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.
Walter T. Downing was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1865 and as a child moved with his mother to Atlanta around 1876. 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.
rcial 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 (later Shorter University) in Rome, and at the University of Chattanooga (later the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga).
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 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.
Media Gallery: W. T. Downing (1865-1918)