Albert Cassell

Albert Irvin Cassell was born on the twenty-fifth of June 1895 at Towson, Maryland, the son of Albert Truman Cassell — a Baltimore County labourer — and Charlotte Cassell. He was raised in the Black community of the Baltimore County tobacco-farming belt and educated at the Baltimore Coloured High School.

He enrolled in 1915 at the Cornell University College of Architecture at Ithaca, New York — the same school from which Vertner W. Tandy (placed in this archive) had graduated seven years earlier — and completed the Bachelor of Architecture there in 1919.

He served the United States Army in the closing year of the European war and at the army of occupation of the Rhineland from 1918 to 1919 as a second lieutenant of the 351st Field Artillery, 92nd Infantry Division.

He was hired in 1919 by William A. Hazel at the Howard University Department of Architecture and rose by 1921 to head of the department. He took the additional appointment in 1921 of head of the Howard University Building and Construction Department, and was the principal architect of the Howard University campus for the following two decades from 1921 to 1938.

He designed the Howard University master plan of 1929 — the comprehensive plan of the principal Black research university in the United States across the inter-war expansion of the institution under President Mordecai Wyatt Johnson. He designed under the master plan over twenty principal buildings of the Howard campus — among them the Founders Library (1937), the Frederick Douglass Memorial Hall (1936), the Childers Hall of Fine Arts (1930), the Tubman Quadrangle Women’s Dormitories (1932), the Chemistry Building (1936), and the Cook Hall (1947).

He designed additionally the Mayfair Mansions Apartments at Washington, D.C. (1946) — the principal Black-occupied middle-class apartment complex of the post-war District — and the Masonic Hall at Washington, D.C. (1948).

He died at Washington on the thirtieth of November 1969 of a heart attack, at seventy-four.

He is honored here as the designer of the Howard University master plan.