Nowland Van Powell: Eccentric Eclectic of the Modern Era
by David Royer

William Nowland Van Powell was an artist above all else.  A highly successful dilettante in the architectural trade, he made a practice of placing aesthetics at the forefront of his designs.  Throughout his 73 years, the independent, always self-assured architect managed continually to stay on the cutting edge of architectural trends while gaining a reputation as a respected painter, remarking at the end of his career that he "never did anything he didn't want to do."

Powell was born in Memphis in 1904 and grew up in a middle-class Midtown house on Harbert.  His father, one of thelast steamboat captains on the Mississippi, imparted to his son a love of ships that would become the dominant theme of his artwork in his later years.  It was architecture, however, that paid the bills.  His idols: Andrea Palladio and Robert Adam.  His professional career began early, at the age of 16, when he dropped out of school after 9th grade to work as an architectural draftsman.

Over the next few years, Powell quickly worked his way up in the trade.  One of his notable early designs is the Farnsworth Building at Main and Union, now home of the Memphis Business Journal, which he co-designed with E. L. Harrison in 1927.  The Art Deco mid-rise reflects the architect's contemporary attitude toward design and fascination with the modern.  Form didn't necessarily follow function to Powell.  In fact, it rarely did.  Decorative detailing, regardless of the building's purpose, was the signature of his work.

Still in his twenties, Powell, again with Harrison, designed Fairview Junior High School at the corner of Central and East Parkway in 1930 to great public acclaim. Fairview was absolutely the most modern public school of its day, both in design and engineering, and remains today "the city's finest Art Deco structure" according to Eugene Johnson, author of Memphis: An Architectural Guide.   In addition to grandiose touches such as relief carvings representing Night and Day and the city of the future, Fairview was also the first Memphis school to be fully fireproofed and equipped with a fire alarm.

Powell left Memphis in 1933 to practice in St. Louis for four years, but returned to work for the firm of George Mahan in 1937.  Mahan and his partner, Everett Woods, had taken over the firm of  Neander Woods after Woods' departure to New York in 1912.  Long acknowledged as one of the most inventive and prolific architectural firms in the city, they later moved into commercial design, and Powell jumped right to work designing the Peabody Hotel Skyway ballroom in 1938.  A year later, he and Mahan collaborated on one of the grandest houses in the city, Harry Schmeiser's Elizabethan dream castle at 4225 Walnut Grove.

As fashions changed over the next 30 years, Powell always stayed on top.  His eclectic repertoire ran the gamut from the gone-but-not-forgotten Venetian Gothic excess of the 1927 Memphis Steam Laundry building on Jefferson, to the charming "Main Street America" replica inside the Chickasaw Oaks Mall, one of his last designs, built in 1972.  

The brutal "modernization" of downtown Memphis in the 1950s and '60s took its toll on Powell's work.  He, along with many other architects of the time, was responsible for some aesthetically questionable statements like the decision to cover the 1901 Goldsmith's Department store in pink porcelain panels.  However, even in later years his work held the same verve as his early Art Deco successes.

What was possibly his most interesting work came in 1963, when he designed the interior of Memphis businessman Hoyt Wooten's underground bomb shelter, a structure so expansive it ranks today as the largest private bomb shelter in the world.  Wooten, an engineer and entrepreneur, designed the 5,600-square-foot underground bunker and built it underneath his Whitehaven house at a cost of $120,000.  Its vast array of high-tech features included a worldwide radio communications center, a refrigerated morgue, special generators and seven-and-a-half watt light  bulbs designed and built by Wooten himself.

After the engineering was complete, Powell, a friend of Wooten, took on the task of designing the interior of the shelter, working to create a comfortable and efficient space in which a large family could live for years after the end of the world.  His resulting ultra-modern design would make Austin Powers'  Dr. Evil feel at home.  Newspaper articles of the time describe the living room  "painted cheerful coral, or grayish vermilion, with a rug of grayish-tan, centered with a green table tennis setup."  In the plastic screens which opened into the women's bathroom, "butterflies are pressed into the plastic.  The men get ferns and maple leaves."  Natural colored fluorescent tubes set behind frosted glass give the effect of sunlight through the windows, while some windows are painted with scenes of the outside world (pre-Armageddon) to make inhabitants feel at home.  "Color and comfort" were "deftly blended with efficiency," journalists noted.  Powell was in his final decade of work by this time due to failing eyesight, and the Wooten bomb shelter perfectly capped his career with a masterpiece of "quasi-futuristic" design.

After gradual retirement from architecture in the 1970s, he returned to his first love, art, and garnered acclaim as a painter that exceeded his prior reputation as an architect.  His paintings of ships and naval battles sold for thousands, and his name spread worldwide after he painted Christmas cards for Vice President Spiro Agnew and family in 1971.  

Nowland Van Powell, a talented eccentric who boasted that he had never owned a television and that his most productive hours were between 5 p.m. and 5 a.m., died in 1977 still at the height of his productivity at age 73.