Youtz, Philip Newell, 1895-1972

Architect, inventor and educator, director of the Brooklyn Museum, and dean of the College of Architecture and Design of University of Michigan.

Architect, curator, educator.

Curator of the Pennsylvania Museum of Art (1930-1932), director, Brooklyn Museum (1934-1938), director, Pacific Area at the Golden Gate International Exposition, San Francisco (1938-1939), and dean, University of Michigan College of Architecture and Design (1957-1965).

Philip N. Youtz was born April 27, 1895 in Quincy, Massachusetts. He was educated at Amherst College (1918) and Oberlin College (1919). During the period 1920-1922, he built schools and a non-sectarian Chinese Christian College in Canton, China. Upon his return, he did publicity work in New York City for the College while also teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University. He also taught extension courses in philosophy and logic at Columbia, and supervised art courses at the People's Institute.

After receiving his architectural degree from Columbia University in 1929, he became curator of the Sixty-Ninth St. branch of the Pennsylvania Museum of Art in Philadelphia. In 1933 he became assistant director of the Brooklyn Museum of Art and served as director from 1934 to 1938. From 1938 to 1940, he was director of Pacific House at the Golden Gate International Exposition and the Pacific Area in San Francisco. Following the war where he served with the War Production Board, Youtz was a practicing architect in the New York City area. Here he invented the "lift slab" method of construction in which concrete slabs are raised on supporting columns to form different stories of a building. He came to the University of Michigan in 1957, where he was soon named dean of the College of Architecture and Design, a post he held until his retirement in 1964.

Youtz was a member of the Engineering Society of Detroit, the New York Historical Society, the American Association of Museums and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture. He was a director of the Detroit Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, the Michigan Association of the Professions and the Ann Arbor Art Association.

Youtz died in January 1972.