Roxanne Williamson

I was very fortunate to have Roxanne as my architectural history professor during my early years at university. She walked, conversed, and lectured with authority. During the Christmas season her blue Volvo always had a big red bow on the grille. She was seldom seen without a carousel of slides in her arms, and was a a huge proponent of the actual in-person experience of architecture as opposed to reading essays and looking at pictures in books and periodicals. “Context is everything.” This was an ongoing mantra of hers. She also had a love for history that was contagious, and somehow, being in a dark room, sitting on the well-padded seats of the Music Hall, where her lectures were given after lunch, most of us were rapt in attention instead of taking naps, which would have been typical with almost any other lecturer. This love of her surroundings prompted her to write a book (now out of print) detailing the architecture at the University of Texas in 1965. Her concise use of indeterminate words like confection, abomination, bread box, concussion, acid-dream…these all gave a better understanding of the buildings projected on the screen. This need for sharing her scholarship was interwoven through her career - in 1973 she published (the now out-of print volume) Austin, Texas: An American Architectural History. Through her proper Texan lectures, my mind was expanded and the need for seeing these places in person became somewhat of an obsession. The original Kimball Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas can not be described properly as it is such a unified structure (not so much now with the addition, but I have had the pleasure of seeing the museum both originally and altered). Having taught for so many years, she had to put her perception of American Architects and Architecture into a deeply insightful book, published IN 1991, after I’d graduated from UT.