Lion and lover, artist and architect, musician and all around world class human being
Richard T. Reep Sr., photo taken by me at age 8, about 1968. He was 35 at the time and taught architecture at Clemson University.
My dad had an incredible impact on those around him and his passing has left a huge empty spot. I can only briefly summarize him here. He was born in 1933, during the early phase of the Great Depression, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the last of three children. He grew up in Minneapolis and went on to University of Minnesota, graduating in 1955. He really wanted to be a musician, and was a talented trumpet player, making his own jazz album in Minneapolis when he was still young.
Dad enlisted in ROTC and served in the US Army Corps of Engineers, mostly in Korea rebuilding bridges after the Korean War. After he returned he met my mom and they got married. Dad was talented enough to have his portfolio accepted by both Harvard and Penn, selecting University of Pennsylvania in 1961 for graduate school taught by Louis Kahn.
He told me this just before he died. In 1962, returning to Minneapolis, "I went back to my old job, and was designing a garage addition to an A-frame house by my boss.* I was having a lot of trouble with it, as Kahn's voice kept echoing in my head. 'Why did you do this?' 'What does that mean?' Then, my classmate had gone to Clemson to teach, and invited me down for a visit."
His classmate apparently offered him an Assistant Professor position on the spot, and we all moved to South Carolina for six years. This photo was taken when we lived in faculty housing on campus, and he usually walked to work. We used to walk to the Clemson House together on Sunday morning, and he would get a newspaper and a coffee, and read me the comics on a bench.
My dad was both a professor and a practitioner, and the lure of practice pried him away from Clemson to move to St. Louis in 1969. We stayed there for several years, but even then the growth hotspot was Florida, while St. Louis seemed to be swirling in midwestern tension.** We moved to Jacksonville in 1972 and he worked there until finally retiring around 2018, with his last project being a wheelchair elevator at Florida Junior College's Kent Campus, a campus he designed in the seventies.
Dad was a lion, becoming Florida AIA President, travelling worldwide, speaking at conferences, and designing iconic projects that have had huge impact on their communities. He received so many awards it would be difficult to even know them all. In 2022, the Jacksonville AIA honored him with the Henry J. Klutho Award for a long career and contribution to Jacksonville's skyline.
Dad was a lover, and the love of his life was my Mom. They loved each other with their whole hearts. This was no ordinary love and it set me up terribly to expect the same sort of thing. My brother, my mother and I all feel the loss as if there was a huge empty hole.
Richard Reep Sr. will be honored in a memorial service at Hardage-Giddens Oaklawn in Jacksonville on November 23, 2024. Come by about noon if you'd like.
-Richard Reep
*Brooks Cavin, most likely, as he worked for Cavin before he left for Penn.
**Read Jonathan Franzen's The Twenty-Seventh City for a taste of it. He had his own run-in with the mob.
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