Book Description

This is the first work to document the life and career of Dallas architect Mark Lemmon, a pre-eminent American historicist. It is an illustrated testament to Lemmon's ideas of architectural civility, solidity, and classicism--considered retrograde by many architectural historians, though taking on a renewed relevance after the post-modernist revisionism of the 1970s. Having completed his architectural education at MIT and a tour of duty as a military engineer in Europe during World War I, Lemmon, a Texas native, moved to Dallas and began a distinguished career spanning forty years from the 1920s to the 1960s. Lemmon's greatest contributions to Texas architecture were his designs for educational and religious institutions. His most important clients were the Dallas Independent School District, Southern Methodist University (for which he designed eighteen Georgian style buildings), the Port Arthur School District, and the University of Texas at Austin. In styles that vary from Romanesque to Moderne, these buildings define their neighborhoods and place their users in a system of civilized architectural allusions that raises the level of urban culture. Few Texas architects matched the range of Lemmon's ecclesiastical architecture. His master works include Highland Park United Methodist Church (1927), Third Church of Christ, Scientist (1930), and Highland Park Presbyterian Church (1939). His other projects include the Cotton Bowl, the Museum of Natural History, the Hall of State, the Art Deco Great Hall, and the Hall of Heroes--all at Dallas's Fair Park. The volume contains an essay by Richard R. Brettell placing Lemmon as historicist in the context of a modernist century, as well as a critical biography of the architect by Willis Cecil Winters with a chronological list of buildings and projects by the team of DeWitt and Lemmon (1921-1926) and later by Mark Lemmon (1926-1964).