Architect Robert L. Wesley died on January 24 at the age of 88. News of Wesley’s passing was confirmed by SOM, where Wesley spent the near entirety of his career. Wesley started working for the company’s Chicago office in 1964 and in 1984 he became SOM’s first Black partner.
In 2020 the SOM Foundation launched the Robert L. Wesley Award to support BIPOC architecture, landscape architecture, interior architecture, urban design, and engineering undergraduate students. To date 25 students have received the award.
“It is my belief that one of the greatest gifts a young person can receive from any authority, organization, or institution, is an education,” Wesley said in 2020. “And this award exemplifies exactly that. Education is one of those indelible rights that keeps our society strong, productive, and empathetic. When used properly, all of society benefits.”
Wesley was born in 1937 and he grew up in New Chicago, just north of Memphis, Tennessee. In an oral history of Wesley’s life, organized by MAS Context, Wesley shared details of a childhood spent living under segregation. He said, “the South was obviously all segregated and operating under Jim Crow laws. That was a different era and times. Unless you lived there, you don’t have a good knowledge of what it was about. It had its really unfair and unjust structure.”
“I didn’t have an environment of racial, nationality, or religious inclusiveness but, in our own way, we had our own environment,” Wesley continued. “We had our own Black doctors, we had Black lawyers, we had Black school teachers, Black ministers, and so forth and so on. As a youngster, I didn’t know any different. To me, that was the norm.”
Wesley’s interest in architecture was sparked after he attended a building opening celebration for the Universal Life Insurance Company, where his mother worked as a stenographer. The Universal Life Insurance Company’s Memphis flagship building opened in 1949 and was designed by McKissack & McKissack, the African American-owned and operated architectural firm based in Nashville, where Wesley would get his first job in architecture.
Wesley finished high school in Memphis, at Manassas High School, in 1955. In 1960 Wesley earned his Bachelor of Science in Architectural Engineering from Tennessee State University where he studied with professor L. Quincy Jackson, one of his most important mentors.
When Wesley was a student at Tennessee State University, the summer after his third year, he worked for McKissack & McKissack. He worked at the firm for one year before enrolling at University of Oklahoma.
Wesley received his Bachelor of Architecture in 1962 and Master of Architecture from University of Oklahoma in 1963. His thesis project was a cultural center in Lagos, Nigeria. After graduating in 1964, Wesley went to work for SOM in Chicago. He was hired by SOM’s Ed Petrazio and Robert Diamant. Petrazio “liked my thesis project,” Wesley later recalled.
“I got the right place for you to work,” Petrazio told Wesley, who went to work for SOM’s Walter Netsch on a series of buildings at Northwestern University, University of Chicago, University of Iowa, Grinnell College, and Miami University in Ohio.
Netsch and Wesley worked together on projects in Monterrey, Mexico; and in Algeria at the University of Blida and the University of Tizi-Ouzou. In 1970 Wesley was promoted to associate and in 1975 he became associate partner. After Netsch retired, Wesley worked for Bruce Graham.
In 1984 Wesley was promoted to managing partner. He worked on myriad projects for the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as the Millennium Park Masterplan, and Lyric Civic Opera House and Chicago Symphony Center’s Orchestra Hall renovations. He also managed SOM’s Miami University Art Museum project, EG&G Education Center at MIT, and Rowes Wharf in Boston.
Wesley retired from the firm in 2001. He said “to have that retirement rule in place and to have people retire at 65 is probably one of SOM’s strengths.” Wesley moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, after retiring from SOM, and then to Naples, Florida.
The late architect is survived by his daughters, Tracy and Tammy, and his extended family.
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