The Legacy of the First Licensed Black Architect in Texas Lives Here

Several years before Rosa Parks made national news for an act that sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott and just two years before the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, John S. Chase graduated from the University of Texas School of Architecture with a degree that came with zero guarantees.

One of the first Black graduate students to enroll at University of Texas at Austin (just two days after the Supreme Court decision in Sweatt v. Painter forced the school to integrate its graduate programs), and the first African American to graduate from its School of Architecture, Chase was stonewalled from internships at the predominately white architecture firms in Houston, where he and his wife, Drucie, relocated after his 1952 graduation. So he took matters into his own hands, petitioning the state for permission to take the licensing exam. In 1954, Chase became the first registered African-American architect in Texas, and by 1959, he ran his own firm. That same year, he completed the construction of a seminal, but fairly little-known work: a low-slung, brick-clad house for his family in Houston’s Oakmere neighborhood.

In John S. Chase—The Chase Residence (University of Texas Press, 2020), architect and University of Texas professor David Heymann and historian and Rice University lecturer Stephen Fox take a magnifying glass to Chase’s trailblazing career, providing context to the history of Black architecture in the American South. They also explore how Chase impacted modernism through the design of his 1959 family residence—a courtyard home inspired by the style of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe that pushed architectural boundaries in Texas and beyond.

"The low-slung brick house that architect John Saunders Chase completed for his own family in 1959 was Houston’s first modernist house with a true interior courtyard," writes Heymann.

The home’s public spaces were set around a large, partially shaded outdoor courtyard that served as the primary connection between the rooms (though there was a narrow interior passage along one side). While other progressive modern architects of the era were beginning to experiment with the residential courtyard, few used the courtyard as Chase did at his residence—a centralized outdoor room binding the house together. In the book, Heymann writes: 

The social courtyard enclosed on four sides, as in the Chase design, first appeared regularly in American modern architecture in California in the early 1950s. It was an improvement to the compact houses the developer Joseph Eichler had begun building in the Bay Area.... Yet, it’s important to understand the profound architectural difference. In any early Eichler atrium home, you invariably enter the courtyard first, proceeding across it to the inside entry door. Most of the rooms lining an Eichler atrium are service spaces or private rooms: those courtyards serve primarily as light wells. The whole sequence is imagined as a threshold, cleverly shortening the apparent distance to the backyard—considered by Eichler to be the vital family space in California. 

The courtyard in the Chase Residence provides daylight, but it isn’t a threshold. It’s the important place you come to once you’ve entered the interior, the mysterious center of the house, its own room, the extension of all the public rooms surrounding it, and a window to the sky. It’s a proper atrium: an old, even ancient, idea that appeared radical in the modern era, and certainly radical in Houston in 1959.

By the late 1960s, the architect and his wife had three children, and were deeply involved in the Houston community, often hosting social, community, and political events that were frequented by local Democratic politicians and civil rights activists. In 1968, Chase decided to renovate the house, enclosing the courtyard as a two-story interior great room. He also added decorative interior and exterior details that shifted the building’s look away from the minimalist aesthetics of high modernism. 

Among other achievements over the course of his career from the 1950s to the late 1990s, Chase helped found the National Organization of Minority Architects in 1971. John S. Chase—The Chase Residence details the trailblazing architect’s inspirational professional story, and examines the "personal, social, and architectural" significance of the Houston home he turned into a centerpiece for his larger body of work.

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