Julian Abele and the Buildings He Could Not Enter
Near Raleigh Durham, North Carolina
The Gothic stone towers of Duke University's West Campus rise from a dense grove of oaks on the western edge of Durham. The chapel at the center of the quadrangle is among the finest examples of collegiate Gothic architecture in the United States. The library, the hospital, the law school, the stadium where Coach K built a dynasty, the medical school, the divinity school, the residential halls: all of it was designed by one man.
His name was Julian Francis Abele. He was born in Philadelphia in eighteen eighty-one. In nineteen oh two, at the age of twenty-one, he became the first Black person to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in architecture. He went on to study in Paris, then joined the Philadelphia firm of Horace Trumbauer, where he eventually rose to chief designer.
James Buchanan Duke hired Trumbauer's firm in nineteen twenty-four to design the West Campus. Abele did the work. More than thirty buildings on what is now called Abele Quad. The chapel cornerstone was laid in nineteen thirty. The building was formally dedicated in June nineteen thirty-five.
Julian Abele never visited the campus during construction. The buildings he designed in meticulous detail in a Philadelphia drafting room were located in the American South in the era of legal segregation. He could not enter them. His name did not appear on the buildings, on any plaque, or in any university publication that many graduates encountered during their time at Duke.
His role remained almost entirely unknown until the nineteen eighties, when Duke historians began documenting the archives. In two thousand sixteen, after student advocacy, the university renamed the main quadrangle Abele Quad in his honor.
Julian Abele died in Philadelphia in nineteen fifty. He had contributed to the design of more than four hundred buildings during his career, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Widener Library at Harvard, and thirty-plus buildings at a university in Durham, North Carolina, that he was never permitted to see.
