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Curtis “Curt” Moody, founder and chairman of Columbus, Ohio–founded Moody Nolan, the largest African-American owned and managed architecture firm in the United States with more than 350 employees and a dozen offices in cities ranging from Houston to New York to Washington, D.C., died on Sunday, October 13. He was 73. Moody Nolan announced his death on Monday and said details about arrangements will be shared later this week. A cause of death was not released.

“Curt Moody was a great American architect, a good person, a visionary, and we have lost an icon in the minority business space and an icon in the architectural design space as well,” former Columbus mayor Michael Coleman told the Columbus Dispatch.

Moody Nolan's projects—modern, angular, suffused with natural light—include civic offices, sports centers, airport terminals, and educational buildings, particularly ones located at historically Black colleges and universities. Many have been completed in and around Ohio, though the firm's work can be found across the country. Major Moody Nolan projects include Dunbar Senior High School in Washington, D.C. (2013, with Perkins Eastman), the Malcolm X College and School of Health Sciences in Chicago (2016, with CannonDesign), the Martin Luther King Branch of the Columbus Metropolitan Library (2018), and the extensive renovation of Marcel Breuer’s Atlanta Central Library (2021, with Cooper Cary). The long-awaited International African American Museum, a project in which Moody Nolan served as executive architect alongside design architect Pei Cobb Freed & Partners and landscape architect Hood Design Studio, opened in Charleston, South Carolina, last year.

“As our collaborator on the International African American Museum in Charleston, Curt brought tremendous passion and enthusiasm to the project, and his insights and guidance inspired our team throughout the decade we worked together,” said the partners of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners in a joint statement provided to RECORD. “We admire the way he shaped the firm he founded, empowering a diverse group of talented individuals. Curt will be greatly missed within our professional community.”

In-progress projects by Moody Nolan include a 45,000-square-foot sports facility at the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago’s Jackson Park and the Center for Fine Arts and Communications, which will house the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts, at Howard University.

The firm has won hundreds of citations, and in 2021 received the AIA Architecture Firm Award, the first Black-led firm to receive the honor. In recognizing Moody Nolan, the AIA noted its “long history of serving clients with its trademark navigation of cultural sensitivities and keen understanding of the impact its work has on individuals and communities.”

“This is for US!” Moody wrote after winning the award. “For everyone that has supported our vision. For our staff that continuously produces exceptional work. And most importantly, for other minority-owned businesses to know that you too can rise to the top.”

“It is architecture that gives us the platform,” he continued, “but it’s what we do with architecture and beyond that can have a lasting effect on society.”

Moody was born in 1950 in Columbus. Growing up, he was more interested in playing football and basketball than excelling academically. But one day, when visiting a friend’s house, he saw drawings belonging to his friend’s father. He was a builder, and it sparked something in the young Moody. "I want to do this,” he remembered thinking.

When he told a school guidance counselor about his desire to be an architect, though, “she said there weren't any African-American architects, ‘It’s not a career path for you’,” Moody told the Dispatch in 2013.

Never one to bend to discouragement, Moody committed to proving the doubters wrong. He focused more on his studies, attended Ohio State University, and graduated in 1973 with a bachelor’s in architecture. For the next nine years, he worked for local firms before setting out on his own. And he did so with a clear goal.

“[I wanted] to do projects the size of the firms I had worked for, as the lead firm, unlike most minority-owned firms [that] were criticized for being too dependent on government agencies,” Moody told RECORD in 2020.

Jonathan and Curtis Moody. Photo © Sam Brown, courtesy Moody Nolan

In 1982, he founded Moody and Associates. A year later, he partnered with Black engineer Howard Nolan to form Moody Nolan. Moody’s son, the architect Jonathan Moody, has led the firm in the role of CEO since 2020.

“Curt Moody has been a mentor and role model to so many in the [National Organization of Minority Architects] community that the full impact of his contributions will be felt for generations to come,” current AIA President (and past NOMA president) Kimberly Dowdell wrote in 2008. “The legacy of Moody Nolan is something for all firms to aspire to.”

That legacy has only grown in the succeeding 15 years. “More minority firms have come out of our office than out of any other firm” in Columbus,” Moody told RECORD. And more will follow—to say nothing of the expanding size, project list, and community impact of the successful practice that Moody established.