David Reichard Williams (1890-1962) is perhaps best remembered as the leading proponent of the regionalist movement among Texas architects during the late 1920s and 1930s, although he also made enormous contributions as an administrator of public programs during the Depression and World War II.

Born in the prairie community of Childress in 1890, Williams had early interests in art and photography that led him to seek a career in architecture. In the first of many adventures, Williams abruptly left UT in 1916 and traveled to Mexico (the country was then undergoing a revolution) to work for American oil companies. Williams then traveled to Europe for a two-year tour, but the stay failed to inspire him to adopt the eclectic models then in vogue. Rather, upon his return to Dallas in 1923, he began to explore the vernacular (he called it “indigenous”) architectural vocabulary of Texas as the basis of his own unique style.

Williams was actively involved with a group of artists and artisans, including Jerry Bywaters, Tom Stell and Lynn Ford, who were then exploring the ideology of regionalism. This intellectual movement found a forum for its ideas in the pages of The Southwest Review, for which Williams served as associate editor in 1927. Williams' now-legendary travels across the state in search of a vocabulary of forms unique to Texas culminated in a series of articles in The Southwest Review. In them he argued that a true Southwestern style could evolve only through the study--not the slavish imitation--of the state's own regional building patterns.

Williams' extensive travels through Texas provided him with a wealth of images from which to draw inspiration--not unlike the pattern books available to architects working in the fashionable revival modes. The F.N. Drane House in Corsicana (1929), one of Williams' earliest houses, has strong horizontal lines tying it to the ground, and it contains a complex series of cloistered spaces with open courtyards and loggias, reminiscent of Mexican architecture. Subsequent designs became increasingly simplified as Williams incorporated elements of vernacular architecture and native materials in his houses, for example for F.B. McKie (1929) and Warner Clark (1930), both in Dallas. The Elbert Williams House (1932) combines the regional response to climatic conditions--informal plan oriented toward the prevailing breezes, shaded porches and patios, shuttered windows, ample fireplaces, and a standing-seam roof--with a specifically Texan iconography in its decoration, furnishings and an articulation of space.

Williams' entrance into public service in 1933 allowed him to apply his ideas of a regional response to design on a much broader scale and with greater social significance. During the next three years, Williams planned and organized new rural communities across the country for the Federal Relief Administration, including the Matanuska Valley project in Alaska and the Woodlake community outside Houston. Williams was appointed the Director of the Division of Works Projects for the National Youth Administration in 1936, eventually being named Deputy Executive Director of the entire organization. Although his project for La Villita in San Antonio is well-known, his other projects included such diverse educational opportunities for youth as the All American Youth Orchestra. As the nation's attention turned to the defense industry, Williams' genius at problem-solving was demonstrated in his designs for on-site prefabricated housing at Avion Village in Grand Prairie (1940-1941), with Richard Neutra and Roscoe DeWitt, as well as his innovative “demountable housing” at Multimax in Beaumont (1941).

Williams was assigned to the Institute of Inter-American Affairs in 1942, providing a broad range of technical assistance in Latin America, such as building roads, establishing health programs, and developing postwar rehabilitation plans. Injuries from a 1944 plane crash forced him to return to the United States although he later worked in Venezuela from 1947-1948, implementing rural and industrial development programs. Williams retired in 1952 to Lafayette, La., where he continued to study indigenous housing. It was during his travels in the South that he discovered Louis Sullivan's library in Biloxi, Miss., in 1954, thus ensuring its future preservation in the AIA's collections in Washington D.C.

Dave Williams had a profound effect upon architecture in Texas as well as the implementation of public policy on a national level. His designs have continued to inspire the architects of [Texas] and his photographs of [its] vernacular architecture captured images of [the] past that would otherwise have vanished.

-Lila Knight

From: “Texas 50.” Texas Architect (Nov./Dec. 1989), p 78.