Julian Abele

Julian Francis Abele was born on the thirtieth of April 1881 in Philadelphia, the youngest of the eight children of Charles Abele and Mary Adelaide Jones Abele, herself a descendant of the abolitionist Reverend Absalom Jones, founder of the Free African Society. His was a family of accomplishment; among his elder siblings were an engineer, a physician, and a sign-maker, and he grew up amid the striving Black intellectual life of Philadelphia.

He studied at the Institute for Colored Youth and the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art before entering the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated in 1902 as the first African American to earn a degree from its department of architecture. With the sponsorship of the architect Horace Trumbauer, he then traveled through France and Italy, and the classical and Beaux-Arts vocabulary he absorbed abroad would shape his hand for the rest of his life.

In 1906 Abele joined the Trumbauer firm, and by 1909 he had risen to chief designer, the guiding artistic intelligence behind one of the nation's foremost practices for three decades. His drawings gave form to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Free Library of Philadelphia's central building, Harvard's Widener Library, and, above all, the soaring Gothic quadrangles and chapel of Duke University's West Campus.

For much of his life his authorship went unnamed, his genius folded quietly into another man's firm, and the segregation of his era kept him from freely visiting the very campus he had raised. Yet the stone endures, and with it his name. Julian Abele built beauty that outlived the prejudice arrayed against him; we honor the hand that drew it and the dignity that carried it.