Rockwell King DuMoulin

A resident of Toronto, Rev. DuMoulin accepted various position in Chicago and Cleveland between 1885 and 1899, eventually becoming Dean of the Diocese of Ohio and ex-officio rector of Trinity Cathedral in Cleveland in 1906.

Thus, DuMoulin spent his childhood in Cleveland and Gambier, Ohio with a Chicagoan mother and a Canadian father.

Rockwell King DuMoulin (January 31, 1906 – February 11, 1983) was an American architect and professor and department chair at the Rhode Island School of Design.

He was keenly interested in Modern style and developed a coastal vernacular architecture.

DuMoulin was born in Chicago, Illinois.

His parents were Ethel Rockwell King and Frank DuMoulin, an Episcopal minister.

His paternal grandfather, John Phillip DuMoulin, was the Church of England's Bishop of Nicaragua.

He attended Columbia University, receiving his A.B. in 1928.

While at Columbia, he was a member of the fraternity St. Anthony Hall and was managing editor of Jester, the campus newspaper.

Next, he studied architecture at École des Beaux-Arts at Fontainebleau, graduating in 1931.

Returning to Columbia, he received a graduate degree in architecture in 1932.

He also attended the American Academy in Rome.

In 1932, The New York Times stated that DuMoulin was an architect in New York City.

In 1936, he visited Sibley Smith Jr., an artist friend, at in Matunuck, Rhode Island where Smith's father was a successful landscape architect.

This visit was pivotal for DuMoulin as he started his architectural practice in Matunuck that same year.

He was registered to practice in Rhode Island, New York, and Washington, D.C.

During and after World War II, he was active in relief efforts in Europe, working as an architect and consultant in rehabilitation and redevelopment.

Because of his work abroad, DuMoulin became a student and architect of rammed-earth construction, writing an article advocating its benefits in 1938.

As a later writer noted, "DuMoulin, writing in a consumer magazine, summarized the opposition’s reasoning very shrewdly. He pointed out that there is no profit to anyone in rammed-earth except the man who is going to live in the house and for that reason, no industry has seen fit to publicize the method."

In South Kingston, Rhode Island, he designed the Modernist style clubhouse for the Willow Dell Beach Club in 1938—a commission secured through his father-in-law Nathaniel Waite Smith.

This clubhouse has since been replaced, but the new building resembles the 1938 plan and was designed by Sandy Taylor, a former student and design associate of DuMoulin.

In 1939, he received a Charles Follen McKim Fellowship in Architecture from Columbia University.

This fellowship is for study and travel after graduation.

In 1942, his friend Sibley Smith Jr. commissioned a house in Perryville, Rhode Island.

DuMoulin's design for Smith was featured in Pencil Points: The Magazine of Progressive Architecture which noted, "The owners wanted a good house designed for their particular needs rather than one that would impress the neighbors or echo an old tradition, and the architect was both sympathetic to this sensible approach and competent to carry through a fresh, creative design without apology or qualification."

The Sibley Smith Jr. house has been called “a handsomely modest example of its type—a hopeful image for a time which strove to incorporate the best of what was modern with the best of a regional vernacular.

He also designed a house for a fraternity brother and art historian Winslow Ames in Saunderstown, Rhode Island.

Ames's instructions to DuMoulin indicate the trust and freedom his friends gave the architect.

Ames recalled, "We told him that what we wanted was a reasonably flexible house. We had not yet come to the point of solar heating, or it would not have been oriented the way it is. It's exactly diagonal to the compass points. So west is there, and north is there. And he did a beautiful job for us, and I think the house is extraordinarily flexible."

He was a housing expert and city planner with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration from 1944 to 1947.

In 1947, he worked with the Institute of Inter-American Affairs in Costa Rica and Chile].

He continued to work for the Institute of Inter-American Affairs from 1949 through 1954, traveling to Bolivia, Columbia], Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, and Peru.

He eventually visited or worked in more than fifty countries.

In the 1950s, DuMoulin returned to his architectural practice in Wakefield, Rhode Island, becoming "locally prominent."

He was most interested in Modern architectural style.

He said, "We are no longer confined to a rigidly circumscribed volume, or series of volumes, defined by solid masses. We are free to seek an architectural expression of our scientific and industrial civilization, and the new relationship with time and space that it has brought to us, in a pattern of interrelated planes and surfaces which vary in structure, texture, form, extent and arrangement to suit their functional or artistic purpose."

Many of his commissions were for houses in Rhode Island's resort communities.

There, he created a coastal vernacular that was a "mix of Modern design, traditional materials, and sensitive siting."

His houses featured low rooflines, weathered shingles, and wide expanses of glass.

Some of his early jobs were for family and friends which allowed him to experiment with the new Modernist style.