Albert I. Cassell

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Albert I. Cassell
Cassell Albert.jpg
General Information
Birth
June 25, 1895
Towson, Maryland
Death
November 30, 1969
Washington, DC
Professional Accomplishments
Significant Design
Founders Library; Mayfair Garden

Biography

Albert Irvin Cassell was born in Towson, Maryland on June 25, 1895. Within a year of his birth, his family relocated to nearby Baltimore, where he grew up and attended segregated elementary and high schools. At fourteen years old, he demonstrated ambitious goals and began learning how to draft from Ralph Victor Cook, a teacher at Frederick Douglas High School, where Cassell completed a four-year carpentry program and graduated in 1914.

In the fall of 1915, Cassell further pursued architecture at Cornell University. Cook, himself a 1898 Cornell graduate, mentored Cassell as a young architect. While at Cornell, Cassell supported himself by singing in local churches. After completing two years there, Cassell’s studies were interrupted by his service in the US Army in World War I. He served in France, though not in combat, and he was honorably discharged as second lieutenant in the 351st Heavy Field Artillery Regiment in 1919. That same year he was awarded a degree from Cornell University.

After receiving this degree, Cassell joined William Augustus Hazel at the Tuskegee Institute (subsequently Tuskegee University) in Tuskegee, Alabama, where he helped design five buildings. Then in 1920 he went with Hazel to work on the Home Economics Building at Howard University in Washington, DC.

Howard University hired Cassell in 1920 as associate architect, construction supervisor, and instructor. He joined the department under Hazel’s leadership, then he succeeded Hazel in 1922. This was when Cassell was named university architect, and he began putting the university’s Master Plan (or “Twenty-Year Plan”) in place, developing the School of Engineering and Architecture as its own department at the university by 1934. During this time he also designed buildings around the university’s quadrangle. In doing so he gave the university a visual order and cohesiveness that’s still recognizable today. He spent eighteen years at Howard and worked as a professor, surveyor and land manager, and guide in the acquisition of properties adjacent to campus. After the Home Economics Building, he designed the gymnasium; heating plant; underground utility tunnels; field house; armory; College of Medicine; Truth, Frazier, and Crandall Residence Halls; Chemistry Building; Douglass Hall; Founder’s Library; and Greene Stadium. From 1930 to 1933, he led both the survey and construction of the campus’s heat, light, and power requirements.

His most notable architectural contribution at Howard University was the Founder’s Library. Built in 1937 in the Georgian Revival style, it is a significant architectural and educational symbol for the university. It sits on the hilltop campus. For many years, it remained the most visible element of Howard’s campus and captured the Georgian style of architecture that Cassell favored in his design. While at Howard as well as after his departure, Cassell served as architect and supervisor of dozens of buildings being constructed in Washington, DC and neighboring states. This work included buildings on other college campuses, such as women’s residence halls at Virginia Union University in Richmond (1928) as well as a men’s residence building at Morgan State College in Baltimore (1964).

Cassel also built Masonic temples, churches, a hospital, commercial buildings, and private residences. These works included Provident Hospital and Free Dispensary (1928), the Masonic Temple (1930), Odd Fellows Temples (1925 and 1932), Maryland School for Colored GIrls (1936), Soller’s Point War Housing Development in Baltimore (for black war workers and their families, 1942). He made alterations to Pilgrim African Methodist Church and St. Luke Episcopal Church Parish (both in Washington, DC. Later in his life, he joined two other black architects to form Cassell, Gray, and Sulton. His work with this firm included the US Army Installation at the former National International Airport, alterations to the Pentagon building (1964), the Washington Diocese of the Roman Catholic Church, several Protestant churches, and other municipal buildings in the District of Columbia.

In addition to Soller’s Point, Cassell designed several World War II public housing projects for African Americans. In Arlington, Virginia, Cassell designed and supervised the construction of George Washington Carver Public Housing. Built in 1942, several of the two-story apartment buildings are extant today. Empty of historic period details, the buildings are sited to create generous yards. Of Cassell’s three federally funded public housing projects, the James Creek project in southwest Washington, DC was the most expensive at $2 million. Sharing a stripped-down style with Carver Public Housing, the James Creek project was presented in a national architectural magazine as an example of well-designed public housing. Cassell, however, was the only architect who was not named, presumably because he was black.

Unlike these three federal housing projects, which were built without major obstacles, the housing projects Cassell conceived, designed, and owned did not go as well. The most well known is Mayfair Garden (also known as Mayfair Mansion), which was an early and rare example of a housing project for middle-class African Americans. Built during the war and finished in 1946, it is still used as housing today. Cassell, however,  was swindled out of majority ownership by his partner and was subpoenaed to testify before Congress concerning bribes paid to a Federal Housing Administration official to secure a federal loan guarantee. Despite this setback in his career (his membership in the American Institute of Architects was suspended), he persisted in trying to develop safe and affordable housing for African Americans. “Calverton” was never built because he could not secure needed subsidies from the US Department of Interior. He moved forward with Chesapeake Heights on the Bay, a 520-acre summer resort community for black people with 305 freestanding houses, a motel, shopping center, parking lots, pier, marina, beach, and clubhouse fronting on the Chesapeake Bay. He described it as a “dream of large and pleasant homes for men of all nations” in the sales brochure. He’d started purchasing land in the 1930s, building roads and several houses. But upon his death in 1969, the project ended. To conceive of bayside housing during the Great Depression, when there was not even access to primary housing, hints at his optimism, ambition, and self-assurance. Given the obstacles he faced, his many accomplishments (architectural and otherwise) are noteworthy.

By Dom Guida

Projects

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Listing

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