Driving/Walking Tour of Aydelott Buildings in Memphis
A good place to begin a tour is the former Aydelott and Associates office building (1950) in Midtown at 2080 Peabody Avenue. This is private property, but the building, with its strong horizontal lines, can be seen from the street on three sides.
Today it is in a state of flux, as much of its interior has been gutted and only partially rebuilt, and its landscape has become overgrown. Here, before Aydelott began using brick and ceramic-unit screens, he explored the layering of a variety of architectural elements on his office’s west side: low serpentine brick walls with plantings, a pair of pipe-columns defining the space for a planter, a wall with clerestory, and a cut-out overhang. These elements are visible in a model made to support a request for a zoning variance as well as in the plan, which reveals that Aydelott conceived the building as four conjoined sets of spaces: the open drafting room to the rear, the subdivided central offices, and the projecting front reception area and conference room.
The drafting room, seen to the right of the plan, looks like a small wing from one of the firm’s modernist schools of the period, with its north-facing glazing comparable to that of a classroom. While its east and west end walls are solid and could have been used for bearing, the joists on the inside span the short north-south dimension, and it is under them that Marty Gorman would have stood when he heard the dreaded clopping of Al Aydelott’s shoes as the boss returned from a two-martini lunch and headed down the hallway to set somebody straight.
The middle portion of the building is divided orthogonally into an assortment of room sizes, but this geometry changes radically at the front. At the southwest corner, Aydelott broke the grid to produce canted walls for the entry vestibule, a design idea not seen in any of his other work. Adjacent to it and projecting toward Peabody Avenue is the conference room, a kind of room within a room, with two glazed sides opening out to a walled-in “planting area,” partially surfaced with extensions of the internal terrazzo flooring. This conference room contained no conference table, but it was given, of all things, a fireplace, as well as artwork, meaning that it was in no way a conventional conference room. Rather, it appears to have been a place where a cart would have been rolled in carrying cocktails or champagne or pheasant under glass, a place for getting deals done Al Aydelott style.
Not far away (east on Peabody, then south on Cooper, then west on Central) and east of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception at 1695 Central Avenue stands Immaculate Conception High School (completed 1956), and off-street parking is available. This building is notable for its Mies van der Rohe-inspired curtain-wall construction with exposed, verticalsteelmembers used as wall articulation. More distinctively the work of All Aydelott is the north end-wall, where corbeled brick produce a patterned background for a suspended cross.
Also in Midtown (back to the east on Central then north on East Parkway South) at 650 East Parkway South is the campus of Christian Brothers University, where the Aydelott firm did work beginning in 1954 and extending into the 1960s. Automobiles can enter from the parkway at a spot south of the bell tower, and there is visitor parking on the front campus, where all of the Aydelott work is located.
The Congregation of Christian Brothers was founded in the seventeenth century by Jean-Baptiste de la Salle. Today more than 500 Christian Brothers’ institutions educate some one million students worldwide. What is now Christian Brothers University in Memphis was founded in 1871, with the first president being Brother Maurelian Sheel from Pass Christian, Mississippi. In 1939, the institution moved to its present location not far east of the Aydelott office. They immediately built Tudor-Jacobean-style Kendrick Hall as a high school. Unfortunately, it has very recently been demolished. The extant Barry Hall south of the Kendrick site went up in 1950 in a similar style, and the De LaSalle Arena was built at the same time farther to the southwest. In 1953, administrators, anticipating expansion, recognized the need for a master plan. Enter Al Aydelott.
To adequately appreciate what happened, consider the state of American campus planning up until that time. Well known examples with college buildings built in traditional styles go back to, say, Frederick Law Olmsted’s plan for the Stanford campus in 1886 or Ralph Adams Crams master plan for Collegiate Gothic Rice Institute in 1920. At about the time when Christian Brothers relocated, Frank Lloyd Wright developed a master plan and over a period of time designed campus buildings in his own modernist style for Florida Southern College. And in the early 1950s the firm of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, with Walter Netsch as the lead designer, planned the Air Force Academy in Boulder, Colorado. Wright’s intention was essentially to obliterate any of Florida Southern’s existing ‘inferior’ buildings, while SOM began their campus from scratch. So when Al Aydelott arrived at Christian Brothers, American campus plans were relatively novel, and sympathetically weaving new modernist campus buildings in among those built in traditional styles was ever more so.
An old blue-line print of the Aydelott masterplan remains in the Christian Brothers archives and a version of it appears in the office brochure, which also contains an aerial-perspective tempera rendering showing both the old buildings and Aydelott’s new ones.[v] And this is what he wrote to describe the campus work, what he wrote in a characteristically modernist manner dismissive of traditional buildings.
The existing buildings in “Neo-Collegiate Gothic” style which minimized orientation, classroom lighting and appropriate grouping, seemed inappropriate as a model for over-all development. The master plan takes the architectural character of the original buildings into account by recalling the groined vault Gothic cloister in covered walks and tracery in the perforated brick pattern. Further, the buildings are grouped to form quadrangle enclosures which combine visual appeal and a sense of “tradition” in a thoroughly modern scheme.
Despite his misgivings about traditional-style buildings, Aydelott devised a scheme that took advantage of both new and old, and when viewed from Parkway South, the ‘covered walks’ both unified the new panorama and defined the front lawn. It also defined a definite street edge and along it a new bell tower marked the point of vehicular entry through a new gateway structure.
Of course the elements that Aydelott compared to ‘groined vaults,’ today simply called the ‘arches,’ are neither of these things; rather they are poured-concrete units with reinforcing steel inside them and have only the outward appearance of groin vaults. In addition to these arches, Aydelott added the bell tower and three buildings in strategic locations. A new dormitory, named Maurelian Hall (1958) for the institutions first president, still anchors the north end of the campus and created its own small courtyard. At the south end of the arches and just south of Barry Hall, Aydelott positioned a smaller dormitory called Ave Maria Hall (1953), which has since been stripped down and built back up to a larger footprint. Farther east he added St. Joseph Hall (1954), a classroom and office building with an interior court, and in front of it he strung out more arches, so that every building could be reached under cover. The ensemble was both efficient and generous and it respected the extant buildings about as much as modernists ever did.
Despite being modeled on traditional forms, Aydelott’s arches set the design theme for his modernist campus because of their permeability. On one hand, they consolidate views for those looking through them. On the other, they frame views for those looking out from within them. All of the new campus structures have exposed concrete frames, with brick enclosure walls and flat roofs, so that their outward expression is a classical and formalist one of load and support. This expression is seen most dramatically at the dormitories, where the frames produce continuous porticoes, which, like the arches, outline the facades and frame views for those looking out from within them. And Aydelott used perforated walls made of repetitive brick and ceramic units as screens at these porticoes and at adjacent stairs and repeated this openwork effect at lattice-pattern handrails. While the bell tower has been largely rebuilt, it originally shared the same visual language, with its iconic form and with its tiers faced with perforated walls. Likewise, there were similar effects on the west side of St. Joseph Hall and the adjacent Ave Maria Hall, all of which has been modified or lost in later re-buildings.
From Christian Brothers, it is about four miles (north on Central and west on Poplar) to downtown Memphis and the Shelby County Supplementary Court and Office Building (1959) at 157 Poplar Avenue. A visitor can go to the back of it and see aluminum screens wrapping exhaust piping, and these screens are similar to those sunscreens that originally shielded the glazed facades. Aydelott’s design problem was how to build compatibly with the classically inspired, monumental-masonry existing criminal-court building to the south. His solution was to create a heavy limestone base for his building and span the court and district-attorney functions over it on concrete pilotis. Figures 31 and 32 show two designs, the latter one consistent with the building as built, with exposed concrete and the textured patterning of the screens.
Walking distance north on Poplar Avenue is Court Square and adjacent to one another here are Aydelott’s U. S. Courthouse and Federal Building (completed 1963), now called the Clifford Davis/Odell Horton Federal Building, and the Memphis City Hall (1966). The eleven-story federal building rises from an elevated plaza, which was intended eventually to extend across the street to the city hall. Beginning with a structural frame of poured-in-place concrete, Aydelott designers faced the repetitive spandrel panels with gray granite, raised the external columns up in black granite, and added thin, white window mullions, a design strategy comparable to that applied at Immaculate Conception High School, but here much more highly articulated.
The city hall’s design is an overt expression of post-and-beam construction, with joints and connections celebrated rather than concealed. Like that of the federal building, its concrete frame has a veneer, in this case black and white marble.
Finally, farther south (west on Poplar and south on Front) stands the building now called the City Town Village Government Fire Station (1967). Its form reveals that by this date designers in the Aydelott office were exploring the possibilities of Brutalist concrete, an exploration that culminated with the Pet Milk headquarters discussed above.
[v]Subsequent to the creation of the tempera rendering, changes were made to the master plan. The rendering shows arches along both sides of the access road, dividing the front campus into two quadrangles, but these arches were never built. The rendering shows parking inside the southern quadrangle and shows a preliminary design for St. Joseph Hall.