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W. T. Downing (1865-1918)
By the end of the nineteenth century, W. T. Downing, at thirty-five, already had developed a reputation as a designer of stylish
homes for an elite clientele in Atlanta. His houses were innovative in their combined stylistic references and sophisticated in their up-to-date Late Victorian taste.
He was responsible for several of Atlanta's oldest extant churches. In his later collaborations with architect Thomas Morgan
(of Morgan and Dillon), Downing created significant tall office building designs in the Fairlie Poplar district in Atlanta
as well as collegiate architecture at Oglethorpe University.
Early Career Walter T. Downing was born in Boston in 1865 and as a child moved with his mother to Atlanta around 1876. He began his architectural
career as a draftsman for Hannibal I. Kimball (1884-85) and L. B. Wheeler and Company (beginning in 1885), with whom he briefly
entered into partnership. His first significant success was winning the competition for the Fine Arts Building for the Cotton States and International Exposition in 1895.
Wheeler had left Atlanta by 1891, and the firm W. T. Downing, Architect, was established in 1890, when Downing was only twenty-five.
He focused extensively on residences. In 1897 he published Domestic Architecture, which illustrated his houses of the decade, only two of which—the William P. Nicolson (1891-92) and Gay (1895) Houses—are
still standing. Perhaps his most noteworthy house in the region was Lyndhurst (1909, razed), a mansion built for J. T. Lupton
in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Its size (more than 34,000 square feet) and amenities made it second in splendor only to the Biltmore
House in Asheville, North Carolina, in all of the Southeast.
Public Buildings In his first major public building, the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (1897-98), Downing demonstrated his sure eye for
proportion and scale as well as quality of detail.
The craftsmanship in brickwork resulted in one of the finest Romanesque revival churches of the Southeast. His other major
Atlanta churches include Trinity United Methodist Church (1911) and First Presbyterian Church (1919), the latter an exercise
in Gothic revival brownstone enriched inside by Tiffany windows. He translated his medieval theme to commercial architecture
at the Healey Building (1913, with Bruce and Morgan), a Gothic revival office building erected in Atlanta the year before Cass Gilbert's world-renowned neo-Gothic Woolworth
Building in New York. The façade of his Eiseman Clothing Company store (1901-2), a Beaux-Arts palazzo dominated by sweeping
multistory arches and a crowning cornice, is preserved in the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority station in Five Points.
Lupton Hall (1920, with Morgan and Dillon) at Oglethorpe University was completed after Downing's death. Earlier school designs
include Swann Dormitory and the Electrical Engineering (Savant) Building (both 1901) at the Georgia School of Technology (later
Georgia Institute of Technology). He also designed buildings at Shorter College in Rome, and at the University of Chattanooga (later the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga).
Important Surviving Work Throughout his career Downing continued to build houses for well-to-do Atlantans and was a leader in domestic taste in the
eclectic tradition. Among his best-known surviving houses in Atlanta are the Wimbish House
(1898, later Atlanta Woman's Club) in the French Renaissance Revival (or Chateauesque) style; the Frank Ellis House (1910-14),
a small Italianate palazzo on a prominent site at an entry to Ansley Park; the John Grant House (Craigellachie, now the Cherokee
Town Club, 1921) in a simplified medieval vernacular aesthetic; and the Dodson House (1915-18) in Druid Hills. The Tudor Revival
character of the Dodson House influenced work by both Robert Smith Pringle and Francis Palmer Smith, each of whom served as a draftsman for Downing.
In 1918, at the age of fifty-three, Downing was struck by an automobile during a family trip to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
He died as a result of his injuries.
Suggested Reading W. T. Downing, Domestic Architecture (Atlanta: Franklin, 1897).
Elizabeth A. Lyon, Atlanta Architecture: The Victorian Heritage, 1837-1918, 2d ed. (Atlanta: Atlanta Historical Society, 1986).
Gerald Sams, AIA Guide to the Architecture of Atlanta (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993).
Robert M. Craig, Georgia Institute of Technology
Published 7/30/2002
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