ARCHITECTS

CHARLES CROMBIE TAYLOR, FAIA

(February 13, 1914 – May 24, 1999)

Crombie Taylor was an architect, preservationist, and educator, who helped spread the influence of the Bauhaus to America. Born in Oakmont, PA, Taylor was educated at Penn State and Princeton University. After teaching at Georgia Tech, he began a decade of teaching and working with the Institute of Design in Chicago. The school, founded by former Bauhaus instructor, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, was a successor to the New Bauhaus, so called because its faculty included prominent refugees from Nazi Germany. Taylor became acting director from 1951 until he left to practice architecture in 1954. During his 10-year tenure the institute’s enrollment grew sixfold.

​

Taylor also championed and preserved the work of Louis Sullivan, a pioneer of modern skyscraper design and the mentor of Frank Lloyd Wright. He wrote a book on Sullivan's work in collaboration with Jeffrey Plank, who subsequently authored a book on Crombie Taylor.  From 1962-1985, Taylor taught at USC, first as Associate Dean of the School of Architecture, then attaining full professorship in 1972. He was elected a Fellow of the AIA in 1973, for his work on restoring Sullivan’s designs and became president of the Southern California Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians.

​

During this time, he was asked by Chicago entrepreneurs the Rosenbaums to design a Bauhaus-style home for them in the desert. The 1972 Rosenbaum Residence at Tamarisk Country Club is the only example of Taylor’s work in the Coachella Valley. Taylor designed “spare, even severe” houses in Chicago and California “that evoke a more reductive Mies van der Rohe.”