4/8/2023 0 Comments Peter cook architect![]() ![]() “Abele was so consistent in preserving the anonymity of big-office practice, and so graceful in navigating around the vile indignities of Jim Crow America, with a kind of Green Book for architects, that it’s difficult for us today to reconstruct his likings and his authorship,” Brownlee said. Those factors make it difficult to sort out Abele’s own interests and style. Though it’s been more than a century since Abele graduated from Penn, Brownlee said, scholars and historians are still learning about his work, partly because he worked in a large firm, and partly because the norms of his era systematically undervalued the work of African Americans. ![]() William Whitaker, curator and collections manager of the Architectural Archives, moderated a discussion with Abele’s descendants and Duke University Archivist Val Gillispie. The panel was kicked off by David Brownlee, the Frances Shapiro-Weitzenhoffer Professor Emeritus of 19th Century European Art at Penn, who presented an overview of Abele’s architectural career, most of which was spent in the office of Horace Trumbauer, where he contributed to the designs of such iconic Philadelphia structures as the Free Library, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Irvine Auditorium on Penn’s campus. In March, a group of Abele’s living descendants, including his son, Julian Abele, Jr., and his great grand-niece and -nephew Susan Cook and Peter Cook, joined a virtual panel celebrating the life of their long-overlooked forebear, the first Black student to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania’s architecture program. It is likely that he was hesitant to travel there because of the indignities of segregated travel and accommodations in the college town of Durham. For example, whether Abele ever set foot on campus remains a mystery. And the effort to unpack Abele’s legacy continues today. The exchange helped spark a campus-wide discovery of Abele’s work. Cook wrote back, noting that the campus itself had been designed by her great grand-uncle, African American architect Julian Abele (BArch 1902). ![]() A student who lived in Cook’s dorm wrote a letter to the school newspaper, complaining that the protests impeded her right to a beautiful campus. As part of those protests, says Cook, who now works as an exhibit designer for the parks system in Montgomery County, Maryland, the students set up a series of makeshift shanties on the main quad. When Susan Cook was a student at Duke University in the 1980s, she helped organize a series of protests with the Duke South Africa Coalition, pushing the school to divest from the apartheid government in South Africa. ![]()
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