The Aydelott Archive

The Aydelott Archive at Christian Brothers University is housed in the building at 2455 Avery Avenue and is open to the public by appointment. 

Among the materials available here is the office brochure from about 1959 titled “Projects, Current and Completed Work.” Also found in the archive is a “Biographical Resumé,” prepared by Al Aydelott in 1994, and his undated “REVUE WITH COMMENTS AND REFLECTIONS”  of Eugene J. Johnson and Robert D. Russell, Jr.’s Memphis, An Architectural Guide, published in 1990 by the University of Tennessee Press. Aydelott was distraught about what he felt was inadequate and uninformed coverage of his work in this guidebook and so produced a lengthy critique of it.  Whatever the guidebook’s merits, it did not adequate address mid-twentieth-century modernism in Memphis, including the work by Aydelott and Associates.  In their preface, the authors simply avoid the issue, saying that “Critical opinion is divided over many of the Memphis buildings of the last decades, as it should be.”  So in addition to its truncation due to personal illness, Al Aydelott’s production and consequent professional reputation has not yet benefited from informed historical assessment.