The Life and Work of
William Ward Watkin

William Ward Watkin was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 21, 1886. His parents were Fred W. Watkin and Mary Hancock Watkin. Watkin grew up in Pennsylvania, the home state of his mother's family. He graduated from Danville High School in 1903 and entered the University of Pennsylvania, pursuing the study of architecture under Paul Phillipe Cret. Following his graduation in 1908, Watkin spent one year traveling in Europe, principally in England.

Upon his return from Europe, Watkin joined the Boston office of Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson, then one of the most prominent architectural firms in the United States. At the time of Watkin's employment, 1909, Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson had received the commission to produce a campus plan and to design the initial buildings of the Rice Institute in Houston, Texas. Watkin worked on the development of both the campus plan and the building plan in the office; when construction was to begin, in the summer of 1910, Watkin was sent to Houston to serve as Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson's representative supervisor. In this capacity Watkin not only oversaw the construction of the initial Institute group - the Administration Building, the Mechanical Laboratory and Powerhouse, and the North and South residence halls - but most of the Institute's subsequent development: the Physics Laboratory (1913-1915), East Hall (1913-1914), West Hall (1915-1916), three proposed President's houses(1913, 1915, 1923-1924), the Field House (1920), the Chemistry Laboratory (1923-1925), a proposed Alumni Hall (1927), two proposed libraries (1927, 1940-1941), and the Founder 's Statue (1927-1930). Watkin himself was to design the Faculty Club - Cohen House (1927), Rice Stadium (1938), and the Naval ROTC building (1941). He also served as consulting architect to Staub & Rather in the design and construction of the Fondren Library (1946-1949), M.D. Anderson Hall (1946-1947), and the Abercrombie Laboratory (1947-1948).

As supervising architect, Watkin worked closely with Dr. Edgar Odell Lovett, president of the Rice Institute. Lovett offered Watkin a faculty appointment and the Institute opened in the fall of 1912 with Watkin as the only instructor in architectural engineering. In 1914 the architecture faculty expanded to two, and to three in 1915. In the summer of 1916 Watkin was made an assistant professor and in 1922 he became a full professor. Watkin was also the first chairman of the Architecture Department. Rice awarded the first professional degrees in architecture in 1917. Watkin's efforts to provide his students with a thorough course in architectural studies led him to organize a traveling fellowship in 1928, which is now known as the William Ward Watkin Traveling Fellowship. Watkin's academic duties were not restricted to the Architecture department. He was also Curator of Grounds, Chairman of the Faculty Committee on Buildings and Grounds, and Chairman of the Faculty Committee on Outdoor Sports, a position which resulted in his serving a term as president of the Southwest Conference in 1920. At the time of his sabbatical in the 1928-1929 academic year, Watkin resigned the athletic committee post. He remained, however, head of Buildings and Grounds, as his resignation of this post was not accepted by Dr. Lovett. During World War II, Watkin chaired the Committee on Air Raid Protection and Civilian Defense.

As early as 1912 Watkin was accepting independent architectural commissions. Between 1913 and 1915 he entered into partnership with George Endress of Austin, practicing under the name Endress and Watkin. This firm was dissolved at the end of 1919 and Watkin thereafter practiced under his own name. Watkin's work falls into several categories: institutional (schools, social clubs, churches), commercial, and residential. Watkin's association with Rice brought commissions from other educational institutions in Texas: Sam Houston Normal Institute in Huntsville, Sul Ross Normal Institute in Alpine, Texas A&M College in College Station, Victoria Junior College in Victoria, and the College of Industrial Arts (now Texas Women's University) in Denton. In 1924, in association with Sanguinet, Statts & Hedrick of Fort Worth, Watkin obtained the commission to develop a campus plan for the Texas Technological College in Lubbock, and to design the initial buildings - the Administration Building, the Textile Engineering Building, the Women's Building and the President's House. Watkin also served as consultant to the Houston School Board from 1924-1926, in connection with the design and construction of seven secondary school buildings. He laid out the campus of Kinkaid School in 1924, designing the lower school (1925), the gymnasium (1937), and the upper school (1946). Watkin designed several facilities for the Young Men's and Young Women's Chrisitian Associations - a YMCA building in Beaumont, the YWCA Activities building in Houston (in association with Birdsall P. Briscoe and Maurice J. Sullivan) and the YWCA building in Galveston. In 1922 Watkin was called upon to prepare plans for the Museum of Fine Arts, a project completed in two stages, 1924 and 1926, for which Cram and Ferguson acted as consultants. He also received a number of commissions for structures in Houston Parks, designing the Miller Memorial Outdoor Theater (1921), activities centers for Root Square (1937), Hennessey Park and Proctor Plaza (1938), and the Garden Center in Hermann Park (1938-1940). Ecclesiastical commissions included the First Methodist Church of Wichita Falls (1926, in association with Hedrick and Gottlieb), the Edward Albert Palmer Memorial Chapel (1927), St. Mark's Church, Beaumont (1942, in association with Stone & Pitts), the chancel reconstruction and Golding Chapel at Christ Church (1938-1939, in association with Carl A. Mulvey), and the Central Church of Christ (1940-1941, 1945-1947). Following his work on the Houston Public Library, Watkin prepared a proposal for a municipal library in Corpus Christi (1927) and served as consultant to Staub & Rather in the design of the Lake Charles, Louisiana, Public Library. From 1946-1951, Watkin, in association with Stayton Nunn, Milton McGinty, and Vance Phenix, was involved in the design and construction of the Methodist Hospital and Wiess Memorial Chapel.

The commercial work for which Watkin was responsible was of a generally small-scale character. He prepared a design for an eighteen story Cotton Exchange Building, but it was not constructed. His largest commercial projects were the Southern Drug Co. building (1916), several buildings for the T.H. Scanlan Estate (1925, 1926, 1927, 1932, 1935), the Princess Louise Hotel in Corpus Christi (1927, in association with Hardy & Curran), and Wilson's Stationery Co. building (1932). Smaller commissions comprised Ye Old College Inn (1921), the addition of flanking wings to the South Texas Commercial National Bank (1922), the A-B-C South Main grocery store (1928), a one story building for Palmer Hutcheson (1931), and a one story building for F.A. Heitmann (1937). For investment purposes, Watkin designed and built an apartment house - the Windward Court - and a one story commercial block at South Main and Isabella (1928).

Watkin produced many residential designs, particularily during the 1920's. Most of his houses were located in the South End suburbs near Rice Institute - Southmore, Montrose Place, Shady Side, Turner Addition, West Eleventh Place, Shadowlawn, Broadacres, Edgemont, Southampton Place and Riverside terrace. He also did houses outside of Houston: Two in Beaumont, a house in Keokuk, Iowa, for the parents of Howard Hughes, Sr. and the "Casa de Manana" in Sugarland for W.T. Eldridge, Jr. For a number of Houston subdivisions, Watkin served as landscape consultant, designing ornamental gateways and walls, and laying out plantings. Courtlandt Place (1913) was the earliest such commission; similar ones followed for Southampton Place and Broadacres (1923). During the thirties, Watkin did only a few houses, notably extensive additions to the George S. Cohen house and the Dr. James A. Hill house (1939).

In 1919 Watkin had ceased his affiliation with Cram and Ferguson, but he continued to operate, on a commission basis, as supervisor for their Texas projects, in addition to pursuing his own practice. Prior to this, Cram & Ferguson had received work in Texas with which Watkin was associated as local representative: a parish house for St. Mark's, Beaumont (1915), the Mendelsohnn Apartments (1917), and Trinity Church (1917-1919). During the period of their collaboration, Watkin represented the Boston firm on the Autry House (1921), The Houston Public Library (1926), the Cleveland Sewall house (1925), and a proposed South End Christian Church (1930). Watkin also acted as the local associate for James P. Jamieson of St. Louis on the design and construction of Shady Side (1916-1917), and for Sibley and Featherstone of New York on the proposed Park View condominium apartments (1926). In 1933 Watkin was appointed to the Board of Architectural Consultants, an advisory group connected with the design of the Federal Triangle in Washington, D.C.

During the teens and twenties, Watkin wrote articles for journals, primarily dealing with Houston, its growth and development, and the implications these held for the city's architecture. Watkin contributed descriptive pieces on the Rice Institute to Progressive Houston and the Southern Architectural Review, Houston's short-lived architectural magazine. Not until the late twenties did he become more involved in research and writing. In 1930 the Rice Institute Pamphlet published a series of lectures Watkin had given on the new architecture in Europe; Pencil Points reprinted these in 1931. Watkin wrote two additional essays for Pencil Points, one published in 1931 on new directions in ecclesiastical architecture, and another in 1932. This former essay was something of a prolegomena to Watkin's first book, The Church of Tomorrow, published in 1936. In 1951 Watkin's second book, Planning and Building the Modern Church, was published. At the time of his death he was planning to write a book on architecture in Texas.

Watkin had numerous academic and professional associations. He was a member of the Houston Philosophical Society, the Texas Philosophical Society and the Houston Country Club. Watkin was a charter member of the Rice Institute Faculty Club. He had become a member of the American Institute of Architects in 1913, and was elected to the College of Fellows in 1949. Watkin was a communicant of Trinity Church.

William Ward Watkin died on June 24, 1952 from complications following surgery for a broken kneecap. He was survived by his wife, Josephine Cockrell Watkin, whom he had married in 1933. Watkin had previously been married to Annie Ray Townsend Watkin, who died in 1929. Their three children were Annie Ray Watkin Biehl Hoagland Strange, Rosemary Watkin Barrick, and William Ward Watkin, Jr.