Julian Abele

Julian Francis Abele was born on the thirtieth of April 1881 at Philadelphia, the eighth of eight children of Charles Sylvester Abele — a Philadelphia tailor — and Mary Adelaide Jones Abele, the niece of the abolitionist Robert Jones. The Abele household at 600 South Sixteenth Street was a Black middle-class household of the late Reconstruction Philadelphia, and three of his elder siblings were already established as artists or musicians at the time of his birth.

He was educated at the Quaker-run Institute for Coloured Youth at Philadelphia and at the Brown Preparatory School. He enrolled in 1898 at the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Arts in architectural drawing, and in 1899 at the University of Pennsylvania School of Architecture under Warren Powers Laird. He completed the Bachelor of Science in Architecture in 1902 as the first African American graduate of the University of Pennsylvania School of Architecture.

He took the École des Beaux-Arts at Paris in atelier under Victor Laloux from 1903 to 1906 on a Pennsylvania travelling fellowship.

He was hired in 1906 by Horace Trumbauer at the principal Philadelphia firm of the Gilded Age country-house architecture, and rose by 1909 to chief designer of the firm — the position he held until Trumbauer’s death in 1938, when Abele continued the firm under his own name until his own death in 1950. He was the chief designer of the firm for forty-four years.

He was the principal designer of the Philadelphia Museum of Art on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway (1928) — the Greek-revival temple-front structure of Fairmount Hill — and of the Duke University West Campus at Durham, North Carolina (1927–1932) — the principal collegiate-Gothic quadrangle of the American South, the construction of which his name did not appear on at his own insistence during the segregated Durham period.

He died at Philadelphia on the twenty-third of April 1950 of a heart attack at his Rittenhouse Square apartment, at sixty-eight.

He is honored here as the chief designer of the Duke West Campus.