Hilyard Robinson

Hilyard Robert Robinson was born on the seventh of August 1899 at Washington, D.C., the son of George T. Robinson — a postal clerk of the United States Government Printing Office — and Lillian Robinson. He was raised in the Black professional Washington of the Reconstruction period and educated at the M Street High School — the academic-preparatory branch of the Washington Coloured Public Schools.

He served the United States Army from 1917 to 1919 in the 92nd Infantry Division at the western front of the European war.

He returned to Washington and enrolled in 1920 at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Arts at Philadelphia, completing the course in 1922. He transferred to the Columbia University School of Architecture at New York for the Bachelor of Architecture in 1924 and the Master of Architecture in 1931, under William A. Boring and Burgess Williams.

He took graduate study at the Berlin Bauhochschule and the Hochschule für Bildende Künste at Berlin in 1931 — under the post-Werkbund modernism of the Weimar German architectural curriculum.

He returned to Washington in 1932 and was appointed in 1933 to the Howard University Department of Architecture, where he taught for the following thirty years until 1963.

He was named in 1935 the principal architect — over a consortium of associates including Paul R. Williams (placed in this archive) — of the Langston Terrace Dwellings at the Carver Terrace tract of the Kingman Park neighbourhood of Northeast Washington. The Dwellings were the first federally funded public housing project of the United States, constructed under the Public Works Administration housing programme of 1933 to 1937, and completed on the seventh of May 1938.

The Langston Terrace plan integrated the four-story rectangular blocks of the German Bauhaus housing programme with the courtyard organisation of the Italian Renaissance — and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1987.

He designed additionally the Tuskegee Army Air Field at Tuskegee (1941), the master plan of the Tuskegee Veterans Administration Hospital expansion (1947), and the Ralph Bunche Recreation Center at Washington (1962).

He died at Washington on the fourteenth of November 1986, at eighty-seven.

He is honored here as the principal architect of Langston Terrace.