The Aydelott Office, Its Prominence, and an Overview of Its Work
Unfortunately, after Al Aydelott abruptly ended his architectural practice, none of his office records and drawings were preserved. When Hope Aydelott died in 2010, the few architectural documents remaining in her Carmel, California home were placed in the archives at Christian Brothers University in Memphis.
Today it is primarily through these limited materials and through periodical articles from the late 1940s to the early 1970s that Aydelott’s architectural production is known. During this period, his work appeared in the most prominent professional publications of the time, including Architectural Record, Progressive Architecture, and Architectural Forum. For instance, in 1952 Architectural Forumgave eight pages of coverage to Aydelott and fellow Arkansan Edward Durrell Stone’s gigantic hospital in Lima, Peru. Then, in 1955 Progressive Architecture published a sixteen-page piece on the whole history of the firm up until that time.[iv] Al Aydelott had become prominent on the national architectural scene.
In c.1959, Aydelott and Associates produced an office brochure, which includes photographs and write-ups for personnel and projects. (Also see section 4 below.) As represented here, the office’s output was diverse, with the dominant building types being medical, educational, commercial, and governmental, but the firm also designed churches, banks, and restaurants, as well as residences.
The biggest of the office’s hospitals was the Peru megastructure mentioned above. The associate architect was a personal friend whom Aydelott referred to as Ed Stone—Edward Durrell Stone as he later fashioned himself. Stone’s descent from celebrated modernist in the 1930s and 40s to ostracized ornamentalist by the 1960s has been well chronicled. While Aydelott never embraced overt ornamentalism, he argued late in his life that he had preceded Stone in the use of articulated brick patterning and sun and privacy screens made from repetitive ceramic units. If this were found to be accurate, it would produce some alterations in the understanding of Stone’s career, and, regardless of the chronology, this design idea set Aydelott apart from stereotypical modernists.
Across the country the Aydelott firm designed Sears and Roebuck stores, including one for Augusta, Georgia (begun 1958), which is shown in model form in the brochure. Its poured-in-place concrete construction included a dimpled wall pattern consistent with Aydelott’s search for non-ornamental wall articulation. No mid-century-modern building type was more widespread than the branch bank, and Aydelott and Associates produced such a building for the Union Planters National Bank in 1958 and gave it a folded-plate roof. Aydelott described it as a throwback to the concept of a bank as a formidable, vault-like protector of customers’ money. With comparable roof forms are the firm’s designs for Shady Grove Presbyterian Church and Lanier High School, both begun in 1958. The church, as seen in a tempera rendering, is a precinct-like complex organized around multiple courtyards and bounded by a continuous privacy wall. The model and perspective drawing of the high school show a grouping with a comparably rigorous orthogonal organization.
Outside of the United States, Aydelott and Associates designed the U. S. Embassy Office Building Chancery (1956-60) in Manila, the Philippines. His stated design intention was to make it representative of both American and traditional Filipino architecture. Its one-story base with internal courtyards was faced with local volcanic stone. Rising from it on pilotisthe five-story block of offices was enveloped in a ceramic sunscreen. It cannot have been a coincidence that his friend Ed Stone’s U. S. Embassy in New Delhi, India had a similar enveloping layer.
Aydelott was particularly proud of the fifteen-story Pet Milk Company headquarters building (1969) in St. Louis (now repurposed as apartments), an exposed-concrete, Brutalist work like his downtown Memphis fire station (discussed below) from two years earlier. The tower is a bold and sculptural interweaving of horizontal and vertical lines and rises up from an elevated platform as an assemblage of vertical window banks, formidable stair tower, and prominent flared cap. It was his own lengthy written analysis of this building that Aydelott proposed as a model for the analyses that Aydelott travel-award students are required to write after they visit their four buildings.
Also appearing in the brochure and discussed in the Driving/Walking Tour, which follows in Section 3 below, are the Aydelott firm’s own office building, the Immaculate Conception High School for Girls, buildings at Christian Brothers University, the Supplementary Court and Office Building, and the U. S. Federal Building. On the tour but built after the date of the brochure are the Memphis City Hall and Aydelott’s downtown fire station.
[iv]“Big Double Hospital,” AF, vol. 96, pp. 138-145 and “The Architect and His Community,” op. cit., pp. 80-93.