P. Whitney Webb

Paul Whitney Webb was an architect who was born in Hamden, Connecticut, USA to Paul and Anne (Pinkney) Webb. His father was an attorney, and his mother was a homemaker. He was the second of five children and the first of two sons. He graduated from Yale University in 1946 and the Yale School of Architecture in 1947. He earned numerous academic honors and awards including the Woolley Scholarship to go to the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, completing his studies there in 1949. He later lectured on architecture at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, USA. In the 1950s and '60s, he worked with architects Edward Durrell Stone, Kenneth Franzheim, Max Urbahn, and Frederick G. Frost Jr. In 1970, he joined Giffels & Rossetti of Detroit, Michigan. By the 1970s he had established a firm under his own name in Paris, Kentucky. In 1977 he merged this firm with an engineering firm to create the Webb-Dillehay Design Group. At the end of 1979 he became a board member of the American Institute of Architects. Webb strongly believed in the dictum that form should follow function, and he was influenced by architects who built massive modernistic, institutional structures. He championed these "megastructures" and dismissed much of the orange-brick architecture found on many traditional American college campuses as "early Halloween". Buildings he designed included Stanford University Medical School and Hospital, Meadowbrook Hospital in East Meadow, New York and some buildings on the campus of Niagara University in Lewiston, New York. He married Marjorie Ann Skinner during the 1950s. They had two children, Michael and Mary. He subsequently married Lillie Franzheim McCullar in August 1981. She was the daughter of Webb's former employer, Kenneth Franzheim. He lived with his second wife, who was a race horse breeder, on her farm near Paris, Kentucky. She died on 18 May 1996. He died in Chevy Chase, Maryland on 31 Mar 1999.