Explore Paul R. Williams’ Community Architecture

In this activity, you will:

• read about three building projects designed by Paul R. Williams
• identify design elements in Williams’ drawings that evoke community and pride
• reflect on a personal experience of belonging by describing a specific place

• 30 – 60 mins

Read About the Role of Architect Paul R. Williams in Creating Spaces for the African American Community in Los Angeles

The United States was built on a racial hierarchy that shaped nearly every space within it. Throughout its history, schools, hospitals, neighborhoods, hotels, restaurants, and public spaces kept Black people and other people of color separate from white Americans by law and by custom. In California, formal segregation was sometimes less rigid than in the Southern United States, but discrimination was still systemic. For example, restrictive housing covenants legally barred Black families from buying homes in most neighborhoods. Black Americans were routinely excluded from white-owned banks, businesses, and civic institutions. Many public and commercial spaces offered Black Americans inferior, or even no, access to services.

During this era of segregation and discrimination in Los Angeles, California, Black-owned and Black-serving institutions became essential. Churches, banks, shops, and community centers were vital for community survival, functioning as more than just businesses or gathering places. These buildings were spaces of safety, solidarity, and self-determination. Paul R. Williams played an important role in shaping these spaces through his architectural designs. As an architect who understood this reality firsthand, Williams brought both professional excellence and personal understanding to his work, designing spaces that served and uplifted Los Angeles’s Black community during one of the most rigidly segregated periods in the city’s history.

Examine and Read About Drawings of Three of Williams’s Projects

Look at the drawings and read about each of these building projects: the Pueblo del Rio Housing Project, the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Building, and the 28th Street YMCA.

The Pueblo del Rio Housing Project

Williams’ work included large-scale housing developments designed for entire communities. Start by looking closely at the site plan drawing of the Pueblo del Rio Housing Project above. As you examine the drawing, answer the following questions.

• What details do you notice? How would you describe the layout of this space?
• This drawing shows a bird’s eye view, looking straight down from above. What shapes, patterns, or repetitions do you notice in how the buildings are arranged?
• Make a rough estimate of the number of green shapes scattered across the drawing. What do you think they represent? What role might they play in this community?
• Each red rectangle represents a single two-story building with multiple apartments. Make a rough estimate of how many separate residential buildings are included. What does this tell you about how many families or people this space was designed to hold?

Paul R. Williams co-designed the Pueblo del Rio Housing Project in 1940, one of the largest public housing developments of its era in Los Angeles. Public housing is housing that is funded and managed by the government to provide affordable homes for people who cannot afford market-rate rents or mortgages. The drawing of the Pueblo del Rio Housing Project illustrates how the housing development was organized into quiet residential clusters, each represented by the red rectangles. Each green circle represents a tree. The plan also shows open spaces and a play area for children.

The federal government funded Pueblo del Rio specifically to house the rapidly growing population of workers in Los Angeles’s defense industry during World War II, people who needed to live close to the factories and shipyards where they worked. Because much of Los Angeles was governed by restrictive covenants, legal agreements that explicitly prevented Black residents from buying or renting homes in most neighborhoods, Black defense workers had almost nowhere to live near their jobs. Pueblo del Rio was built in the Central-Alameda neighborhood, near the concentration of defense industry employment, to address that gap.

The project was controversial from the start. Some saw public housing as essential support for working families; others opposed it on political or racial grounds. The existence of Pueblo del Rio represented both a political victory and an architectural one, proof that well-designed, dignified housing could be built for and by a community that the rest of the city had largely shut out.

The 28th Street YMCA

Paul R. Williams’ designs for the 28th Street Branch of the YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association) included detailed architectural drawings of the building’s entrances. Look closely at this drawing and consider the following questions.

• What details do you notice? How would you describe the style of these entrances?
• Look closely at the “Men’s Entrance” on the left. What decorative details do you notice around the doorway itself?
• Why might Williams have given so much attention to the design of an entrance, rather than leaving it plain?

Paul R. Williams designed the 28th Street YMCA in 1925–26. It was the first YMCA in Los Angeles built specifically for Black youth. The YMCA is a community organization that offers recreational and educational programs, like gyms, pools, and classes for young people. Membership in the YMCA at many branches was male-only at its founding. The YMCA gradually phased out gender discrimination starting in the 1920s, and the national organization officially banned it in 1978. Williams had been a member of this men-only branch since childhood himself, which gave the project personal meaning that shows up in the careful details of the design. The drawing shows the different materials used to build the building, including concrete, terracotta, plaster, and brick. Above one of the entrances, an engraved panel reads “Men’s Entrance,” decorated with scrolls and vines. There is another entrance, which is not shown in this drawing, which was labelled “Boy’s Entrance.” The drawing also shows the entrance to the gymnasium underneath a large stone arch.

At the time, most YMCAs in Los Angeles were racially segregated, meaning Black young men had been excluded from the social, athletic, and educational opportunities these institutions offered elsewhere in the city. Williams’s design did more than provide a functional building, it made a statement. The front of the building features terracotta sculptures of Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, placing the faces of historic Black leaders directly into the architecture of a building built to serve Black youth. The four-story building is designed in the Italian Renaissance style. Its front features symmetry, meaning the left and right sides mirror each other almost exactly, with matching windows, columns, and decorative details balanced on either side of the building. This kind of balanced, orderly design was often used for banks, government buildings, and other important institutions, buildings that were meant to be taken seriously and treated with respect. By using this style, Williams gave the YMCA the same sense of importance and permanence usually reserved for institutions serving white communities, sending a message that this building, and the community it served, deserved the same level of respect and belonging.

The Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Building

Paul R. Williams’ design for the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Building included this drawing of the exterior. Look closely at the drawing, and respond to the following questions.

• What details do you notice? How would you describe the shape and style of the building?
• This building is made up of two connected sections, a tall vertical tower and a lower, longer wing. What differences do you notice between these two parts of the building?
• Look at the trees, cars, and open courtyard in this drawing. Why might Williams have included these details in his drawing, rather than just drawing the building alone?

This Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company was one of the largest and most successful Black-owned businesses in the American West, and it became one of the most important symbols of Black enterprise in Los Angeles. By the late 1940s, the company had grown large enough to commission a large, prominent headquarters, and they turned to Williams to design it.

Golden State Mutual existed because it had to. Mainstream insurance companies routinely refused to insure Black Americans or charged them discriminatory rates, making an institution like this not just a business but a necessity for the community it served. When people in the Black community could not obtain insurance, it made it difficult to start and expand businesses, purchase homes, ensure financial security for loved ones, and build generational wealth. These factors had broad, sweeping impacts, widening the racial wealth gap, limiting economic mobility and opportunities, reinforcing racial segregation, slowing neighborhood development, and more.

Williams designed the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Building in 1947–49. The precise draftsmanship in this drawing reflects the ambition and permanence the building was meant to project. Williams used sharp, precise lines in the design and a unique roof that looks like giant steps to make the five-story office building look strong and permanent. The rows of tall windows across the exterior help to give the building a sleek look. Williams oriented the building diagonally at a prominent intersection, giving it visual presence from multiple angles and establishing it as a landmark rather than simply an office building. That choice reflected the ambition behind the commission: this was a building meant to be seen, to signal stability and permanence, and to assert that Black-owned institutions belonged, prominently and unapologetically, in the fabric of Los Angeles. All of these architectural details came together to create a proud symbol in the form of architecture for the largest Black-owned business in the American West and the community that it served.

Analyze Williams’s Architectural Designs for Community Projects

Questions

Consider all three architectural drawings as you respond.

• What does the design and quality of a building communicate to the community it serves and to the broader city around it? Provide details from at least two of the building projects to support your answer.
• These three building projects exist because mainstream institutions excluded Black residents of Los Angeles. What can we learn about a community that builds its own parallel infrastructure?
• What do you think have been the long-term impacts on communities of color from being excluded from important financial institutions such as home ownership and insurance over time?

Reflect in Writing

Paul R. Williams succeeded in a world designed to exclude him and his community. Through his architectural designs he created spaces that told Black residents of Los Angeles: you belong here, and you matter.

Think of a specific place where you personally felt like you belonged, somewhere that felt made for you, or for people like you. This might be a room, a building, an outdoor space, or even a corner of your home.

In one to two paragraphs, describe this place using specific details. Explain what specifically made you feel that sense of belonging. Was it a certain color, object, or arrangement of space? Try to connect the feeling you had to the specific details that created it, the same way Williams used design choices like sculpture, symmetry, and materials to create feelings of pride and belonging in his buildings.

A network or group of people, sometimes living in a particular place, who share interests, values, characteristics, responsibilities, or physical spaces.

Legally binding agreements or rules, often written into property contracts, that controlled what a person could do with land or housing, including who was allowed to live there.

Actions stemming from conscious or unconscious prejudice, which favor and empower one group over others based on differences of race, gender, economic class, sexual orientation, physical ability, religion, language, age, national identity, and other categories.

An organization or the buildings that house them that has been around for a long time and plays a major role in a community’s life.

The physical or social separation of people into different groups based on race, ethnicity, or other social traits, which can be enforced by law (de jure) or happen naturally through economic or social habits (de facto).

The right or ability of a person or group to make their own choices or control their own destiny.

Unity, mutual support, and shared responsibility among individuals or groups around a common cause.

When one side of an object (like a drawing or building) perfectly mirrors, balances, or matches the other side.

Describing a problem or pattern that is built into the rules, laws, or structures of a society rather than caused by one person or one incident.

Italian for “baked earth.” The term describes a reddish-brown clay that has been fired at a low temperature and left unglazed. Terracotta is used to make pottery, sculpture, architectural decorations, and tiles.