The mastermind behind Saks Fifth Avenue’s Beverly Hills store, he also spearheaded the revamp of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel-an extensive renovation that cost $3 million. Jude Children’s Hospital in Memphis, and the Los Angeles Superior Court. Among his most prominent public works are the Golden State Mutual Life building in L.A., St. Williams is responsible for the creation of more than 2,000 private residences, including Sinatra’s former hilltop estate on Bowmont Drive, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’s sprawling home in Palm Springs, and French restaurateur Rene Faron’s American Colonial-style abode in Silver Lake, CA. I wanted to prove that I, as an individual, deserved a place in the world.
Without having the wish to “show them,” I developed a fierce desire to ‘show myself.’ I wanted to vindicate every ability I had. “Eventually, however, as I grew older and thought more clearly, I found in my condition an incentive to personal accomplishment, and inspiring challenge. I passed through successive stages of bewilderment, inarticulate protest, resentment, and, finally, reconciliation to the status of my race,” he shares. Though he was often subjected to blatant racism and marginalization, he never allowed it to rattle him, nor get in the way of his work.Īs he writes in I Am Negro: “I came to realize that I was being condemned, not by lack of ability, but by my color. For the same reason, he made a habit of keeping his hands clasped behind his back, so that no client would ever feel obligated to shake his. Williams, who served as an architect in the Navy during World War II, was known for his uncanny ability to draw upside down-a skill he taught himself for the benefit of white clients who might have felt uncomfortable sitting next to the Black architect. In 1923, he became the first African American inducted into the American Institute of Architects (AIA).
In 1921, at the age of 27, he became a certified architect, going on to open his own firm the following year. He married Della Mae Givens in June 1917, and together they had three children (the eldest of which passed away at birth). branch of the (now defunct) New York Beaux-Arts Institute of Design, he worked as a landscape architect, later earning a degree in architectural engineering from the University of Southern California. After studying at the Los Angeles School of Art and Design and at the L.A.
He was tragically orphaned at the age of 4, losing both his parents to tuberculosis, and was sent to foster care until he was adopted. Paul Revere Williams was born on February 18, 1894, into a middle-class family in Memphis. Williams stands outside a Tudor mansion in Bel-Air that he redesigned in 1970. But now, seeing men and women of their own color bettering their condition so phenomenally, they realize that they-or their children-can do as much.” “A few decades ago Negroes had no examples within their own race to spur them on. “The power of example is strong,” Williams penned in his 1937 essay for American Magazine, I Am a Negro. It’s because he served as a champion and voice for minorities during an era when racial discrimination was still rampant in America, paving the way for every other Black creative who followed in his footsteps. The first African American to become a certified architect west of the Mississippi, the pioneering draftsman had a hand in designing many of L.A.’s most iconic buildings, including parts of Los Angeles International Airport and the Beverly Hills Hotel-not to mention the homes of many Hollywood bigwigs-from Frank Sinatra and Carey Grant to Lucille Ball-which earned him the nickname of “architect to the stars.”īut what makes Williams so legendary? It’s not because by the end of his five-decade career he had designed more than 3,000 buildings, or that he designed the jaw-dropping abodes of countless celebrities. If you’ve ever marveled at the glamorous mansions that line the posh streets of Los Angeles, you’ve likely admired the work of Paul Revere Williams.
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