An Appreciation of Curt Moody, by Wil Haygood

Wil Haygood, an author and Scholar-In-Residence at Miami University (Ohio), is a native of Columbus.

Curtis J. Moody (1950-2024), the product of a working-class family, came to prominence as a nationally-renowned architect through gritty self-determination and shrewd business acumen. His rising success captured the attention of scores of civic leaders far and wide who hired him for his modernist architectural and design talents. His firm built libraries, sports centers, hospital units, hotels; colleges and universities are dotted with his designs. One of the last projects he was working on before his death at the age of 73 was the Program, Athletic and Activity Center for the Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, scheduled to open in 2026.

In a sweeping four-decade career, Curt Moody not only became a prominent architect, but he also inspired a legion of younger Black architects in a field that has not always been welcoming to them. In a 2022 study, it was revealed that only 2% of the nation’s architects are Black.

Born in 1950, young Curt grew up in a racially mixed neighborhood on the northside of Columbus, Ohio. Between grade school and junior high, he picked up a unique hobby: collecting pop sickle sticks and using them to design miniature houses and buildings by gluing them together. Classmates were in awe of both his concentration and dedication to this particular hobby. Shortly after entering Indianola Junior High School, he began winning school contests for his model designs. One of the ribbons he would come to win was from a competition at the wildly popular Ohio State Fair.

Most of the adults in Curt’s neighborhood worked in either factory, retail, or post office jobs. But John Penn, father of one of Moody’s classmates, was a draftsman, a kind of assistant to an architect. He and Penn talked hours about what it would take to become not just a draftsman – but an architect. Young Curt had found his inspiration.

In 1969 Curt Moody entered The Ohio State University. The immediate years ahead would prove to be an explosive time – racially and culturally – in the university’s history. In May of 1970 Ohio State shuttered for almost two weeks

because of anti-Vietnam War demonstrations. As well, Black students began demanding that the school increase its Black faculty, offer more courses related to the nation’s political and racial history, and pay more attention to the retention of minority students. The atmosphere was a minefield for a first-generation Black student like Curt, but he exhibited an uncommon discipline when it came to focus: He not only got into the school’s challenging architecture program, but he made the varsity basketball team as a sophomore and would play on that team for three consecutive years.

Architecture was certainly not the traditional academic route of most varsity athletes. “The competition was fierce” Elton Jones, one of the few Black architecture students alongside Curt, came to recall. “The professors would post projects on a wall, and a jury would come in and judge them.”

While he received little playing time on the Fred Taylor-coached basketball team, Curt refused to sulk. While visiting other basketball arenas, he’d walk around their hallways and, in his mind, imagine how he would someday build and design sports arenas. The pop sickle sticks would be moving around in his imagination again. John Penn, the Black draftsman with his own thwarted dreams of becoming an architect, was still there, hovering and imploring him: You can become an architect! “I’d even be looking at the arena during games when I was sitting at the end of the bench,” Curt would come to confide.

Curt Moody graduated from Ohio State in 1973 with an architecture degree.

The nation was only five years removed from the last of President Lyndon Johnson’s epochal civil rights bills (1964, 1965, and 1968) that would begin to alter the racial shape of America. Still, the doors at architecture firms were hardly swinging open for young Black architects.

But in Columbus at the time – and soon thereafter – a cadre of Black individuals were making inroads in the fields of law, politics, construction, and social activism. Among them were Ben Espy, Larry James, Edna Bryce, Lewis Smoot Sr., Michael Coleman, Otto Beatty Jr., and Amos Lynch. And soon enough they all began casting glances in the direction of Curt Moody, who had dared start his very own architecture firm.

Amos Lynch was publisher of the Columbus Call & Post newspaper, geared toward news directly affecting the Black community. Lynch knew a good story when he saw one, and in 1982, when Curt Moody formed his own firm, it was a good story indeed. Lynch proceeded to assign a multitude of stories to be written about the young architect. A few years after starting his firm, Curt Moody joined forces with Howard Nolan, a Dayton native, military veteran, and an engineer. In Curt Moody’s thinking, he could gamer more job offers with an engineer, creating a kind of hybrid model for his company. The two Black men formed Moody Nolan Architecture and Engineering LTD. More stories about the company and their multi-million- dollar contracts began appearing in newspapers and architecture journals around the country.

Across the years, the firm’s reach of designs stretched across every region of America: the Nashville Soccer Club Training Facility, Michigan State University’s Health and Wellness Center, University of Cincinnati’s Health Sciences Building, Omni Hotel at the Seaport in Boston, Morgan State University’s Science and Research Complex, Alabama A & M’s University Event Center. The list grew so long it had to be abbreviated at events where the firm was being honored: University of Illinois at Chicago Mile Square Health Center, University of Pittsburgh’s Recreation and Wellness Center, Miami University (Ohio) Clinical Health Sciences and Wellness Facility, Albany State University’s Student Center, Indiana University’s Madam Walker Legacy Center.

Handsome coffee-table sized books about the buildings the firm designed were produced and sent to other architectural firms: They were no longer just the new­ cats-on-the-block, they were thriving, and had become the biggest minority-owned architecture firm in the nation. (When Howard Nolan passed away in 2011, the firm kept his name.)

No matter how many buildings sprouted around the nation built by his firm, Curt Moody was enormously proud of the buildings erected or renovated on the campus of his alma mater, The Ohio State University. It is impossible to drive around the campus and not spot a Moody-Nolan building. Among them: the Energy Advancement and Innovation Center, the Mars G. Fontana Labs, the Pelatonia Research Center, the James Cancer Hospital and Solove Research Institute, the Don Scott Airport, the Ty Tucker Tennis Center, the Covelli Center and Jennings Wrestling Facility, the Recreation and Physical Activity Center, and the Jerome Schottenstein Center, the scene of men’s and women’s basketball games as well as other sports. The latter is considered one of the snazziest venues of its type anywhere in the nation. “Curt doesn’t necessarily have a particular ‘style,”‘ Zena Howard, also an architect, told Columbus Monthly magazine. “He certainly is a modernist. He does it from the lens of things that make architecture great – colors, tonality, all the things we define as beauty… His style is grounded in values of great architecture. It is modern and progressive.”

Through the years the firm’s awards kept coming. In 2021 they received the American Institute of Architects’ Architecture Firm Award. It is the highest award the AIA presents in recognition of a firm’s “architecture practices.”

Curt Moody is survived by his wife, Elaine – his dutiful fishing partner on and around Lake Erie – and three sons, David, Curtis Jr., and Jonathan. In 2020 Jonathan became CEO of Moody Nolan.

During the last two years year of his celebrated life, Curt Moody had begun spending time at the site of the long-shuttered Indianola Junior High, the school which he attended. The school – more than 100 years old – is believed to have been the first junior high in the nation. It is also a historic landmark. A major renovation project had been announced and the bidding was known to be quite competitive.

Curt Moody wanted the job. It was, after all, the junior high where a counselor had tried to steer him away from dreaming of a career in architecture. Fond of stories, he told the interview committee a few stories: The story of growing up near the junior high itself, the story of how he kept pushing his architecture dream up the hill. Moody Nolan won the job.

Many, of course, are left to now ponder what would have become of Curt Moody’s life had he been given more years. And yet, there is another dimension to consider: He lived his life as a man in full. He now joins the pantheon of not only Ohio State greats, but also of a nation’s significant architects. In his wake, he leaves things of beauty and light, structures that will endure with the passage of time, and beyond time.