Few architects have left as large a mark on the city as Roy Harrover, who passed away on December 12th at the age of 88. His masterpiece, Memphis International Airport, built in 1963, has long been considered one of our region’s most beautiful buildings, with its distinctive martini-glass columns fronting the main concourse. Thanks to his concept, Mud Island, a former sandbar in the Mississippi River, was transformed into one of America’s most unusual destinations. The Memphis College of Art campus stands as a timeless design in Overton Park. Other local landmarks include The Church of the River, Goldsmith’s department store in East Memphis, Commerce Square downtown, and more than a hundred other projects.
Born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1928, Harrover studied architecture at Yale and moved to Memphis in 1955, where he formed a partnership with Leigh Williams and Bill Mann. Williams moved to Seattle, and the tiny firm of Harrover & Mann’s first projects were small ones — the snack bar for a downtown department store, small homes and schools in Arkansas and Mississippi. In 1958, however, they won the competition to build the Memphis College of Art, a building that has been called “one of the best and most enduring examples of early modern architecture in Memphis.”
When Bill Mann died of cancer in 1960, Harrover took over as sole architect, compiling an impressive portfolio of major projects. Constructed in 1963, Memphis International Airport garnered a National Design Award from Progressive Architecture and the National Award of Merit from the American Institute of Architects. The authors of Memphis: An Architectural Guide consider the structure “one of the architectural success stories of the city.” That same book described Harrover’s designs for Mud Island as “one of the finest architectural designs in the city’s history.”
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His impressive talents weren’t confined to Memphis. Other work included the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, the Sigma Chi fraternity house at Ole Miss, a resort at Reelfoot Lake, and hundreds of other projects over a career that spanned almost half a century. Harrover finally stepped away from the drawing board in 2000, spending his last days living quietly with his wife, the artist Stephanie Eggleston Harrover, in a surprisingly traditional home across from Overton Park. In a 2010 interview with this magazine, Roy Harrover summed up his achievements quite modestly: “We sure did a lot of nice work.”
The November 2010 issue of Memphis magazine features a complete profile: “The Man Who Built Memphis: The World of Roy Harrover.”
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