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We’re in Madison’s Shaker Heights condominium, where he lives by himself with
help from a housekeeper-cook. His wife of 62 years, Leatrice, died in 2012. His
spacious unit at The Diplomat is decorated with abstract art, oriental rugs, and midcentury
modern Scandinavian furniture, including a womb chair by Eero Saarinen.
Looking across his living room at his numerous awards, lined up on a shelf, it’s hard
to imagine Madison designing porches to make a living.
Madison’s honors and awards are legion. He was elected a Fellow of the
American Institute of Architects (AIA) in 1974, one of its top honors, and 10
years later was elected the AIA’s Chairman of the Jury of Fellows. He received the
AIA Ohio’s Gold Medal Firm Award, an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from
Cleveland State University and Kent State University, an honorary Doctor of Science
degree from Case Western Reserve University, the Cleveland Arts Prize, and an
honorary Doctor of Humanities from Howard University, where he studied as a
young man and later taught.
Most recently, Derek Morton, a filmmaker from Washington, D.C., made
a documentary about him, “Deeds Not Words,” which screened at the Greater
Cleveland Urban Film Festival last September. The movie was five years in the
making, off and on, the brainchild of his daughter Juliette, who lives in Washington.
Why all the fuss? First of all, Bob Madison is smart, funny, and charming. “He
has a great talent for talking to people and getting them to listen, and for listening to
them. He knows how to make friends,” says his long-time friend Philmore Hart. “He
has a flair for life.”
But more to the point, Madison, now 95, has always been a man on fire,
confronting and defeating racism where he found it (which was everywhere) mostly
by mocking it or ignoring it, from his time in the 92nd Infantry Division in World
War II – the segregated “Buffalo Soldiers” – whose commander, Major General
Ned Almond, wanted nothing to do with them, to his time at Western Reserve
University’s School of Architecture in the late 1940s under a dean who shunned him
as a “colored boy.” The dean asked him sarcastically upon graduation, “What will you
do now, work in a lumber yard?”
Right. Who ever heard of a black architect? The fact that he later found a
tolerance of his skin color and an appreciation of his skills under Walter Gropius
at Harvard and at École des Beaux-Arts in Paris as a Fulbright Scholar still didn’t
mitigate the question when he started his own firm.
In the end, all the fuss is about courage and determination, even more
than architecture.
“He has a great talent
for talking to people
and getting them
to listen, and for
listening to them.
He knows how to
make friends,” says
his long-time friend
Philmore Hart.