Ernest J. Kump, Jr. (1911-1999), who began his career in Fresno, achieved early recognition within a small circle of American modernists as one the most advanced architectural thinkers of the late 1930s and early 1940s. Kump initiated his experiments in modernism working with architect and engineer Charles H. Franklin (1891-1956), who hired Kump as a draftsman in 1935.
Kump was born in Bakersfield on December 29, 1911, and was raised by his mother. His architect father had abandoned the family in 1914. The senior Kump then settled in Fresno. During his teens, young Kump drafted for pioneer California architect J. N. Saffell (1858-1936), and studied under noted architectural educator Clarence Cullimore FAIA (1885-1963) at Kern County Union High School in Bakersfield. After taking his undergraduate degree at Berkeley in 1932, he began graduate studies at Harvard for one year. Lacking funds to continue, he returned to California to work for his classically trained father, who promptly fired him over conflicts arising from his son's modern ideas, which the senior Kump characterized as "chicken coop architecture."
Just as the younger Kump found himself unemployed, Franklin received a commission for a modern home for prominent Fresno merchant Sam Pudlin. Franklin, having witnessed him being fired by his father, hired young Kump, a passionate modernist, to design it. Pudlin, who had attended the Century of Progress International Exposition at Chicago in 1933, had been greatly impressed by the avant-garde housing types displayed there. He called for a home in the European modern tradition. Prior to meeting with Franklin, Pudlin interviewed architect Richard Neutra, the expatriate Austrian modernist then practicing in Los Angeles. However, unable to reach a satisfactory fee agreement with Neutra, he gave the commission to Franklin. The Pudlin home set a dramatic new standard for design simplicity along Fresno's prestigious North Van Ness Boulevard, a scenic avenue long identified with handsome Period Revival style residential architecture in the community. Following the Pudlin project, a series of prestigious residential commissions, clustered on North Wilson Avenue in the Figarden district, came to Franklin's office. These were completed near striking side-by-side homes Franklin and Kump designed for themselves. From the same period, the duo's 1936 Fresno School Administration Building, designed for Allied Architects, a Depression-era architectural collaborative, was a "gem" in the Dutch Modern style. This expressive building was greatly admired statewide at the time of its construction..
The firm of Franklin & Kump, with offices in Fresno and Bakersfield, was announced in 1937. One of its earliest advanced designs was Fowler Grammar School (1937), which Kump purportedly submitted as his Harvard University master's thesis. The completion of Kump's graduate degree was supervised by Walter Gropius, the famed German Bauhaus modernist who had only recently been appointed head of the Harvard architecture program. Other early innovative Franklin & Kump projects followed, including Bakersfield's impressive Sill Residence (1937) and the extraordinary Sill Building (1938). Acalanes High School (1939) in Lafayette, California, and Exeter High School (1941) were early examples of the much imitated "finger-plan" campus model also developed by the firm at that time.
Franklin and Kump shot into national prominence when their radically modern Fresno City Hall (1941) was selected by the Museum of Modern Art in New York as one of the most significant American structures built between 1932 and 1944. During World War II, both men left Fresno for the Bay Area, Franklin to work for the Corps of Engineers and Kump to work for the Navy as an architect. They subsequently formed the new firm of Franklin, Kump & Falk with offices in San Francisco. This firm's legacy is preserved in the San Joaquin Valley in the high-profile United Air Lines [sic] Airport Terminal at Merced. First published in 1947, this advanced International style facility received highest honors in the annual awards competition sponsored by the influential journal Progressive Architecture in 1948.
Identified as "an altogether distinguished work," the Merced airport facility, along with Kump's Ordnance and Optical Shop for the U.S. Naval Shipyard in San Francisco (Kump & Falk), set benchmark standards for American design during the 1940s. Locally, the Merced terminal building signaled an evolutionary step forward, setting aside prewar modernistic idioms that characterized the 1930s city. Merced building projects such as Charles Butner's handsome Streamlined modernization of the Central Hotel, completed in 1939, best exemplify that modernistic era. Franklin, Kump & Falk's terminal building heralded the postwar trend toward an American International style that would ultimately dominate worldwide architectural thinking by the 1950s.
Kump, who had remained in San Francisco, formed a partnership with Mark Falk (1896-1965). During the late 1940s, Kump & Falk garnered a succession of awards and recognitions coinciding with Kump's increasing stature as a public spokesman for modern architecture. Notable among Kump's appearances was his high-profile presence at Princeton University's Bicentennial Conference in 1947. Identified then by Princeton as a "specialist in school architecture" and for "Fresno City Hall," Kump was selected to serve as a delegate to the university's now legendary symposium, Planning Man's Physical Environment. Joining Kump were Alvar Aalto, Serge Chermayeff, Sigfried Gideon, Walter Gropius, Philip Johnson, George Fred Keck, Richard Neutra, Konrad Wachsmann, Frank Lloyd Wright, William Wurster and other eminent practitioners and scholars.
Kump subsequently formed Ernest Kump Associates with offices in Palo Alto and New York. As an internationally recognized expert in school architecture, Kump was most closely associated with his 1962 design for Foothill College in Los Altos, California. The Foothill facility is considered a masterpiece of college campus planning and design. Included among Kump's other significant projects are De Anza College, Cupertino (1967) and Crown College, University of California, Santa Cruz (1967).
After retiring from active practice in the United States, Kump lived abroad and maintained a London office from which he continued working as an international architectural consultant. Until his death, Kump remained dedicated to his research on low-cost modular building systems for housing and community facilities in underdeveloped Third World countries. Ernest J. Kump, Jr., died in Zurich, Switzerland, on November 4, 1999.
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