Crombie Taylor; Preservationist, USC Design Educator

Crombie Taylor, innovative architect, design educator and preservationist who championed the historic work of late 19th century designer Louis H. Sullivan, has died. He was 85.

Taylor, who taught design at USC for 23 years, died May 24 at his Santa Barbara home of congestive heart failure, USC officials announced.

As an architect, Taylor designed several award-winning buildings in Chicago, including the Hull House Uptown Center. He was known as the first modern architect to value and use Tiffany glass and Oriental carpets in spare, open, unadorned interiors. He also used 18th century and early 19th century furniture in those sleek interiors, a technique that became widely imitated.

As an educator, Taylor used his skills in architectural photography to develop use of multiscreen slide programs and other visual images in classroom teaching and exhibitions. At USC, he developed team study approaches, expanded the curriculum and helped establish the Building Research Institute as part of the doctoral program. His slide programs on Chicago architecture have been exhibited throughout the U.S. and Europe.

As a preservationist, Taylor did much to bring recognition to Sullivan, whose work included the well-known Art Institute of Chicago. Taylor personally restored several buildings that Sullivan designed, and rediscovered, reproduced and exhibited Sullivan’s trademark stencil designs that ornamented his buildings.

“To his students and colleagues, Taylor was an iconoclastic and wide-ranging thinker who worked with single-minded determination to preserve unrecognized but valuable American buildings,” said Sam Hurst, USC emeritus dean of architecture. “He never flinched at the opportunity to champion Louis Sullivan.”

In 1981, Taylor earned a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts and told The Times he would use it to complete a visual media program on Sullivan’s architecture and shape it into book form. Abrams plans to publish that book next year.

“Sullivan,” Taylor said then, “more than any other man, gave image to the skyscraper. He was the leader of the ‘Chicago school of architecture’ in the late 19th century.”

Born in Oakmont, Pa., Taylor earned architectural degrees at Penn State and Princeton University and began his career teaching at Georgia Tech. In 1944, he began a decade of teaching and working with the fabled Institute of Design in Chicago, furthering the European Bauhaus school of modern architecture and design. From 1951 until he left to practice architecture in 1954, Taylor was acting director, and during his 10-year tenure the institute’s enrollment grew sixfold.

Known for his own simple and elegant buildings, Taylor in the 1950s was commissioned to restore the buildings of Roosevelt University in Chicago. Included in the project was the interior of Sullivan’s Auditorium Building, where Taylor discovered the forgotten stencils.

In a 10-year effort that continued after he joined the USC faculty in 1962, Taylor peeled off layer after layer of paint, plaster and varnish to find, identify, restore and reproduce the Sullivan designs in four major structures. After exposing them, he traced the designs, matched colors and made full-scale ink drawings for a stencil cutter to reproduce the stencils. Taylor exhibited the reproductions in Los Angeles and Chicago in the early 1970s.

He also prepared a major exhibition of Sullivan’s polychromatic, two-dimensional ornament for the Smithsonian Institution.

The American Institute of Architects honored Taylor’s extensive work in 1973 by electing him a fellow. Five years earlier, the group awarded him an honorable mention for his design of the Hull House Uptown Center in Chicago.

A former president of the Southern California chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians, Taylor bought his own 17th century farm in England in 1978 and spent vacations restoring the buildings.

Taylor, after his USC retirement in 1985, restored Sullivan’s Van Allen Department Store in Clinton, Iowa, as a community center and worked on other restoration projects.

He is survived by his wife, Hope; three children, Victoria, Beth and John, and several grandchildren.

The family has asked that any memorial donations be sent to the Hospice Services of Santa Barbara. No immediate memorial service is planned.