James Murray (Jim) Webb (1908-2000) is considered by many to be the source of a new indigenous modernist architecture that emerged in Chapel Hill in the 1950s. As the principal in his firm from 1947 until his death, Webb produced a formidable body of modernist architecture in his adopted hometown and elsewhere in North Carolina. The James Murray Webb Papers at North Carolina State University’s Special Collections Research Center document scores of projects throughout his career; this entry covers only the first decade, through 1957, a particularly prolific period for the firm.

Webb was born in Mexico and grew up in California. He began his undergraduate work at Pomona College in the 1920s and after a year transferred to the University of California at Berkeley School of Architecture where his brother, John Bruce Webb (1910-1997), was already studying. After three years, the brothers dropped out of college due to financial challenges of the Great Depression and spent much of the 1930s working as draftsmen in various architectural offices in the San Francisco Bay area. Jim eventually went back to UC-Berkeley and graduated in 1937. (John, who was artistically talented, found school demeaning and never completed his degree.)

In the late 1930s, the brothers worked in the office of William Wilson Wurster, the best-known proponent of the Bay Area Regional style of architecture and a profound influence on Jim and John Webb. They developed life-long friendships with Wurster and with his wife, the noted urban planner Catherine Bauer. In numerous interviews given later in his life, Jim Webb explained that in Wurster’s office the brothers absorbed his concept of design and, perhaps more subtly, his attitudes about the environment (preserve it and make it part of the design), social consciousness (avoid elitism and ostentation), and interaction with the client (communicate frequently and become friends). The lessons learned with Wurster remained a standard for Jim Webb’s architectural practice for more than fifty years.

Following military service during World War II, Webb earned a Master of Arts in city and regional planning in 1946 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Wurster was dean of the architectural and planning school from 1945 to 1950. The following year, a former MIT colleague recruited Webb to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to help start a graduate program in city and regional planning. He arrived in Chapel Hill as both the town and the university were experiencing prodigious growth with the influx of veterans attending college on the G. I. Bill and the expansion of the University faculty to serve them. The post-war boom continued throughout most of the 1950s as the university established its medical school in 1951 and a new cadre of professionals, often recruited from urban centers in the Midwest and Northeast and abroad, arrived in Chapel Hill.

Due to a scarcity of practicing architects and his own position as a member the university faculty, Webb soon found his architectural services in demand and arranged to allocate a third of his time to private architectural commissions. The decade of 1947 to 1957 was a period of enormous productivity and innovation for Jim Webb and the Chapel Hill architectural firm he established and initially partnered with his brother John. (The website https://www.ncmodernist.org/webb.htm features a blueprint of 1950 with the identification “James M. Webb, Architect/ N. C. Lic. 640/ John B. Webb, Associate, 201 Rosemary Street, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.”)

In this short period of time, the Webb brothers and Donald Stewart, who joined the firm in 1952, designed approximately fifty contemporary houses, primarily in Chapel and Durham. After John Webb left the firm in the mid-1950s, Stewart replaced him as chief designer. Jim Webb’s papers reveal that the brothers were negotiating a contract to design a house just west of town in November 1947 and by June of 1948 several commissions were under way. One of the earliest completed projects was the Norman E. Eliason House for an English professor and his wife, built in 1948 in the Laurel Hills neighborhood. (Until the Webb brothers obtained their architectural licenses, their drawings were signed by North Carolina State University faculty member and architect Lawrence Enerson, but there is no evidence that he worked closely with the Webbs.) In Chapel Hill, the non-profit cooperative residential development of Highland Woods was the largest collection of Webb designs. According to Ruth Little in The Town and Gown Architecture of Chapel Hill (2006), the Webb firm planned the twenty-six-lot subdivision in 1956 and designed at least nine of the houses built there in 1957.

Occasionally Jim Webb met his clients’ needs by designing houses in traditional styles, usually the Colonial Revival. The vast majority of his firm’s work, however drew firmly upon the organic and modestly scaled California Bay Area Regional style which was largely residential and sometimes described as a middle ground between Frank Lloyd Wright’s humanist architecture and the hard-edged International Style utilizing new materials which had been formulated by Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier. In a 1998 interview, Jim Webb was asked what style of architecture he practiced, and he answered, “Eclecticism, modern eclecticism,” and added, “. . . there is a certain subtle quality – a personal quality that enters into it that isn’t trying to amaze people, that isn’t trying to make a name for itself . . . something we could all feel comfortable with.” Interviews with the owners of several of the Webb firm’s early houses suggested that they were created independently of influences other than free and open discussion with the architects and a shared interest in open floor plans, windows that offered wooded views, and a certain desire to have something different. The Webb firm produced designs that matched their clients’ often modest budget and desire for livability and were well-suited to the area’s rugged topography.

Over the years, the name of Jim Webb’s firm changed a few times. Initially it was James M. Webb and John B. Webb Associates. When John Webb left the firm, Jim Webb began practicing as Webb Associates, and around 1960 he changed the name of his firm to City Planning and Architectural Associates. Webb withdrew from that partnership in 1969 and re-established his practice as James M. Webb, AIA and AICP.

The building list that follows is a small sampling of known projects from 1947-1957, the first decade of Webb’s career. Additional information, illustrations, and building project lists may be found at (https://www.ncmodernist.org/webb.htm) and in the James Murray Webb Papers. Pending further research, the entry will be expanded to address subsequent decades.

Interview of Donald Stewart by Claudia R. Brown and Diane E. Lea, September 22, 2004.

Interview of James Murray Webb by David Brook, tape recording, July 28, 1998.

M. Ruth Little, The Town and Gown Architecture of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1795-1975 (2006)

James Murray Webb Papers, Special Collections Research Center, North Carolina State University

“Jim and John Webb,” https://www.ncmodernist.org/webb.htm