A. G. (Arthur Gould) Odell, Jr. (November 22, 1913-April 21, 1988), a native of Concord, N. C., numbered among the principal leaders in the North Carolina’s architectural profession during the post-World War II building boom. A forceful personality with an elegant presence as well as a thorough-going modernist philosophy, he played a major role in shaping the state’s modernist approach to government and corporate architecture as well as religious and residential buildings. His large firm, A. G. Odell, Jr., Associates, led in making Charlotte a center of corporate modernism and a complement to the more academic and diverse modernism promoted by faculty at the (then) School of Design at present North Carolina State University in Raleigh under Odell’s near-contemporary, Dean Henry Kamphoefner.Together Odell and Kamphoefner and the many architects they influenced and encouraged made North Carolina a remarkable center of mid-century modernism. The Odell firm’s best known works in North Carolina are probably the highly innovative Charlotte Coliseum in Charlotte and Blue Cross Blue Shield Headquarters near Durham, but the firm also led in the production and acceptance of more standard modernist works. Odell’s obituary in the Raleigh News and Observer of April 23, 1988 gives a brief outline of his career. His firm and its influence deserve far more attention from architectural and cultural historians.

Arthur “Goolie” Odell was the son of Grace Patterson and Arthur Gould Odell, Sr., of a leading textile manufacturing family in Concord; his grandfather, William Robert Odell, was a pioneering textile industrialist and banker. His family’s stature and connections would open many doors for him. During the early 1930s, Odell studied civil engineering at Duke University and architecture at Cornell, graduating from the latter in 1935. In 1935-1936, like many future modernists, he studied at L’Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. After returning to the United States, he worked for the New York firm of Wallace K. Harrison and Jacque Fouilhoux, architects for the Rockefeller Plaza project and the 1939 World’s Fair. Of the Harrison and Fouilhoux design for the Trylon and Perisphere that became icons of the Fair, “I was the first to come up with the idea of a sphere,” Odell recalled. In 1938 he joined the firm of Raymond Loewy, the French-born industrial designer of many modernist products. As noted by Mary Carolyn Dominick in The Original Concept and Design of Charlotte College: 1957-1965, Loewy had a “continental natty style” of dress, which may have influenced Odell’s style of attire in Charlotte as well as encouraging his bent toward sleek architectural designs.

These experiences introduced the young Odell to the growing modernist movement in Europe and America, especially in its expressions influenced by Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. He emerged as a devoted modernist who by dint of his connections and personality exerted a powerful and widespread influence on the modernist movement in North Carolina, both in individual buildings and in urban and campus planning projects that reflected the tenets of Corbusier and Mies.

According to Odell, he decided to move to Charlotte in 1939 because it appeared to be one of the fastest-growing cities in the southeast, and in 1940 he opened his office there. It was also near the piedmont communities where Odell ancestors had made their mark and his family was well known. After serving in the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers during World War II, he returned to Charlotte and continued his practice under the name of A. G. Odell Jr. and Associates. He married Mary Walker Ehringhaus in 1951, and they had three children.

In Charlotte, Odell frequently expressed his disdain for the existing eclectic and revivalist local architecture and insisted on the superiority of modernist design. Early on, he showed his ability to gain prime commissions and produce memorable designs that became landmarks of their communities. As Charlotte historian Thomas Hanchett phrased it, “In a society where class connections still counted for much, young Odell had automatic entry to the offices of the area’s mill owners and businessmen” (Hanchett, Sorting Out the New South City) and thus took a major role in shaping the business elite’s taste for modernism. With the stated philosophy—evidently quoted from Louis Kahn—that architecture is 90 percent business and 10 percent art (Charlotte Observer, August 15, 1982), he established an immensely successful and productive firm, which he headed for many years. Like Kamphoefner at the School of Design at present NCSU, he was outspoken in his advocacy of modernism. Odell’s access to clients with deep pockets enabled him to execute his philosophy on a large scale.

The firm’s first major work in North Carolina was among its most famous, the Charlotte Coliseum and Ovens Auditorium. The complex, including the coliseum with its immense dome, was a powerful statement of modernism and structural innovation. Odell began negotiations with civic leaders about the project in the 1940s and was formally chosen as architect in 1950, but the project was delayed by Korean War limitations on construction. The project’s fame at its completion in 1956 was a reputation-making accomplishment for Odell nationally and even internationally, being featured in many prestigious architectural publications. Look Magazine (January 24, 1956) called the coliseum the “world’s largest dome.”

In the immediate postwar years, Odell undertook other, smaller projects, including public schools that were many architects’ bread and butter and which promoted advanced theories of education. Notable among Odell’s early examples of modernist public school and college design was his progressive design for Double Oaks Elementary School (1950) for black students in Charlotte, which departed from traditional schoolhouse architecture in its display of simple forms, abundant light, and a flowing plan that followed the terrain; it won an AIA National Honor Award in 1954, one of many awards the firm’s projects would garner.

Especially in the early years of his career, Odell designed modernist residences in Charlotte and elsewhere, chiefly for friends and corporate clients, but he did not publicize these, considering them essentially private works. For a listing and images of these, see http://www.ncmodernist.org/odell.htm. Early among these was the Robert and Elizabeth Lassiter House in Charlotte, where the architect worked closely together to develop the plans for the house.

The Odell firm attracted so many commissions in downtown Charlotte that an article in Southern Architect (July 1957) carried an article, “Odell’s Work Featured,” illustrated by an aerial photograph of the central city with a dozen Odell buildings labeled. Among these was a trend-setting modernist skyscraper, the Wachovia Building. It asserted the presence in Charlotte of a major bank headquartered in Winston-Salem. Odell’s Charlotte work then and later was tied to the city’s emergence as a regional and even national banking center.

By capturing the spirit of mid-century modernism in designs suited to establishment clients, Odell’s operation expanded rapidly to an office staff of fifty by the early 1960s. The firm’s brochure, “A. G. Odell, Jr. and Associates” of the era stated, “The basic premise of the firm is to produce on schedule superior designs which can be built within prescribed budgets. The creation of structures and facilities of maximum efficiency, economical cost, and distinctive beauty is the result of this policy” (http://www.ncmodernist.org/Odell-1960s-brochure.pdf). In 1962, when the News and Observer polled 22 North Carolina architects on their favorite buildings in the state, five of the top eight selections were by Odell’s firm: the Charlotte Public Library; the Charlotte Coliseum and Auditorium; and the Commerce Center (Wachovia Bank), all in Charlotte; Concordia Lutheran Church in Conover; and St. Andrews College in Laurinburg. These were followed by such well-known works as the world headquarters for the R. J. Reynolds Company in Winston-Salem and the Blue Cross Blue Shield Building near Durham, both with stunning forms in glass. According to Michael Warner, an architect with the firm, Odell believed the BCBS Building, for which Charles McMurray was the principal designer, was the firm’s best work. These attention-getting designs generally featured bold geometric forms, extensive use of glass, and structural innovations. For other projects, the firm used less dramatic designs that embodied the period’s rectilinear forms and simple details. In several cases, the Odell firm was associated with prestigious out-of-state architectural firms. The firm reportedly received more than 75 design awards.

Moving beyond individual buildings, Odell’s firm gained commissions for new college campuses on rural sites where he could employ modernist principles to create a master plan on a clean palette as well as designing an ensemble of buildings. In 1958 Odell was selected as the architect for the master plan and buildings at the newly established Charlotte College, later the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Its open, suburban site offered the architect a blank slate for designing functional and economical buildings in a clearly modernist mode. The buildings that made up the core of the campus were constructed in the 1960s, beginning with the Kennedy Building (1961). After seeing a drawing, the Charlotte Observer of March 17, 1960, lauded the design as “Modern But Dignified,” and “Clean, open, efficient-looking with straight lines—in a word businesslike.” In a stripped-down version of classical concepts, the rectilinear brick buildings were defined by vertical strips of glass alternating with brick pilaster strips rising to a plain frieze. An abstracted arcade shelters the principal entrance at Kennedy, design elements of which were incorporated into the college’s official seal.

Also in the 1960s, Odell’s firm planned another modern college campus on a large and undeveloped site—the master plan and initial buildings at present St. Andrews Presbyterian College at Laurinburg, a new college formed from two older local colleges and named for the region’s Scots heritage. With Richard P. Leaman as lead designer, the Odell firm collaborated with landscape architect Lewis James Clarke of the NCSU School of Design to create an ensemble of buildings, driveways, a variety of plantings, and a lake. The architecture displayed a consistent vocabulary of rectilinear forms rendered in earth-toned concrete aggregate and taupe brick to blend with the natural setting.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the Odell firm gained commissions that would apply modernist concepts to much larger and already fully developed sites—major urban planning projects that would remake the center of Charlotte and downtown Raleigh along lines advocated by the modernist LeCorbusier. In contrast to the open sites for his two college campus designs, these projects envisioned—and generally affected—the destruction of existing urban fabric to create radically new cityscapes, socially and visually. Using concepts developed in Europe, the new schemes pursued differentiated use zones (instead of traditional mixed uses); extensive clearance of old buildings and street patterns: and creation of large new open spaces among new skyscrapers and other large new buildings. (Note: Detailed building entries for these projects and their components await further research.)

In Charlotte in 1965, Odell and Associates developed a comprehensive plan for the transformation of Center City Charlotte, which obliterated many areas of town and separated the community into strongly defined zones, with a downtown of open spaces and large new buildings. The firm also designed skyscrapers such as the Bank of America (NCNB) Plaza to populate the new plan.

In Raleigh in the late 1960s and the 1970s, Odell and Associates faced a city planned in the eighteenth century according to classical principles, with a principal central square, four axial streets, and four secondary squares. Buildings of various eras lined the streets and created termini to key views. The Odell firm created two transformative plans: the Fayetteville Street Mall south of the State Capitol—the southward axial street—and the State Government Mall north of the State Capitol centered on Halifax Street, the northward axial street. Other original street patterns near the capitol were realigned. These projects captured the spirit of the time on a major scale and were to face controversy in later years.

The Fayetteville Street Mall did not entail wholesale destruction of the existing commercial sector, but in keeping with trends of the day created a pedestrian mall instead of a street and planted the Raleigh Civic Center (1977) astride Fayetteville Street, blocking the intentional view between the south façade of the Greek Revival style State Capitol and the Beaux-Arts classical portico of the city’s Memorial Hall.

The transformation by the State Government Mall was far more extensive. In an interview with the Raleigh News and Observer in 1964, Odell said the state needed to gain control of the property around the State Capitol and develop a complex that would create a “distinguished government plaza symbolizing the heritage and dignity of our state.” The government mall required the demolition or moving of several blocks of 19th and early 20th century buildings north of the capitol and the creation of a wide, grassy mall flanked by large buildings with the high-rise Archdale Building (1977, 512 N. Salisbury St.) at the northern terminus. The Civic Center has been removed (2006) and the Fayetteville Street Mall converted back to a broad axial street, reopening the Beaux-Arts view that many citizens had not known before. The State Government Mall and Archdale Building still exist as of 2020.

In addition to his firm’s vast and oft-awarded architectural output, Odell was also a leader in the architectural profession. He served as president of both the North Carolina chapter of the AIA and the national AIA and was the first architect from North Carolina to hold the latter position. In addition to awards to his firm for individual projects, Odell was honored with the designation of Fellow of the American Institute of Architects. He was involved in civic affairs including the Charlotte planning board and chamber of commerce. Many architects who worked in the Odell firm went on to establish distinguished careers; the firm was known as a “graduate school” for young architects and engineers. Within the firm, various architects served as lead designer for specific projects. Among those who became prominent architects in North Carolina were Harvey Gantt, Charles McMurray, Harry Wolf III, Charles Lyman Bates, Sr., and the architects who left the Odell firm in 1973 to form Clark Harris Tribble and Li. Odell expressed his pride in the success of many of the men who had worked in the firm for a time. Through them, as well as through the buildings the firm designed, his influence on modernism spread far and wide. After suffering from health problems, in the early 1980s Odell retired and turned over direction of the firm to his younger associates. According to his obituary, he sold his interest to them. At the time of his death, Odell Associates was the largest architectural firm in Charlotte with more than 150 employees, and by 1986 it was listed among the 100 largest such firms in the nation. When the firm celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1990, the company counted projects in 25 states.

The following building list is, as indicated above, only a fraction of the work produced by Odell’s firm during his lifetime. He and his firm warrant a fuller study of their role in 20th century American architecture. The Arthur Gould Odell Papers are held by the J. Murrey Atkins Library at UNC Charlotte.

http://www.ncmodernist.org/Odell-1960s-brochure.pdf

http://landmarkscommission.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/History-of-Charlotte-and-Mecklenburg-County.pdf

Mary Carolyn Dominick, “The Original Concept and Design of Charlotte College, 1957-1965,” M. A. thesis, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 2013 (http://landmarkscommission.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/FINAL-THESIS-APRIL-3-2013.pdf)