School History

Ninety Years of Architectural Education in Kansas
by Stephen Grabow

In the fall of 1913, Goldwin Goldsmith became the first Professor and Head of Architecture at the University of Kansas. The decision by the University to create a program in architecture originated in 1910 when Montrose McArdle, a prominent St. Louis architect, was hired by Chancellor Frank Strong to assist John Stanton, the State Architect, in designing a new Administration and College building in accordance with George Kessler’s master plan of 1904. (1) McArdle’s influence on the chancellor must have been significant because in 1912, at Strong’s request, the Kansas Board of Regents authorized the University to create an Architecture Program within the School of Engineering. Although McArdle, who had been appointed Professor and was expected to give a few public lectures on architecture while he worked on the design of the proposed new building, was offered the position to head up the new program by Dean Frank Marvin of the Engineering School, he returned to his practice in St. Louis. Upon Marvin’s retirement, his successor, Dean Perley Walker, was authorized by Chancellor Strong to conduct a national search. The University’s decision to fill this position was obviously a serious one because in 1912 Walker traveled east to New York City visiting schools in St. Louis, Champaign-Urbana, Ithaca and Boston before deciding upon Goldwin Goldsmith.
Goldsmith, a graduate of Columbia University, had been an apprentice of the legendary Stanford White in the New York office of McKim, Mead and White, one of the most prominent architectural firms in the country. After a year of postgraduate study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, Goldsmith started an architectural practice with Joseph Van Vleck in New York City in 1897. Although appointed by KU in the fall of 1913, Goldsmith delayed his arrival on campus until the end of the year in order to finish ongoing projects in the firm but also, and more significantly, to attend the second organizational meeting in Washington, D.C. of the heads of eight of the then twenty-six schools of architecture in the United States. (2) This group eventually became the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, or ACSA, of which KU became a member in 1920. Under Goldsmith, Kansas joined a select group of fifteen “accredited” schools of architecture, out of the forty that then existed in the nation. Goldsmith remained active in ACSA and became its President in 1927. His early leadership in ACSA served as a model. Since then, five other KU faculty have served on the ACSA Board of Directors, including a member of the current Board in 2003.
Because of his training and orientation, Goldsmith adopted the American version of the educational methods of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris in which all student design projects were juried in New York City with those of the students from M.I.T., Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Carnegie-Mellon, and Virginia. At that time, the reputation of a school became known by how well its students performed in these design competitions. In its first year of participation in the juries, 1917-1918, KU received twenty honors; in 1918-1919, forty honors; in 1919-1920, sixty-three honors; and by 1922, Kansas was listed among the top schools by the Beaux Arts Institute of Design.

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