“Start small … Build a small house now, one that is a complete and attractive unit in itself, but has a floor plan designed to take more rooms as needed or as your budget increases … But be sure your plan will give you a pleasing house inside and out …

Williams predicts that the “old-fashioned” living room will disappear in modern American homes. Living rooms will become “informal recreation and leisure rooms that open on a backyard garden.” (Ebony, March 1949)

This Williams’ floorplan for a 1960s development illustrates the informal recreation/leisure room he describes in the Ebony article.

The Oracle, September 1949
America’s Top Architect: Author of “I Am a Negro” Sees Better Race Relations, Has Plans for Homes to Cost Less Than $5,000 Each

“The designer is of the opinion there is only one kind of property restriction and that is the one which protects a community against inferior design or construction. And Brother Williams is active in the fight against all the other types of residential restrictions.”

The cover of the September issue of The Oracle features Paul R. Williams. This magazine is devoted to the Omega Psi Phi, a prestigious African American fraternity. This is not the first time that Williams is the subject of an article about members of the fraternity.

Philip Johnson, an important 20th century architect known for his designs and philosophy, influences the course of American architecture. Collaborating with Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Johnson writes the celebrated exhibition catalog: The International Style: Architecture Since 1922 (1932). Hitchcock and Johnson are the first to describe and popularize the style.

A student of Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer at Harvard’s School of Design, Johnson begins designing his Connecticut residence after graduating in 1943. The Glass House is completed in 1949 and is an immediate sensation. The house is a simple rectangular structure built of 18-feet-wide, floor-to-ceiling, plate-glass sheets secured between black steel piers. It is considered a key postwar building. Built as a single room with a brick mass containing the fireplace and bathroom, the interior is open with cabinents and bookshelves serving as room dividers.

The Glass House is added to the National Register of Historic Places as the “epitome of modernism, its simplicity and purity of form unparalleled in domestic architecture.” Philip Johnson describes his home and the surrounding complex as “the diary of an eccentric architect,” a material record of his evolving architectectural philosophy.