1948 APLA Alumna Looks Back on Trailblazing 50-year Architecture Career

At 100 years old, the Atlanta resident reflected on her long, varied and fulfilling architectural career that spanned 50 years and inspired other women to pursue careers in the discipline.

Waggoner grew up in Savannah, Georgia, graduating from Savannah High School in 1944. Although her high school yearbook expressed her ambition to major in her favorite subject—mathematics—she chose to study architecture at Auburn, following her passion for drawing houses and floor plans as a child. To combine her interests, Waggoner pursued a structural track within the architecture program at what would later become the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture (APLA), completing the five-year curriculum in just four years.

When she started Auburn, Waggoner was one of six first-year women in the program, a disproportionate ratio of male to female students as many of the university’s usual male students were serving in the military. Following World War II, her senior-level cohort included five women and 38 men. Waggoner remembered collaborating well with her male classmates, but when the men worked together on assigned projects until late in the night, she recalled being unable to participate as she was subject to the curfew in women’s residence halls.

While at Auburn, she met Charles Waggoner, a 1947 architecture graduate completing his degree after returning from military service in Italy. Shortly following her graduation in 1948, the Waggoners married and moved to Charles’ hometown of Hattiesburg, Mississippi to begin their careers. After initially working for the firm Hearon and McCleskey, Julia and Charles formed their own firm, Waggoner Associates, Architects. She became a registered architect in 1954, while raising her young family in the house she and Charles designed together.

In response to the urgent need for more classrooms to educate children of the postwar baby boom, the Waggoners became part of a consortium of architects in Hattiesburg that designed and renovated public school buildings. This work exposed them to the gross disparities in conditions and funding for the segregated Black and white schools across Mississippi, leading them to a long, varied path of civil rights activism. The Waggoners became advocates for school desegregation.

Throughout most of her career, Waggoner earned less money than her male colleagues. While working with the Associated School Architects in the 1950s, she received $2.25 per hour while the four men in the group received between $3.00 and $3.75.

In 1965, the Waggoners joined Brewer, Skewes and Godbold, Architects and Engineers—later Brewer, Godbold & Associates—one of the state’s largest firms. While there, they designed many institutional buildings, ranging from academic, athletic and residential facilities for universities to public libraries, courthouses and medical buildings. Meanwhile, Julia served as the president of the Clarksdale Business and Professional Women’s Club.

Charles died in 1979 following a move to Jackson, and Julia continued her career at the Mississippi Bureau of Buildings, where she had responsibility for reviewing proposed plans for state buildings.  Her expertise in building codes and the structural aspects of architecture equipped her for this work, which often took the form of annotations to plans made with her legendary brown pencil.

When Waggoner retired in 1998—fifty years after her graduation from Auburn—she received many tributes from her colleagues. One wrote, “Architects across the state speak of you with respect. You will be missed by all.” Another wrote, “I admire your grace and skill in this wonderful profession. Thank you for your guidance and encouragement.” A third colleague wrote, “Because of your pioneering spirit, my daughter can grow up to be an architect.”

Values that informed her buildings—integrity, intelligence, good judgment and generosity—have shaped her life over the past century.

In designing buildings, Waggoner emphasized that “functionality was necessary for good design.” She believes that, above all, buildings were to “serve the needs of the people who used them.”