A life and love of drawing
Architect to Hollywood’s elite. Designer of civic monuments. The man who learned to draw upside-down — and changed what was possible for every architect who came after him.
Paul R. Williams was orphaned as a young child in downtown Los Angeles and raised by a foster family who encouraged his talent for drawing. Teachers and counselors of the era openly doubted that a Black architect could find clients — Williams set out to prove otherwise.
In 1921 he became the first Black architect licensed west of the Mississippi. Over the following five decades he designed more than three thousand buildings — private estates for Hollywood stars, churches, civic landmarks, and everyday homes — becoming one of the most prolific architects in Southern California history.
In 2017, he was posthumously awarded the AIA Gold Medal, the institute’s highest individual honor, cementing a legacy the Fund now works to extend.
In the segregated Los Angeles of the 1920s and 30s, many prospective clients were uneasy sitting beside a Black architect. Williams responded with a singular skill: he taught himself to sketch fluently upside-down, so he could sit across the table and hand a finished, legible rendering to the client facing him.
What began as an accommodation to prejudice became a signature of his practice — a small, exacting act of mastery that put clients at ease and let the work speak first. It is a fitting emblem for a fund built on the belief that talent, given the chance, finds its own way through.
Williams often said he wanted young people to see architecture not as an inaccessible profession, but as a tool, one that shapes how a city moves, how a neighborhood feels, and how a family lives.
The PRW Scholarship & Education Fund was founded in 2023 to put that tool directly into the hands of a new generation, through scholarship dollars and hands-on education, starting with the students who need the door held open.
One hundred and three years after PRW became the AIA’s first Black member, African American membership still hovers at 2% of the total.
“How can you, as an individual, fit into this pattern of tomorrow? First, we must be a part of the community in which we live and not apart from it.”
