The National Building Museum announces two major exhibitions that, for the first time, will be presented in conversation with one another, illuminating how architecture, education, and collaboration shaped Black American life and the nation’s shared history.  

Opening February 28, A Better Life for Their Children: Julius Rosenwald, Booker. T Washington and the 4,978 Schools that Changed America, photographs and stories by Andrew Feiler, and The Tuskegee Chapel: Paul Rudolph x Fry & Welch, curated by architect Helen Brown Bechtel, together reveal the built environment as a powerful force for dignity, aspiration, and community transformation.  

“These exhibitions tell distinct stories, but they share a common truth: buildings are never just structures, they are vessels for memory, resilience, and possibility,” said Aileen Fuchs, president and executive director of the National Building Museum. “This is the first time these exhibitions are being experienced side by side, and that dialogue allows visitors to see how collaboration and education helped build pathways toward opportunity and lasting change.”  

Together, the exhibitions demonstrate how place becomes meaningful when animated by human intentions and collaboration. From the rural schoolhouses that transformed educational access across the segregated South to the rebuilt Tuskegee Chapel that embodied ambition and self-determination during the Civil Rights Movement, these projects show how communities shaped their futures through design, labor, and collective vision. In both the Rosenwald Schools and the Tuskegee Chapel, architecture is not a neutral container, but an active participant in history, shaped by the people who built it and shaping generations in turn.  

A Better Life for Their Children: Julius Rosenwald, Booker. T Washington and the 4,978 Schools that Changed America 

Beginning in 1912, philanthropist Julius Rosenwald and educator Booker T. Washington forged one of the most consequential partnerships of the 20th century. Their collaboration led to the construction of 4,978 schools for Black children across fifteen southern and border states, laying the groundwork for civic leadership, the Great Migration, and the Civil Rights Movement. Notable Rosenwald School alumni include John Lewis, Maya Angelou, Medgar Evers, and Eugene Robinson. 

The Rosenwald Schools required shared investment: local Black communities raised funds and contributed labor and land, while Rosenwald’s philanthropy provided major support and required local school boards to maintain the schools and pay teachers. This early model of public-private partnership reshaped educational opportunity across the South.  

The exhibition features 22 black-and-white photographs by Andrew Feiler, architectural drawings, newly created models by artist Mark Wittig, an introductory film, and a recreated period classroom environment.  

“The Rosenwald Schools are one of the most overlooked stories of American architecture and moral imagination,” said Andrew Feiler. “These were not just school buildings, they were acts of belief in a better future, built through partnership across divides. To see them in conversation with the Tuskegee Chapel helps paint a full picture of how education, place and collaboration together became forces of liberation.” 

The Tuskegee Chapel: Paul Rudolph x Fry & Welch 

After the original Tuskegee Chapel, designed by pioneering Black architect Robert R. Taylor, was destroyed by fire in 1957, its rebuilding became a profound act of collective effort and architectural translation. 

Modernist architect Paul Rudolph conceived a bold new design, but it was African American architects Louis Fry, Sr., and Col. John Welch who translated Rudolph’s concrete vision into brick, integrating it into Tuskegee’s historic campus and drawing on the extraordinary skill of Tuskegee’s masonry students and alumni. 

Constructed almost entirely by students using 1.2 million bricks made from Alabama clay, the original Taylor chapel embodied Tuskegee’s enduring pedagogy of “learning by doing.” It served not only as an architectural marvel but as a site of dignity, worship, collective reflection, and self-determination during the Jim Crow era. The Rudolph and Fry&Welch chapel carried these same values forward in its new Modernist form. 

Key features of the exhibition include models of both Taylor’s original 1898 chapel and Rudolph’s redesign, architectural photography by Ezra Stoller, photographs by Chester Higgins from 1969 and 2024, a robotically-laid brick sculpture by Myles Sampson, digitized architectural drawings, large scale murals, and an interview with Major L. Holland, the last living member of the Fry & Welch design team. 

“The Tuskegee Chapel is fundamentally a story of partnership,” said curator Helen Bechtel. “It is about designers and builders, educators and students, materials and vision, all coming together to create something larger than the sum of its parts. Placing this story in conversation with the Rosenwald Schools allows visitors to see how community building and collaboration have shaped the American landscape.”