Wendell Campbell

Wendell Jerome Campbell was born on the third of February 1927 at East Chicago, Indiana, the son of John Wesley Campbell — a steelworker at the Inland Steel Indiana Harbor Works — and Eva Campbell. He was raised in the Black working-class East Chicago of the Calumet steel belt and educated at the Roosevelt High School at East Chicago.

He served the United States Navy from 1944 to 1946 as a steward’s mate, returning to East Chicago on the closing of the Pacific war.

He enrolled in 1947 on the G.I. Bill at the Illinois Institute of Technology under Mies van der Rohe — the founder of the Bauhaus and the founding director of the IIT architecture department — and completed the Bachelor of Architecture there in 1956. He took graduate study at the IIT architecture department from 1956 to 1958.

He was hired in 1956 by C.F. Murphy Associates at Chicago — the principal Chicago commercial firm of the period — and served the firm for eight years until 1964.

He co-founded in 1971 with Howard H. Mackey Sr. (placed in this archive), John S. Chase (placed in this archive), Robert J. Nash, Harold L. Williams and seven others the National Organization of Minority Architects at the American Institute of Architects national convention at Detroit on the seventh of October 1971 — the first sustained national professional organization of African American architects in the United States. He served as the founding president of the organization for two years from 1971 to 1973.

He opened his own practice — Campbell Wendell Associates Architects, subsequently Campbell Tiu Campbell — at Chicago in 1974 and served the Chicago Black community from the practice for the following thirty years.

He designed the Pullman Bank and Trust Company headquarters at the Bronzeville district of Chicago (1973), the Black Expo pavilions on Navy Pier (1972), the Bessie Coleman Branch of the Chicago Public Library (1981), and the Soldier Field renovation studies for the Chicago Park District (1995).

He died at Chicago on the twenty-ninth of January 2008, at eighty.

He is honored here as the founding president of the National Organization of Minority Architects.