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Bill Brockway, an architect who worked for A. Hays Town in the late 1950s, helped to restore the 1935 renaissance-style French House on the LSU campus in 1981 after extreme water damage forced it to close for 10 years.

You may not know it by looking at all of the Creole cottages and cookie-cutter neighborhoods posing as collectives of French villas, but Baton Rouge has a rich tradition of modern architecture.

Examples may go largely unnoticed to the untrained eye, but architecture buffs and art history scholars find and celebrate a trove of architectural gems hidden among Baton Rouge’s nondescript housing developments, apartment complexes and commercial buildings.

“Baton Rouge is kind of this urban wasteland,” says Darius Spieth, assistant professor of art history at LSU. “It doesn’t present a very coherent architectural picture. It’s easy to just drive along without really noticing the amazing examples of modern architecture we have here.”

The recent demolition of Buckminster Fuller’s industrial geodesic dome in North Baton Rouge stunned—and worried—modern architecture enthusiasts.

Carolyn Bennett of the Foundation for Historic Louisiana lamented the discreet demolition. “Public entities need greater education on historic preservation and its economic significance.”

Retired Baton Rouge architect Bill Brockway remembers the heyday of Baton Rouge’s modern era of architecture, when A. Hays Town, often referred to as the “premier architect of the South,” was erecting modern structures for commercial clients, rather than the residential architecture for which he’s most often remembered.

“To people like Hays Town, what we call modernism was just another style,” says Brockway, who worked for Hays Town for two years in the late 1950s. “If you knew the rules like he did, you could design it. He would probably disagree with that assessment, but he was an excellent designer, probably the best design architect at that time in Baton Rouge. A lot of architects claim you can’t make any money doing residential architecture, but he sure did.”

Brockway, now in his 80s, is a graduate of Tulane University’s School of Architecture. In the late 1940s he was fresh out of the U.S. Army, having served overseas in France and Germany during World War II. Most of his professors were Harvard-educated under German architect Walter Gropius, commonly associated with the influential Bauhaus school of art and design.

After the war most of the architecture in the United States was designed in the tradition of the international style, Spieth explains. Many progressive European architects, like Gropius, had immigrated to the United States eager to escape the war, and they brought their modernist ideas with them.

“The international style came to be defined by an absence of architectural ornament, the use of modern materials (reinforced concrete, steel and glass) and the appearance of flat roofs, and of buildings raised above the ground on slender supports,” Spieth says.

Brockway was a member of the first class in Tulane’s architecture program to be taught functionalism and modernism. Before the war architecture students were schooled in the ways of the Beaux-Arts architectural movement, characterized by more classical, ornate designs taught at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

At the height of this modernist movement, American’s preeminent architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, came to Baton Rouge to give a lecture. Originally scheduled at LSU’s Greek Amphitheater, the talk was moved to the law school building due to torrential rains. Brockway, a budding architect at the time in 1950, was in the audience that day.

“Frank Lloyd Wright was kind of a natural showman,” Brockway recalls. “He opened his talk by saying, ‘I suppose we owe our being here tonight to the fact that it never rains in Greece,’ and then he followed that up by looking around at the surroundings at the law school, the kind of building he had spent his career fussing about and railing at, and said ‘I suppose you call this extra legal.’”

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Modern architectural relics

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Having Wright in the Capital City was a nod to Baton Rouge’s budding architectural scene. The next time Baton Rouge hosted an architectural celebrity was in 1958 when Buckminster Fuller came to build his dome for Union Tank Car.

But since its modern architectural heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, Baton Rouge has reverted back to a much more traditional style—even many new commercial buildings today are built in faux-French country cottage style.

In an effort to ensure some local modern architecture isn’t destroyed or neglected, Spieth conducted a survey of modernist buildings along Florida Boulevard. He identified buildings “whose historical importance warrants renewed appreciation of the modern architectural heritage of Baton Rouge and better protection for the most outstanding examples of extant modernist buildings in the city.”

He did it to draw up an inventory of buildings that should be included on the National Register of Historic Places. Despite Florida Boulevard’s image of rows of fast-food restaurants and check-cashing stands, the corridor has plenty examples of Baton Rouge’s fling with the international style.

Among them: several A. Hays Town designs, including the East Baton Rouge Clinic (1950), the Florida branch of the Union Federal Savings and Loan Association (1956) and the Blue Cross building (1967-69). Others on Spieth’s list include the IBM building by John F. Wilson and Robert M. Coleman (1956), the Anchor Marine building by Lionel H. Abshire (1958-59), the Sears Roebuck building by Aydelott & Associates (1961-63) and the Republic Tower (now called Dean Tower) by Lewis P. Manson (1964-65).

“Louisiana is really one of the most advanced states in terms of modern architecture,” Spieth says. “It can’t measure up to, say, Illinois or New York, but nevertheless there were interesting things that were happening here during the modernist movement, especially in Shreveport, New Orleans and Baton Rouge. At least for the South we’ve got a good stock of modern architecture right here, and we need to do what we can to preserve it.”