Arts and Letters

Ralph Walker, architect, artist, author, soldier, and world traveler, must have read early in his life the words of Vitruvius who, in the reign of the Roman Emperor Augustus, wrote:

Architects who have aimed at acquiring manual skill without scholarship have never been able to reach a position of authority to correspond to their pains…. Let them be educated, skillful with the pencil, instructed in geometry, understand music, have some knowledge of medicine, know the opinion of jurists, and be acquainted with astronomy and the theory of the heavens.

Ralph Walker prepared himself for his profession through careful and meticulous study and became one of the most distinguished architects of his generation. His classic training is exemplified in all of his buildings and memorials. Whereas he was not an eclectic, his distinctive designs were clothed with a beauty of form and detail marked with the aura of his individuality. He had a great respect for one of the most notable architects of the generation before him, Paul Phillipe Cret (1876-1945), a member of the Institute-Academy, when, in 1938, he wrote of him:

He is not a copyist. His work is remarkable for three things—good planning, individuality, and good proportions. There are no loose ends. The character of each building is complete to itself. They may be reminiscent, but they are dominantly the work of Paul Cret.

Now, three and a half decades later, these words that Ralph Walker wrote about Cret are equally applicable to him. He abhorred bizarre forms and the queer contraptions we see about us today and he deplored the tendency that has marked the development of American architecture over the period of the past three or more decades, admirably expressed by a former president of the Royal Academy: "American architecture has become the recognized Gehenna of undisciplined experiments for buildings which bear the same stamp. The result can be seen in the monotonous repetition of cellular facades cloaked with vitreous indifference."

Ralph Walker began his training in architecture by working as an apprentice-draughtsman in the office of Hilton and Jackson of Providence, Rhode Island, before entering the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from which he graduated in 1911. He served as an officer with the 2nd Division overseas in the First World War and subsequently worked in the office of the late Bertram G. Goodhue, a member of the Institute, before joining a firm of architects that was organized in 1885 by Cyrus L. W. Eidlitz. He soon became a partner in this firm, then known as Voorhees, Gmelin, and Walker (1926); in 1938 it became known as Voorhees, Walker, Foley, and Smith.

Ralph Walker was principally responsible for the design of a large number of important buildings undertaken by his firm, the most distinguished among them being: the Barclay-Vesey Building of the New York Telephone Company and the Irving Trust Company, both in downtown New York. Of the former, Louis Mumford, in 1927, wrote:

…its distinguished silhouette, its genial decoration and, above all, its general vitality of conception, which casts off Gothic pinnacles, Romanesque entrances, or classic peristyles and faces the world in naked forms of its own day and place.

Ralph Walker also designed the Bell Telephone Laboratories (1939) in Murray Hill, New Jersey, the International Business Machine Laboratories in Poughkeepsie, New York (1952), the General Foods Office Building in White Plains, New York, and the A.F.L.-C.I.O. Headquarters on 16th Street, next to St. John's Church in Washington, D. C.; it is interesting to observe that this last-named structure was so tastefully designed that the little church still retains its dominance. The handsome Belgian Chancellery in Washington is also his conception.

I would be remiss if I failed to recall Ralph Walker's participation in two world's fairs, the Century of Progress (1932) in Chicago, in which he served as a member of the Board of Design and the 1939 World's Fair in New York City in which enterprise his partner, Stephen F. Voorhees, served as the Chairman of the Board; Ralph Walker served as an associate member of the Board. He designed eight buildings for industrial corporations in this exposition, the most notable being structures for the General Electric Company, the Borden Company, Petroleum Industries, and the New York Telephone Company.

Ralph Walker was a firm believer in collaboration with landscape architects, painters, and sculptors as may be evidenced by two distinguished memorials that he designed: to George Eastman in Rochester, and to Roger Williams on a hilltop overlooking Boston.

His greatest sorrow and what he deemed to be "the loss of a great opportunity" was the disapproval of his design for the chapel in the World War II cemetery at Hamm in Luxembourg. His design had the approval of the Commission of Fine Arts and of the American Battle Monuments Commission; these two agencies were the only ones required by law to give approval. However, a congressman, chairman of the Sub-Committee on Appropriations, saw fit to pass aesthetic judgment upon the design and disapproved it. The Monuments Commission asked Ralph Walker to restudy his design but he refused to compromise; thus his contract was voided, "the Commission to seek a stereotype so earnestly desired and I to find comfort in maintaining the integrity of an ideal."

In a handsome book illustrative of the important projects that he designed during a long and eminently rewarding career as a practicing architect, Ralph Walker wrote these words:

I have stood also in places I have helped to build and always there is within my heart this desire that some other architect may—as so often I have in other places, for a brief moment—feel both the calmness and fierceness of creation and go away saying, "here too, someone has served beauty."

He received many honors and served on many boards and commissions, including the National Commission of Fine Arts, too numerous to name in this brief memorial. He bore these honors lightly, and his professional career proved that he richly deserved them all. He left a noble heritage which should serve well those young men who elect to study architecture and who, hopefully, may recognize that it belongs among the professions of the arts. Ralph Walker's career will long be marked by the distinguished buildings and monuments that he leaves behind, all of them bearing the stamp of a great architect.