Paul Revere Williams: First Retrospective of a Black Architect

Three Museums, One Architect

On August 18, the USC Fisher Museum of Art opens the first exhibition in a triple-institution retrospective dedicated to Paul Revere Williams, the first licensed Black architect in California. The shows spread across USC Fisher, Lacma, and the Getty Research Institute each focus on a distinct facet of Williams life, career and societal impact. Lacma tracks the overarching scope of his work. The Getty tackles how Williams helped construct core components of Black Los Angeles. USC Fisher showcases his archival drawings in conversation with pieces by contemporary artists and architects.

The trio of shows constitutes the first major retrospective of any Black architect in the United States. For Milton S F Curry, professor and senior associate dean at Cornell University, who helped curate the USC exhibition, the significance is clear. The work is worthy of entering into the canon of major architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier. As Curry puts it, they deserve to be in Williams company.

Shaping Los Angeles

Born in 1894, Williams knew he wanted to pursue architecture by high school. When he told a teacher, the response was dismissive: who ever heard of a Negro being an architect? Williams recalled that his personal ability weighed less in his teacher estimation than the burden of his color. Rather than deterring him, the comment became what Williams called an invitation to thought.

In the six decades before his death in 1980, Williams completed an estimated 3,000 projects. He designed single-family residences, commercial buildings, affordable housing projects, the Los Angeles county courthouse, and a reimagining of the now-razed Ambassador Hotel. His celebrity clients included Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. The Beverly Hills Hotel curlicued sign is in Williams own handwriting. He led the renovation that gave the hotel its iconic look.

Perhaps most famously, without Williams the Stahl House, the crown jewel of LA Case Study homes, might have never been funded. The Case Study program commissioned architects to build well-designed single-family homes to help address the postwar housing boom. Williams involvement was instrumental in making it happen. He also worked on the LAX Theme Building, the spindly space-age structure that greets every traveler flying into Los Angeles, in collaboration with William Pereira, Welton Becket and Charles Luckman.

Beyond Celebrity Homes

A stubborn myth has persisted that Williams only built single-family mansions for the stars. The retrospective aims to dismantle that misconception. Williams helped build one of the first public housing projects in the United States, Langston Terrace Dwellings. He advocated for multifamily housing projects and experimented with aluminum prototypes considered experimental at the time. He delivered affordable housing to an emerging Black middle class and to Black GIs during an era of racist redlining policies.

Curry was stunned by the quality of the architectural drawings when he first saw the trove now featured in the retrospective. The craft and quality of the work is extraordinary, he says. Clearly Williams had a deep knowledge of construction, constructability and material power. In an unusual turn for architects at the time, Williams worked across multiple genres simultaneously and bore a penchant for distinctive eclecticism, including a striking take on spiral staircases.

Williams graduated from the USC School of Architecture in 1919, making the university inclusion in the retrospective particularly resonant. The USC Fisher exhibition places his archival drawings in conversation with contemporary work, creating a dialogue across generations. The USC Fisher Museum of Art show opens August 18, with Lacma and the Getty Research Institute exhibitions following. More information about Williams architectural legacy is available through the Getty Research Institute Williams collection.

Williams career began in a Los Angeles that was expanding rapidly. The city population surged in the early 20th century, and housing construction charged ahead to meet demand. Williams first became a draftsperson, then applied for and won a series of grants that did not disclose his race. He began his own office and was hired to build homes in a burgeoning development, then by wealthy Angelenos including Cary Grant. He was known as someone who could deliver on his clients specifications and quirks without sacrificing quality. Sinatra, for instance, wanted a bachelor pad with a button that could roll his bed out from the bedroom onto the patio.

But reducing Williams to a celebrity architect misses the point. He worked across multiple genres simultaneously, from luxury residences to public housing to commercial buildings to institutional architecture. His eclecticism was not a lack of focus but a refusal to be pigeonholed. He came to be known for his striking take on spiral staircases, among other design signatures. The breadth of his output, estimated at 3,000 projects over six decades, is almost without parallel in American architecture. Curry notes that he does not know many starchitects today who would have that many projects.

Why This Retrospective Matters Now

The exhibitions arrive at a moment when architecture is reckoning with its own blind spots. Williams was not unknown in his lifetime, but his name has been a footnote within architecture history for decades. The reasons are familiar: institutional racism, the tendency to canonize white architects, the mythologizing of midcentury modernism as a white story. That Williams designed some of the most recognizable buildings in Los Angeles and still did not enter the canon tells you something about how the canon works.

Williams also navigated the practical realities of racism in ways that shaped his practice. He learned to draw upside down, so that white clients sitting across from him would not have to sit next to a Black man at the same table. He designed homes he was not allowed to live in, in neighborhoods where restrictive covenants barred Black residents. He built public housing for communities that discriminatory lending practices had excluded from homeownership. The fact that he persisted through all of this, and produced work of extraordinary quality, is itself a statement about what architecture can do in the face of systemic exclusion.

The retrospective also raises questions about preservation. Many of Williams buildings have been demolished or significantly altered. The Ambassador Hotel, which he reimagined, was razed. His affordable housing projects face ongoing threats from development and neglect. The retrospective may draw attention to the need to preserve what remains, and to document what has been lost. For more on how architecture intersects with cultural preservation, see our related guide on visual literacy.

Curry frames the retrospective as indicative of how far behind we are in understanding, recognizing, analyzing and theorizing about the legacy of Black contributions to the built environment. The shows are not just about giving Williams his due, though that is overdue. They are about rewriting a history that excluded him and asking what else we have missed. For a full overview of Williams career, the ARTnews architecture coverage provides additional context on how the retrospective fits into broader institutional efforts.

The first exhibition opens at USC Fisher Museum of Art on August 18. The Lacma and Getty Research Institute shows follow in the coming weeks. Anyone interested in American architecture, Los Angeles history, or the relationship between race and the built environment should see all three. They document a career that should have been documented decades ago, by an architect who designed the city most people think they know.

Early in his career, Williams first became a draftsperson, then applied for and won a series of grants that did not disclose his race. Around the time Williams entered the field, Los Angeles population surged and housing construction charged ahead at a steady clip to meet demand. Williams, who began his own office, was hired to build homes in a burgeoning development, and, later, by a bevy of wealthy Angelenos. He was known as someone who could deliver on his clients specifications and quirks without sacrificing quality. His talents extended far beyond celebrity projects, yet the myth that he only built mansions persisted. The retrospective challenges that myth directly, showing the full range of an architect who refused to be limited by what people expected of him.

The trio of Williams shows also constitute a precedent. No Black architect has ever been the subject of a major multi-institution retrospective in the United States. The fact that it took until 2026 for this to happen is itself an indictment of architectural historiography. But the shows also point forward, suggesting that the canon is not fixed and that the buildings we walk past every day may have stories we have not been told. For anyone interested in the relationship between race, architecture and American cities, the Williams retrospective is not just an exhibition. It is a correction.

The practical realities Williams navigated went beyond personal prejudice. He learned to draw upside down, so that white clients sitting across from him would not have to sit next to a Black man at the same table. He designed homes in neighborhoods where restrictive covenants barred Black residents from living. He built public housing for communities that discriminatory lending practices had excluded from homeownership. His persistence in the face of these obstacles, and the quality of what he produced despite them, makes the retrospective not just an architectural event but a historical reckoning.