Thomas M. Price

Last updated

Thomas M. Price (March 17, 1916 November 6, 1998) is an American architect who has been called "Galveston's foremost modern architect" by historian and Rice University faculty member Stephen Fox, an Adjunct Lecturer of the School of Architecture. Price's portfolio of designs encompass a diverse variety of building types. Almost all of the buildings that were built from his designs are located in southeastern United States.

Contents

Early life and education

Price was born in Blacksburg, Virginia, on March 17, 1916. Price attended the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, from which he received his bachelor's degree in 1938. [1] He received his master's degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1941. While at Harvard he studied under modern masters like Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius.

Career

Galveston

Price was primarily active from the 1950s to the late 1970s, designing private residences, hotels, motels, schools, a social club, a beach house and commercial buildings. His preference for trimly-detailed buildings with walls treated as planes of glass or solidly paneled surfaces is evident in many of the buildings he designed in Galveston. These include the Seahorse Motel (1956, now demolished) and the Beachcomber Motel (1963) on Seawall Boulevard, the Galveston Artillery Club (1959) on Avenue O, the gymnasium of Gladneo Parker Elementary School (1960) on 69th Street, and his largest project that he worked on in the city, the 10-story Sealy & Smith Professional Building (1964, demolished in 2007) on University Boulevard. Price designed several of the most distinctive modern houses built in Galveston, among them the Caravageli House (1954) on Caduceus Place, the Stirling House on South Shore Drive (1956), the Mehos House on Harbor View Drive (1958), the Yen House on Marine Drive (1959), and the Kelso Camp on Offatts Bayou (1963). Price was involved in early efforts to preserve Galveston's 19th-century architectural heritage. He was responsible for two pioneer preservation planning studies prepared for the city: Galveston, Texas: Historical District Guide (1970) and Historical Development Plan for Galveston, Texas (1973).

Other cities

Outside Galveston, Price designed the Lasher House (1956) in the Memorial section of Houston, Texas, which has been renovated and restored by Ray Bailey architects and the Bauer House outside Port Lavaca, Texas (1958). Including Houston, he designed banks in Alvin, Bay City, Freeport, Hitchcock, and Webster, Texas, in the 1960s. He also designed hotels in Asheville, North Carolina, Biloxi, Mississippi, Marathon, Florida, and San Francisco, California (most affiliated with the Jack Tar chain) around the same time.

Retirement and death

Thomas M. Price retired to 320 W. Burbank St. in Fredericksburg, Texas, where he designed the Nimitz Museum. He died on November 6, 1998, at the age of 82. Price's house designs are among the most distinctive in Galveston, and are listed in the Galveston Architectural Guide.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edward Durell Stone</span> American architect (1902–1978)

Edward Durell Stone was an American architect known for the formal, highly decorative buildings he designed in the 1950s and 1960s. His works include the Museum of Modern Art, in New York City, the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Ponce, Puerto Rico, the United States Embassy in New Delhi, India, The Keller Center at the University of Chicago, and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Morris Lapidus</span> American architect

Morris Lapidus was an architect, primarily known for his Neo-baroque "Miami Modern" hotels constructed in the 1950s and 60s, which have since come to define that era's resort-hotel style, synonymous with Miami and Miami Beach.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Googie architecture</span> Mid-20th-century American futurist architectural style

Googie architecture is a type of futurist architecture influenced by car culture, jets, the Atomic Age and the Space Age. It originated in Southern California from the Streamline Moderne architecture of the 1930s, and was popular in the United States from roughly 1945 to the early 1970s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Streamline Moderne</span> Late type of the Art Deco architecture and design

Streamline Moderne is an international style of Art Deco architecture and design that emerged in the 1930s. Inspired by aerodynamic design, it emphasized curving forms, long horizontal lines, and sometimes nautical elements. In industrial design, it was used in railroad locomotives, telephones, toasters, buses, appliances, and other devices to give the impression of sleekness and modernity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Miami Modern architecture</span> Modernist architectural style in South Florida

Miami Modernist architecture, or MiMo, is a regional style of architecture that developed in South Florida during the post-war period. The style was internationally recognized as a regionalist response to the International Style. It can be seen in most of the larger Miami and Miami Beach resorts built after the Great Depression. Because MiMo styling was not just a response to international architectural movements but also to client demands, themes of glamour, fun, and material excess were added to otherwise stark, minimalist, and efficient styles of the era. The style can be most observed today in Middle and Upper Miami Beach along Collins Avenue, as well as along the Biscayne Boulevard corridor starting from around Midtown, through the Design District and into the Upper Eastside.

Emerson Stewart Williams, FAIA was a prolific Palm Springs, California-based architect whose distinctive modernist buildings, in the Mid-century modern style, significantly shaped the Coachella Valley's architectural landscape and legacy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Trost & Trost</span> Architectural firm based in El Paso, Texas

Trost & Trost Architects & Engineers, often known as Trost & Trost, was an architectural firm based in El Paso, Texas. The firm's chief designer was Henry Charles Trost, who was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1860. Trost moved from Chicago to Tucson, Arizona in 1899 and to El Paso in 1903. He partnered with Robert Rust to form Trost & Rust. Rust died in 1905 and later that year Trost formed the firm of Trost & Trost with his twin brother Gustavus Adolphus Trost, also an architect, who had joined the firm as a structural engineer. Between 1903 and Henry Trost's death on September 19, 1933, the firm designed hundreds of buildings in the El Paso area and in other Southwestern cities, including Albuquerque, Phoenix, Tucson, and San Angelo.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nicholas J. Clayton</span> Irish-American architect (1839 – 1916)

Nicholas Joseph Clayton was a prominent Victorian era architect in Galveston, Texas.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alfred C. Finn</span> American architect

Alfred Charles Finn was an American architect. He started in the profession with no formal training in 1904 as an apprentice for Sanguinet & Staats. He worked in their offices in Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston. His credits during his tenure residential structures, but firm was a leader in steel-frame construction of skyscrapers.

Armet Davis Newlove Architects, formerly Armét & Davis, is a Californian architectural firm known for working in the Googie architecture style that marks many distinctive coffee shops and eateries in Southern California. The firm designed Pann's, the first Norms Restaurants location, the Holiday Bowl and many other iconic locations.

Jack Tar Hotels was an international hotel chain based in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Lightfoot Price</span> American architect

William Lightfoot Price was an American architect, a pioneer in the use of reinforced concrete, and a founder of the utopian communities of Arden, Delaware and Rose Valley, Pennsylvania.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alamo Plaza Hotel Courts</span>

The Alamo Plaza Hotel Courts brand was the first motel chain in the United States, founded by Edgar Lee Torrance in Waco, Texas, in 1929. By 1955, there were more than twenty Alamo Plazas across the southeastern U.S., most controlled by a loosely knit group of a half-dozen investors and operating using common branding or architecture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eugene T. Heiner</span> American architect

Eugene Thomas Heiner was an American architect who designed numerous courthouses, county jails, and other public buildings in Texas. He was born in New York City, apprenticed in Chicago, and studied further in Germany. His works includes buildings listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.

Howard Barnstone was a Houston-based American architect. He was best known for his work with Mark Rothko on the Rothko Chapel, and for the houses and public buildings he designed with Preston M. Bolton and Gene Aubry in the 1950s and 1960s, largely in Houston and Galveston. Barnstone attended Yale College and the Yale School of Architecture, from which he received a Bachelor of Architecture in 1948. He was a professor at the University of Houston College of Architecture and Design for more than thirty years. From 1952 to 1961, Barnstone was a partner in Bolton & Barnstone, one of Houston´s most public modern architectural firms at the time; the firm became Barnstone and Aubry (1966-1970) after he partnered with Aubry, his former student. Architectural historian Stephen Fox characterized Barnstone's approach as one committed to personal vision, free inquiry, and delight over orthodoxy or conventional wisdom, resulting in diverse buildings that combined proportional grace with wit and charm, and diminutive scale with spatial expansiveness.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Krisel</span> American architect

William Krisel was an American architect best known for his pioneering designs of mid-century residential and commercial architecture. Most of his designs are for affordable homes, especially tract housing, with a modern aesthetic.

Albert Charles Ledner was an American architect, known for his organic and modernist style of architecture. Among his designs are three buildings for the National Maritime Union, located in New York City, originally commissioned in 1958 and built between 1964 and 1968. He also designed approximately 40 homes in the New Orleans metropolitan area and various other projects for the National Maritime Union.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gene Aubry</span> American architect

Eugene Edwards Aubry is an American architect, based primarily in Houston, Texas and later in Orlando, Florida. He is best known for the public buildings and houses he designed and co-designed in Houston, notably the Rice Museum at Rice University and the Alfred C. Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Art Houston, the Rothko Chapel, and Wortham Center. Architecture writers credit the Art Barn's industrial aesthetic with inspiring Houston's so-called "Tin House" movement, as well adaptations by Frank Gehry. Aubry was partners with two other well-known Houston architects, Howard Barnstone and S.I. Morris, and worked on projects with Philip Johnson before starting his own firm, Aubry Architects in Sarasota, Florida in 1986. He completed the Rothko Chapel after artist Mark Rothko clashed with Johnson, who was the original architect.

Anton F. Korn was an American architect based in Texas, known mostly for his residences. A large number of the works are in Dallas and in the Dallas enclave Highland Park, Texas. A number of his works are listed on the National Register of Historic Places for their architecture, and two or three on Galveston Island are even included in a National Historic Landmark district.

B. Robert Swartburg was an American architect working in New York and Florida primarily known for his Modern and Streamline Moderne architectural style. He was one of the leading modernist architects in South Florida contributing greatly to the development of MiMo Modern style in the post- WWII 40s and 50's. In his 35-year career he is said to have designed over 1000 buildings. Swartburg was also an accomplished artist who painted for pleasure, and executed murals and sculptures to embellish his buildings.

References