News: Karl Fred Kamrath Architecture Collection Donated to UT Austin

The heirs of Houston architect Karl Fred Kamrath (1911-1988) donated manuscript materials and other documents pertaining to Kamrath's professional career to the University of Texas at Austin Libraries. These materials, produced in the Houston offices of MacKie and Kamrath include sketchbooks, photographic prints, negatives, slides, drawings, papers, and books. Of particular interest is the MacKie and Kamrath job list that documents 1,000 projects between 1938-1983. This collection joins the Karl Kamrath Library of books, magazines, and ephemera relating to architect Frank Lloyd Wright that was donated to the Libraries in 1987.

MacKie and Kamrath were among the first Houston architects to design modernist buildings. After Kamrath met architect Frank Lloyd Wright in 1946, he devoted himself to Wright’s Usonian architecture. Many of MacKie and Kamrath's projects received national recognition and their buildings are consistently Wrightian in character. The Kamrath Collection joins nearly one hundred other archival collections consisting of more than a quarter of a million drawings and thousands of photographs and related materials in the Alexander Architectural Archive and more than 88,000 volumes in the Architecture and Planning Library.

“The Kamrath Collection enhances our holdings relating to organic architecture,” states Architecture and Planning Librarian Janine Henri. “The University of Texas at Austin is already a primary location for research on Wrightian architecture, with a combination of scholarly expertise on the faculty and a concentration of rare books and archival materials found at no other institution of higher education. Generations of scholars will now have an incomparable foundation upon which to base future research and study on America's best known architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Karl Kamrath, his most prominent advocate in Texas.”

Once processed and cataloged, the Kamrath collection will be available by appointment within the Alexander Architectural Archive.