




Robert Kennard, Architect: A Mid-Century Biography
$75.00
Gail Kennard
UPCOMING TITLE: Available Fall 2025
The first ever monograph on Los Angeles-based modern architect Robert Kennard tells the untold story of an African American professional and deepens our understanding of modernism, specifically in Southern California, and the many people who played a role in shaping post-war California. Gail Kennard, his daughter, unveils a remarkable body of work and fascinating stories from the decades of Los Angeles’s rapid growth. She documents the history of one man’s journey within a wider context, revealing a thriving African American community as she recounts the trajectory of her father’s life——growing up in a segregated town in the outskirts of Los Angeles, serving in WWII, studying at USC, starting his career working with Robert Alexander and Richard Neutra on the infamous housing project in Elysian Fields, before working for DMJM and Victor Gruen, and eventually starting his own firm, which was still thriving in 1995, when Kennard died at the age of seventy-five.
Projected release date: Fall 2025
Hardcover
Est. 352 pages
Color and black and white ill.
8.75 x 11.5 inches
ISBN: 978-1735600154
Description
Robert Kennard was born in Los Angeles in 1920, a generation after the influential Paul R. Williams and James H. Garrott, both architects and African Americans who helped define the architectural landscape of Los Angeles, as did the developer brothers Charles S. and Louis M. Blodgett. The success of these earlier Angelinos became a beacon and inspiration to the many African American architects of Kennard’s generation, including Norma Merrick Sklarek, Roy Sealey, Ralph A. Vaughn, and Benjamin MacAddoo, Kennard’s classmate from the architectural program at Pasadena Junior College.
Author Gail Kennard, who is also the daughter of her subject, traces her father’s life and career. In the process of introducing her father’s substantial body of work—the forty custom houses he designed in the early 1960s, churches and synagogues, commercial work, and his public projects, including public housing, education, and transit—she explores the important network of architects, landscape architects, and engineers with whom Kennard collaborated, among them Robert Alexander, Richard Neutra, Garrett Eckbo, Arthur Silvers, Frank Sata, and Paul R. Williams. She also firmly situates her father’s journey within larger national issues, illuminating how he navigated the social and racial divide in mid-century America.
Before his death, Kennard was appointed a “Fellow” of the AIA, a rare honor he received not only for the more than 700 buildings he designed—among the most well-known in Los Angeles are the Carson City Hall, UCSD’s Marshall College campus, and the Watts Neighborhood Center—but for the impact he had as a mentor.
About the Author
Gail Kennard currently serves as Vice-President of the Cultural Heritage Commission of Los Angeles City Planning Department and is President of Kennard Design Group (KDG), her father’s architectural firm, which from its inception has been a multi-ethnic firm. She is also among five jurors who were selected by Docomomo US for deciding the 11th annual Modernism in America Awards for 2024. She began her career as a journalist for United Press International and Time Magazine and is a former public information officer for the San Diego Historical Society, as well as a former member of the Board of Advisors of the USC School of Architecture. Aside from her active role in helping to ensure the preservation of historic architectural sites in Los Angeles, she has been documenting the histories of American female architects in a series of oral histories.