Paul Revere Williams, the pioneering African-American architect who shaped LA glamour

“Today I sketched the preliminary plans for a large country house which will be created in one of the most beautiful residential districts in the world,” wrote the architect Paul Revere Williams in 1937 of a home he was designing for a wealthy client in Los Angeles. “Sometimes I have dreamed of living there. I could afford such a home. But this evening, leaving my office, I returned to my own small, inexpensive home in an unrestricted, comparatively undesirable section of the city [because] . . . I am a Negro.”

Williams was the first licensed black architect west of the Mississippi, and the first to be a member of the American Institute of Architects. (Even today only 2 per cent of architects registered in the US identify as African-American.) A favourite of the Hollywood elite, he designed around 3,000 buildings, and while LA was his town, an exhibition of new photography of his plentiful projects in Las Vegas and Reno, at the Nevada Museum of Art, shows that he left his mark on that state too.

Williams had to navigate the world he worked in with excessive care. A handsome man, he was always immaculately dressed. Inevitably the only African-American in the room, he would walk into meetings or around construction sites with his hands clasped behind his back, to avoid the fraught question of shaking hands. He learnt how to draw upside down so clients could sit opposite rather than next to him. Such understated elegance must have been exhausting. “He just had to work harder and be better,” says his granddaughter Karen E Hudson, “as with African-Americans of the time, and today. He never failed to use every moment to further his career.”

Williams was born in Memphis in 1894 to a middle-class family. He was orphaned by the age of four — both parents died of tuberculosis — but was adopted by a couple who clearly supported his later ambitions. He studied architecture in LA, and by 1922 had set up his own firm. He didn’t adhere to a particular style: he designed Saks Fifth Avenue on Wilshire Boulevard with an Art Deco precision and a modernist tennis club for Palm Springs part-embedded in a mountainside. His lush modernist extension to the Mediterranean-style Beverly Hills Hotel is still one of the city’s most glamorous sites — and its iconic signage is his own design.

Huge homes for celebrities including Lucille Ball, Lon Chaney and Frank Sinatra tended towards revivalist colonial or Tudor. “For certain architects, it’s their legacy to have built in a certain style,” says Carmen Beals, who curated the Nevada show. “But his legacy was to provide homes that the client was going to love.” She suggests that it is perhaps the fact that you can’t instantly identify a Williams building, along with his race, which has led to a relative lack of recognition today.

Janna Ireland, a 37-year-old photographer, certainly didn’t know much about Williams when she was approached in 2016 by the architect Barbara Bestor, director of the Julius Shulman Institute at Woodbury University in Burbank, who wanted to make an exhibition of Williams’s work in LA. “I’d heard the name,” says Ireland, “but as I slowly began to document the buildings, it became clearer the effect he’d had on the city, especially through the private homes he built. What he created had an effect on what else went up in a neighbourhood.”

Of around 300 houses and businesses he designed in LA, a fair number contributed to the creation of what is now known as the Platinum Triangle — the exclusive addresses of Beverly Hills, Bel Air and Holmby Hills. Williams finally built his own home in 1951 in West Central LA, in Lafayette Square, where successful black families lived. Eschewing the glamour he’d lavished on his clients, his own property is more modern by far, in the International Style with four bedrooms, an open-plan ground floor and ribbon windows.

Ireland’s approach was to focus on the architecture itself — its details, structure and materials. “It seemed logical to concentrate on his hand and eye,” she says, speaking from her home in Eagle Rock, LA. “In my own work, I’m interested in domestic life. But I wanted to show how he put things together. I think it helped me get access to private houses, too. People knew I wasn’t going to look in their closets or under their beds.” Rather like her antecedents, the architectural photographers Judith Turner and Helene Binet, she has created a world of details and shadows and perfect geometries, where arches are beautiful ellipses and staircases are sweeping structures in wood and wrought iron.

In 2020 she was invited by Beals, who had just joined the Nevada Museum of Art, to do the same in Las Vegas and Reno. Beals, who had grown up in Houston in a community built by the African-American architect John Saunders Chase, was particularly interested in Berkley Square, the first community to be built in Las Vegas for African-Americans. The low-slung modern houses were designed by Williams “so individuals of African-American descent could afford their own homes”, Beals says. Funded by the civil-rights activist Thomas Berkley, it was opened for occupancy in 1954. “The first black physician in Nevada had two homes there,” continues Beals, “one for himself, one for non-white entertainers who came to perform in Las Vegas but weren’t allowed to stay in its hotels.”

In Las Vegas, Williams’ buildings include the soaring modernist A-frame Guardian Angel Cathedral, with its triangular stained glass windows showing gambling scenes created by Isabel and Edith Piczek. There is the futuristic La Concha Motel, a dazzling confection of intersecting parabolic forms. (La Concha’s lobby is now the entrance to the Museum of Neon.) In Reno there are low-cost, easy-assemble apartments made from prefabricated steel painted to look like wood, as well as grand brick houses and a decidedly neoclassical church.

In 2017, nearly 40 years after his death in 1980, Williams was awarded the Gold Medal by the American Institute of Architects, the first African-American to be so honoured. “With some architects, it’s all about ego,” says Beals. “But I think Paul R Williams designed for people. He put his ego to one side, he listened.”

‘Janna Ireland on the Architectural Legacy of Paul Revere Williams in Nevada’, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, to October 2, nevadaart.org