typology and the Medieval bay system, reinterpreted in local masonry with contemporary construction techniques. Ford transformed the parabola, which was used more commonly in the twentieth century in industrial architecture, to generally express the modular character of Medieval architecture with influence from both the Texas landscape and the eighteenth-century Spanish missions located in San Antonio. Moreover, the chapels also express Ford’s debt to the work of Alvar Aalto and Frank Lloyd Wright in terms of their sensitivity to natural materials, local craft traditions, and site conditions.

These two chapels are aniconic, unpretentious, and rooted in both historical and vernacular traditions yet executed with innovative structural systems and modern materials—the bygone, together with the contemporary, interpreted through a Texan filter.