David S. Traub

David S. Traub was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1941. As a boy he admired the mansions in the countryside around the city and built imaginary cities and houses with wooden blocks. In 1959 he entered the architecture school of the University of Illinois, where visiting architects such as Aldo van Eyck, Jacob Bakema and Richard Neutra made a lasting impression; in his final year, with classmate John Duell, he won an award in the national Ruberoid Competition.

Music has run alongside architecture all his life. He began cello lessons at the age of ten in Louisville, and at Illinois he minored in music, playing in the orchestra and in chamber groups and studying privately with the cellist Robert Swenson, whom he counts with Louis Kahn among the great teachers of his life. While stationed in Hawaii he played as a member of the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra, and in Philadelphia he has gone on performing in orchestras and chamber ensembles, at times professionally. Music shaped his practice too: fellow musicians became clients, among them the pianists Gary Graffman and Susan Starr, the violinist Szymon Goldberg and the impresario Moe Septee. “I strive to bring architecture and structure to my music, and music and lyricism to my architecture. The one art has informed the other.”

A visit to Kahn’s Richards Medical Laboratories in 1961 decided his course. In 1964 he was accepted into Kahn’s Master’s Class at the University of Pennsylvania, among some twenty-five students from around the world, at the height of what became known as the Philadelphia School. He received his master’s degree in 1965 and stayed in Philadelphia.

He worked for Stonorov and Haws and for David Zuckerkandel, designing affordable housing and community centers in Atlantic City, before being drafted during the Vietnam War. The Army assigned him as an architect to the Corps of Engineers in Honolulu (1966–68), where he designed a non-denominational chapel at Waikiki Beach, received the Army Commendation Medal for a workshop facility in the Marshall Islands, and played cello in the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra.

On the recommendation of Robert Sauers, he joined Kahn’s office in 1970. Under Marshall Meyers he drafted details for the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth during its construction, and he worked on the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven as job captain, traveling with Kahn to supervise construction. He also taught at Temple University in 1970–71.

At the end of 1973 he opened his own office, first in partnership with Samir Mukherjee and from 1977 as David S. Traub Associates, Architects, Planners and Interior Designers. The office spent thirty-five years at 1704 Walnut Street, near Rittenhouse Square, and now works from the carriage house he restored at 2005 Cambridge Street. His practice has two sides: public work for the Department of Recreation and the Fairmount Park Commission, including some thirty recreation centers, often in poor neighborhoods; and private houses, additions, apartments and law offices. Of all of it, he counts his work for the City of Philadelphia as the most important.

He has long worked for historic preservation in Philadelphia and in Louisville. With John Dowlin he co-founded Save Our Sites, and his restorations on St. Albans Place earned an award from the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia. For the city’s 1982 Tercentenary he made the photographic exhibit “Philadelphia, the Concealed City,” documenting its narrow streets, small squares and hidden gardens. He is a member of the American Institute of Architects and the Society of Architectural Historians, and a contributor to the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania.

From 2007 to 2011 he studied playwriting with the Philadelphia playwright and director Ed Shockley. He has written three plays, Lincoln in Louisville, Woodford Place and Train to Essex Junction, which have been read and performed in Louisville and Philadelphia (see Writings).

David S. Traub on Wikipedia