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Longtime Memphis modernist Marty Gorman remembers Al Aydelott as a “kind but flawed character, a gregarious Southern gentleman.” He “would come roaring down the hall,” says Gorman who, along with the seven or eight other designers at Aydelott and Associates, learned to fear the sound of the boss’s footsteps on their office’s travertine floors. “You’d hear that clopping,” Gorman remembers, “and say, Oh my god, who’s he going after?”[i]
For some 25 years after World War II, the vigorous, compelling, opinionated man whom Gorman described ran one of the most productive and award-winning architectural offices in the Deep South. Then in 1973, when he was only 57 years old, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. Believing that he would be dead in short order, Al Aydelott simply locked the doors of his office and moved with his wife to the West Coast, finally settling in Carmel, California, where he lived, also traveled a lot, and for another 25 years made paintings as steadily as he had formerly made buildings, until his death in 2008. Today he is a largely forgotten mid-twentieth-century modernist whose work deserves far more recognition than it has received.
Alfred Lewis Aydelott was born in 1916 on Surrounded Hill Plantation in Brasfield, Arkansas about fifty miles east of Little Rock. He had family members in Memphis, including his grandfather, who owned an impressive residence, much modified but still standing at 1628 Peabody Avenue. Aydelott finished high school in Little Rock, then attended the University of Illinois, where he received his architectural degree in 1936, meaning that he was only twenty years old when he graduated. He married his first wife in 1937 and in 1938 entered into a partnership with Lucian Minor Dent, a man who favored traditional architectural styles and had connections to Colonial Williamsburg.
Aydelott had long admired eighteenth-century buildings in the Virginia Tidewater and in Charleston, South Carolina, and he and Dent produced primarily traditional work until 1940, when Aydelott decided “never again to approach the design of a building through the archives of ancient architecture.”[ii] With this change of mind, he became a dedicated modernist, but one, especially early in his career, with a more formalist bent than many of his modernist colleagues. During World War II Al Aydelott served in the Marines but never went overseas and by 1946 he was back in Memphis. After a conflict with Lucian Dent over the Georgian-revival-style design for St. John’s Church, which was built on the model of Bruton Parish Church in Williamsburg, he abandoned the partnership and established the firm of A. L. Aydelott and Associates in 1949.[iii]
In 1952 Aydelott married his second wife, Hope Galloway, whose paternal grandfather, Colonel Robert Galloway, had done well in coal and shipping and was instrumental in establishing Overton Park, and whose maternal grandfather, C. P. J. Mooney, was the longtime editor of the Memphis Commercial Appeal. Aydelott’s forceful manner and the couple’s social and political connections led to abundant architectural commissions. And in his search for design quality, he soon made it a point to become a visiting critic at Yale University and at what was then known as the Carnegie Institute of Technology, where he recruited talented young designers for his office. All modernists, these men included Yale-trained Francis Mah, the eventual partner of Walk Jones III in the firm of Walk Jones and Francis Mah, the previously quoted Marty Gorman, and Francis Gassner, Thomas Nathan, and Robert Browne, who later practiced together as Gassner, Nathan, and Browne, and the forming of this cadre meant that Aydelott established a beachhead for modern architecture in the city.
[i]Timothy A. Schuler, “ The Aydelotts’ $2.4 Million Gift to Architecture Students in the South,” Architect(the Journal of the American Institute of Architects), 10 August 2016, found at https://www.architectmagazine.com/design/culture/the-aydelotts-2-4-mill….
[ii]“The Architect and His Community,” Progressive Architecture, vol. 36, April 1955, p. 80.
[iii]Dates for the establishing of Aydelott and Associates vary. The 1949 date appears in the April 1955 PA article cited above and below, while a resumé Aydelott produced while living in Carmel and now in the Christian Brothers University archives has the date as 1946.