William R. Mitchell, Jr.

 

Bill Mitchell is an Atlanta native and resident, and a ninth-generation Georgian.  He is the author of sixteen architectural histories and founder/president of the Southern Architecture Foundation, Inc. (SAF), which is collaborating with the Atlanta Historical Society to establish the William R. Mitchell, Jr Southern Architecture Foundation Archives at the Atlanta History Center.  An incorporating trustee of the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation in 1973, he published with the Georgia Trust in 1997 a major monograph on Atlanta’s great early-twentieth century classical revival architect, J. Neel Reid (1885-1926), which funds the Trust’s annual J. Neel Reid Prize for architectural study abroad.  For the nonprofit SAF, Inc., he has produced two books, The Architecture of James Means, Georgia Classicist (a Neel Reid protégé) and a reprint of a rare 1931 publication Southern Architecture Illustrated, for which he wrote a detailed new preface.  His 1984 book on another Neel Reid protégé, Lewis Edmund Crook, Jr. (1896-1967), of the firm of Ivey & Crook, includes data about some forty marble-clad, Italian Renaissance buildings that Crook and his firm designed and supervised for Atlanta’s Emory University, of which Mitchell is a class of 1960 alumnus.  His monograph on architect and craftsman Edward Vason Jones (1909-1980) of Albany, Georgia, a modern neoclassicist and connoisseur and collector of neoclassical Americana, appeared in 1995.  Edward Jones was the initial architect and consultant for the US Department of State Diplomatic Reception Rooms in Washington, D.C., which led to Jones’ work at the White House during the Nixon and Carter administrations.  Among Mitchell’s other books are Classic Savannah (1987), Classic Atlanta (1991), and Classic New Orleans (1993):  for the latter publication he was invited to join the Author’s Guild of America.

Educated at Atlanta’s Westminster Boys School and Emory University, he later spent three years at the University of Delaware, where he earned a Master’s degree specializing in architectural history, and there he also pursued studies in the history of American decorative arts at the nearby Henry Francis duPont Winterthur Museum.  A 2001 review of Mitchell’s J. Neel Reid, Architect includes this high praise:  “This publication is by far the finest architectural monograph to be recently published, and is the standard for all others to emulate”.  This appeared in The Classicist, No. 6 of the Institute of Classical Architecture, which in that issue also warmly reviewed his Edward Vason Jones, Architect, Connoisseur and Collector:  “William Mitchell’s beautifully produced monograph provides a definitive account of Jones’ devotion to the classical tradition of the South.  This is another of the author’s excellent monographs to be recently published, and promises to become the standard for the serious student of the classical tradition”.