It’s difficult to say with certainty that Cocke, Bowman & York created a constituency for modern design in the Lower Río Grande Valley of South Texas. But the buildings designed there by other architects in the 1950s certainly support such an assertion. In 1956, Caudill Rowlett Scott won a citation for St. Joseph Academy, the Catholic boys school in Brownsville, in Progressive Architecture magazine’s annual design awards by pursuing the innovative passive environmental design techniques CRS pioneered in the 1940s.

St. Joseph Academy, Brownsville, 1960, Caudill Rowlett Scott

Completed in 1960, St. Joseph was more formally demonstrative than Cocke, Bowman & York’s school buildings. Different roof shapes identified different uses and the spatial configurations they required.

St. Joseph Academy, Brownsville, 1960, Caudill Rowlett Scott

In September 1960, Frank Lotz Miller’s photo of the St. Joe gym at sundown was published in an article in Time magazine highlighting America’s “schools of tomorrow.” Text and Photos by Stephen Fox.