Wendell Campbell

Wendell Jerome Campbell was born on the twenty-seventh of April 1927 in East Chicago, Indiana, the fourth of six children. He came of age in a building family: his father was a carpenter and contractor — remembered as among the first Black general contractors of the region — and as a boy Wendell worked at his side, learning the feel of timber and joinery long before he learned to draw a plan. That early apprenticeship in the making of things would shape a lifetime given to the built world.

After completing high school in 1945 he served in the United States Army during the Second World War, rising to master sergeant in a unit that designed roads and bridges, stationed for fourteen months in Japan. Returning home, he studied architecture and city planning at the Illinois Institute of Technology on the GI Bill, learning under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Ludwig Hilberseimer, and graduated in 1957. Facing the racial barriers of his era, he opened his own practice in 1966.

In 1971 Campbell co-founded the National Organization of Minority Architects and became its first president — a body built to open the profession's closed doors to those who had long been shut out. His firm shaped hundreds of projects, among them work tied to McCormick Place and civic and cultural landmarks across Chicago. The American Institute of Architects honored him with the Whitney M. Young Jr. Medal and named him a Fellow in 1979.

Wendell Campbell died on the ninth of July 2008 at the age of eighty-one. He built not only structures but a wider gate through which others could pass, and the profession he opened remembers him still.