He Practiced What He Preached and Influenced Architecture

Within the archway between McCosh and Dickinson halls is an inscription attributed to classicist H.E. Mierow 1914: “Here we were taught by men and Gothic towers democracy and faith and love of unseen things that do not die.” To that, William Shellman Jr. *41, an influential architect and professor in the School of Architecture for 45 years, apparently rejoined, “You cannot learn democracy from a building.”

But many Princetonians learned how to design buildings under Shellman, known to his students as “Billy,” whose instruction helped elevate the architecture department from a purely theoretical school devoted to the minimalist precepts of iconic Swiss modernist Le Corbusier with more practical curricula that helped students become actual working architects.

Hailing from Savannah, Georgia, Shellman was the consummate Southern gentleman. As his former student Nicholas Moffett Pyle *71 wrote in a 1996 essay, Shellman “spoke in well-formed sentences spiced with Southern hyperbole” with a voice so gentle “that he had to emphasize his stronger sentiments with deeply furrowed frowns and belligerent juttings of the lower lip.”

Completing his undergraduate education at the University of Virginia, Shellman received his MFA at Princeton in 1941. After a stint working for a Savannah shipbuilding firm during World War II, he returned to Old Nassau as an instructor, where he remained until his 1986 retirement. According to Pyle, Shellman’s strength as a teacher was twofold: Not only did he help students learn how to sketch, he also helped them improve their ability in assessing the hidden elements of a structure through keen observation. “He knew that being able to see acutely, to understand what we [were] seeing, and to file that information away with all its possible connections [were] key to creativity,” Pyle explained.

Critical to Shellman’s approach was his rejection of the modernist style then in vogue, which was preoccupied with attention to function. Rather, he espoused a more well-rounded architectural education that also considered how buildings might express the values of their users.

These lessons resonated with his students, some of whom paved the way for the next era of postmodern architecture. Shellman’s pupils included Hugh Hardy ’54 *56, who supervised the renovation of Radio City Music Hall; Bartholomew Voorsanger ’60, architect of the National World War II Museum in New Orleans; and influential postmodern architect Robert Venturi ’47 *50, whose 1972 book Learning from Las Vegas, co-written with his design partner and wife Denise Scott Brown, radically transformed the field by relaxing the modernist architectural doctrine of stark glass and steel. “William Shellman possessed particular grace as a teacher,” said Venturi, who designed several Princeton buildings. “Many of us at Princeton learned from him about how to look at beautiful buildings with our eyes, hearts, and minds, and free of dogma.”

Shellman also practiced what he preached, designing several houses in Princeton, including his own on McCosh Circle near Lake Carnegie, to which he invited his students for lunch and often regaled them with his favorite recording of Gregorio Allegri’s hymn, “Miserere.” He also built houses as far afield as Georgia and South Carolina, and even built a garden in Spain for Princeton clients.

While Shellman asserted that Princeton’s Gothic revival buildings couldn’t instill democratic values, he believed that his alma mater, the University of Virginia, could foster democracy through Thomas Jefferson’s design for an “academical village” intended to facilitate discussion and community. Despite his reverence for Jefferson’s design, Shellman’s chief resource for his instruction, according to Pyle, was “the Princeton campus itself, a splendidly varied and eminently available trove of historical and historical-seeming architecture, landscape, and planning.”

To Shellman’s mind, one could only learn by experiencing as much architecture as possible, whether it was walking among the archways of Princeton or the grand boulevards of Paris and the Spanish Steps of Rome. “A man who can recover these and thousands of other images of previous sensory experience can select the tiny items that satisfy programmatic needs,” Shellman once argued in a lecture quoted by Pyle. “The sum or addition of these choices can add up to a new set of relationships, a new order.” By planting the seeds of postmodernism, he indeed created a new order.