Arthur Fehr, F.A.I.A. (November 19, 1904 - January 23, 1969) was an American architect who turned in mid-career from his traditional architectural education to the Modern or International style and was one of its first practitioners in Texas.
Early life
Arthur Herman Kilian Fehr was born to Herman Benno Fehr and Selma Ottilie Kilian Fehr in Austin, Texas. He was the second of three sons and reared in lower-middle class, ethnic surroundings. His father was a barber and barber supply salesman. Though both parents were native-born Americans the household language was German. The social focus was the extended family of their local Lutheran church.
Education and early career
In his teens Fehr wanted to be a chemist. But a drafting teacher in his vocational school, noting his ability at sketching and cartooning, encouraged him to try architecture, and he enrolled in the University of Texas architecture program. After receiving his degree in 1925 he worked for architect Harvey P. Smith in San Antonio. Smith's work was in the Beaux Arts and Spanish Colonial styles, and under him Fehr worked on the first building of Lutheran Concordia College of Texas (now Concordia University). This was Kilian Hall, named for his own maternal great-grandfather, Jan Kilian, the pastoral leader of a group of Wendish immigrants to Texas in 1855. The building's design was later cited by the Architects' Guild of Texas, and for Fehr this was an early taste of peer recognition.
In 1926, on the urging of his university professors, Fehr left Texas for New York and worked as a draftsman for Kenneth M. Murchison, whose better known designs were in the Beaux Art tradition. He also took a short and pennywise tour of England and the Continent during the summer of 1927, from which he returned (in his own words) "[a] better American and a much better Texan". While in New York he attended night courses at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design, Columbia University and New York University. He returned to San Antonio in 1928 to work as chief draftsman and designer for Smith on various projects ranging from the officers club at an Army air base to the restoration of San Antonio's 18th-century Spanish Governor's Palace. In 1931 the Depression interrupted his progress, but after two years of infrequent work he rejoined Smith in the survey and initial restoration work on San Antonio's 18th-century Spanish mission of San José y San Miguel de Aguayo.
This led to Fehr, at age 29, being offered the position of park architect-foreman for the National Park Service (NPS) at the beginning of 1934. He was assigned to the new Bastrop State Park project near Austin, part of the state's nascent parks system in the era of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). From 1934 to 1937 he designed, supervised and participated in the construction of all the structures there as well as at the adjoining Buescher State Park near Smithville. These were in the proscribed "rustic" or "pioneer" style favored by the NPS at that time. He also designed and supervised the making of furniture and other decorative fittings used not only at Bastrop but throughout the Texas parks system. Other than some early student commissions Bastrop was the first work of Fehr's to be executed in his own right, and it was soon noted. In Park and Recreation Structures, originally published by the NPS in 1938, the author Good commented that the Bastrop guest cabins "add up to a total effect that is extraordinarily individual and attractive".
In the fall of 1936, towards the end of Fehr's tenure with the park service, came also his first published foray into "modernism": a modest picnic table with a space frame of copper and brass plumbing and a concrete slab top. In his 1938 NPS book Good noted that it was "novel rather than revolutionary" but also an example of "some recent experimentation [within the parks service]…loosed from the fetters of tradition to acknowledge the claims of new materials and methods".
In 1997, Bastrop State Park was designated a National Historic Landmark. Of the hundreds of CCC park projects under the New Deal, it is one of only five so cited to date.
Return to Austin
By late 1937 Fehr had completed the bulk of the Bastrop work. Though offered a new position in the NPS as a furniture designer, he resigned in early August of that year and opened his own practice in Austin. This first office was in the back of the studio of the Swiss-born woodcarver Peter Mansbendel, whom Fehr had met in the 1920s through the Austin Saengerrunde, a German singing club.