This is the first work to document the life and career of Dallas 
architect Mark Lemmon, a pre-eminent American historicist. It is an 
illustrated testament to Lemmon's ideas of architectural civility, 
solidity, and classicism-considered retrograde by many architectural 
historians, though taking on a renewed relevance after the post-
modernist revisionism of the 1970s.

    Having completed his architectural education at MIT and a tour of 
duty as a military engineer in Europe during World War I, Lemmon, 
a Texas native, moved to Dallas and began a distinguished career 
spanning forty years from the 1920s to the 1960s. Lemmon's greatest 
contributions to Texas architecture were his designs for educational 
and religious institutions. His most important clients were the Dallas 
Independent School District, Southern Methodist University (for which 
he designed eighteen Georgian style buildings), the Port Arthur School 
District, and the University of Texas at Austin. In styles that vary from 
Romanesque to Moderne, these buildings define their neighborhoods 
and place their users in a system of civilized architectural allusions 
that raises the level of urban culture.

    Few Texas architects matched the range of Lemmon's 
ecclesiastical architecture. His master works include Highland Park 
United Methodist Church (1927), Third Church of Christ, Scientist 
(1930), and Highland Park Presbyterian Church (1939).

    His other projects include the Cotton Bowl, the Museum of Natural 
History, the Hall of State, the Art Deco Great Hall, and the Hall of 
Heroes—all at Dallas's Fair Park.

    The volume contains an essay by Richard R. Brettell placing 
Lemmon as historicist in the context of a modernist century, as well 
as a critical biography of the architect by Willis Cecil Winters with a
chronological list of buildings and projects by the team of DeWitt and 
Lemmon (1921–1926) and later by Mark Lemmon (1926–1964).  

_________________________________________________________

RICHARD R. BRETTELL is adjunct senior curator of the Meadows 
Museum and Margaret McDermott Professor of Aesthetic Studies at 
the University of Texas, Dallas. WILLIS CECIL WINTERS is assistant 
director of Planning, Design, Construction & Facility Services at the 
Park & Recreation Department of the City of Dallas.


Co-published with the Meadows Museum