Between 1924 and 1954, Julian Francis Abele designed the campus of Duke University — 38 Gothic buildings on the West Campus including Duke Chapel, Cameron Indoor Stadium, the university libraries, the hospital, the divinity school, and the residence halls that define one of the most architecturally distinguished university campuses in the United States. He did this work as the chief designer at the Philadelphia firm of Horace Trumbauer, under whose name all the architectural drawings were signed. He may never have visited the campus he designed, because Duke University did not admit Black students until 1962 and the Jim Crow South did not offer him accommodations when he attempted to travel there. The man who created Duke University could not have attended it. For most of the twentieth century, almost no one knew his name.
Julian Abele was born in Philadelphia in 1881 into a family with deep roots in Black civic life — his great-uncle Absalom Jones had co-founded the Free African Society with Richard Allen in 1787, one of the first mutual aid organizations for Black Americans in the United States. Abele showed extraordinary artistic talent early and was sponsored by Horace Trumbauer to study architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, where he became the school’s first Black graduate in 1902. Trumbauer then sent him to study in France and Italy for three years before he joined the firm in 1906. By 1909 he was its chief designer — the second-highest-paid employee, the creative force behind the firm’s most celebrated commissions. He designed Widener Memorial Library at Harvard, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Free Library of Philadelphia, and Gilded Age mansions for some of the wealthiest families in America. His peers recognized his talent — the director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art called him “one of the most sensitive designers in America.” The American Institute of Architects did not admit him until 1942, forty years into his career.
Abele’s connection to Duke began when James B. Duke hired the Trumbauer firm to design his Fifth Avenue mansion in New York City. Duke was impressed. When he established the Duke Endowment in 1924 and began transforming Trinity College into Duke University, he brought the Trumbauer firm — and therefore Julian Abele — to design the new campus. What Abele created was, in the words of the novelist Aldous Huxley who drove past it in 1937 without knowing who had designed it, “the most successful essay in neo-Gothic that I know.” The 210-foot tower of Duke Chapel is visible for miles. The quadrangles, the cloisters, the carved stone details, the spatial relationships between buildings — all of it reflects Abele’s design intelligence applied over three decades to a single coherent vision. He described his life as “living in the shadows.” The shadows he cast in Durham, North Carolina are made of Indiana limestone and have stood for nearly a century.
The story of how Abele’s name became known is itself a Two Americas story. In 1986, Duke students protesting the university’s investments in apartheid South Africa built shanties in front of the Chapel. A student wrote to the campus newspaper complaining that the shanties violated “our rights as students to a beautiful campus.” Susan Cook — a Duke sophomore and Abele’s great-grandniece — wrote back. She noted that her great-granduncle had designed that beautiful campus, that he was a Black man who had lived under American apartheid, and that he would not have objected to the protest. This letter was the first time most of Duke’s students, faculty, and administrators had heard the name Julian Abele. The university had been built by a Black architect and had not mentioned his name for over sixty years.
Recognition came slowly and then more completely. In 1987 the Black Graduate and Professional Student Association began the annual Julian Abele Awards. In 1988 the first portrait of a Black person was hung in Duke’s Allen Building — it was a portrait of Abele, commissioned by students. In 2016 — sixty-six years after his death — Duke renamed the main quadrangle of West Campus Abele Quad. The dedication plaque was placed at the busiest point on campus. Abele’s great-grand nephew Peter Cook, who became an architect himself, served on the design team for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. The architectural tradition Abele carried continued in his family. The campus he designed in the shadows continues to stand in the light.