William Wayne Caudill, FAIA

Year Awarded: 1985
Born: May 25, 1914; Hobart, Oklahoma, USA
Died: 1983

Quote
Lean and clean. —the phrase Caudill often used to describe CRS's buildings


Projects
• 1973: Fodrea Community School, Columbus, Ohio
• 1970: Cypress Junior College, Cypress, Calif.
• 1965: Larsen Hall, Graduate School of Education, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
• 1961: Laboratory wing of Colorado College's Olin Hall of Science
• 1955: Belaire Elementary School, San Angelo, Tex.
• 1955: Central High School, San Angelo, Tex.
• St. Joseph's Academy, Brownsville, Texas
• Public School 219, the “dome school,” Flushing Queens, N.Y.


Biography
William Caudill earned a BArch from Oklahoma State University in 1937. He followed that with a master’s degree at MIT in 1939. From 1939 to 1942, Caudill taught architecture at Texas A&M, but then joined the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, where he served from 1942 to 1944. In 1944 he joined the U.S. navy and served in the military until 1946.

After leaving the service, he returned to Texas A&M, where he taught until 1949. There he helped to establish the Texas Engineering Experiment Station, the engineering research agency of the State of Texas and a member of The Texas A&M University System. His work there on optimizing natural ventilation and daylighting in school buildings became a cornerstone of Caudill Rowlett, the practice he began with John Miles Rowlett in 1946.

In 1947 Caudill and Rowlett moved their practice to College Station; in 1948 Wallie Scott, a former student of theirs, joined as a partner, and they reorganized as Caudill Rowlett Scott (CRS). William Peña, another student of Caudill and Rowlett, also joined as a partner, but asked them to not change the firm’s name.

In 1948 the CRS was awarded the commission to design an elementary school in Blackwell, Okla. The Blackwell school project launched considerable change in how schools were designed in the United States and helped established CRS’s reputation as an important schoolhouse designer. In 1950 CRS opened branch offices in New York and Hartford, Conn., and in 1952 a regional office in Oklahoma City. In 1957, CRS became one of the first architecture firms to incorporate, and they opened another office in Corning, N.Y. In 1958, the firm moved its main office to Houston, becoming the city’s largest architecture firm with seven partners. By the end of the 1950s, CRS has become an important nationwide practice. During the 1960s and 1970s, CRS expanded its projects to include higher education and hospital design and began working overseas in Saudi Arabia.

Between 1961 and 1969, Caudill served as the director of Rice University’s School of Architecture. From 1969-1971, he was Rice’s William Ward Watkin professor of architecture. While in that role, he developed an intern program, a visiting-critic program, and a publication series called Architecture at Rice. In addition, he wrote or cowrote 12 books, including the influential Space for Teaching and Architecture by Team.

William Wayne Caudill is both the first Oklahoma-born and -educated architect as well as an the first Texan to win the AIA Gold Medal. In addition, the AIA conferred its Architecture Firm Award on CRS in 1972. He and the firm won many other awards and recognitions over the years, including the 1978 Gold Medal Rope from the Sigma Delta Fraternity, Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture.

In 1966 to 1968, Caudill was a member of the Advisory Committee on New Educational Media of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. He served on the Advisory Panel on Architectural Services of the General Services Administration from 1966 to 1969 and was an architectural consultant to the Department of State on foreign buildings 1974–1977. He was a member of the U.S. Energy Research and Development Ad-Hoc Commission. He was a member of the board of directors of Herman Miller Inc. and in 1969 an initial member of the Academy of Texas.

Caudill joined the AIA in 1946, served on the AIA board of directors, and in 1962 was elected to the AIA Fellowship.

Caudill was a strong believer in sharing knowledge and ideas across architecture practices. He was a teacher and a communicator, and he advocated architectural research and publication, sharing information with both clients and competitors to encourage the architectural disciplines to grow. With this perspective, he was a leader in the industry.

He was also an innovator in how professional architecture practices should be organized and operated. He believed that architectural design was more effectively developed by interdisciplinary teams than by individual designers, especially in complex building programs. CRS reflected this belief as it grew into one of the largest architecture and engineering firms in the United States.