Ernest J. Kump, Jr. was born in Bakersfield, California, on December 29, 1911, and was raised by his mother. His architect father, Ernest J. Kump, Sr., had abandoned the family in 1914 and settled in Fresno. In high school young Kump worked for architects J. N. Saffell and Clarence Cullimore in Bakersfield. After taking his degree at Berkeley in 1932, he attended graduate school at Harvard for one year. Lacking funds to continue, he returned to California to work for his classically-trained father, who promptly fired him because of his son's modern ideas. The elder Kump referred to his son's designs as "chicken coop architecture."
Shortly thereafter, Kump was hired as a draftsman by Charles H. Franklin. Franklin & Kump became partners in 1937. One of their earliest advanced designs was Fowler (Calif.) Grammar School (1937), which Kump purportedly submitted as his Harvard master's thesis at the request of Walter Gropius. The firm is recognized for originating the "finger plan" school model, examples of which can be seen at Edison High School in Fresno, California, and Exeter (Calif.) High School. Franklin & Kump shot into national prominence when their radically modern Fresno City Hall (1941) was selected by the Museum of Modern Art as one of the most significant American structures built between 1932 and 1944.
During World War II, Kump left Fresno for the Bay Area, to work for the Navy as an architect. After the war Kump formed the firm of Kump & Falk in San Francisco. He subsequently formed Ernest Kump Associates, with offices in Palo Alto and New York. An internationally recognized expert in school architecture, Kump is most closely associated with his 1962 design for Foothill Junior College in Los Altos, California. Ernest J. Kump, Jr., retired to Switzerland, where he died on November 4, 1999.
A more extensive biography of Ernest J. Kump, Jr., is also available
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Last modified: 10/8/00
