Barry Fox Biography

Born in New Orleans, Barry Fox attended Metairie Park Country Day School which fostered creativity and prided itself on a creative curriculum. Barry found pleasure and success in drawing, painting, sculpture, and pottery. Then when he was an adolescent, his parents gave him a priceless intellectual awakening having John Lawrence, then dean of Tulane Architecture School, design a new two-story 1950’s regionally inspired home for them. Watching plans for the house develop captivated the boy, and to see the curious pictures called blueprints translated into walls, floors and roof opened a new world that intrigued him. When he was given work as a helper on the site, he began to learn something of carpentry-actual building.

Barry attended Washington and Lee University in Lexington, VA where he started taking engineering classes until he realized that he really wanted to study architecture. After two years at W & L where is specialized in the humanities and visual arts, he transferred to study in the School of Architecture at Tulane.

Barry spent his fourth year of college in Scotland at the University of Edinburgh School of Architecture with the distinguished Scottish architect Sir Robert Matthew, designer of London’s Royal Opera House. Pedagogy in Edinburgh revolved around small classes and lengthy discussions of diverse topics: history, art, the theory of architecture and – given their locus – the “historical contextualism” in a city who’s “Old Town” dated back to the 11th century and “New” to the 18th. In Sir Robert’s idiom, buildings were living parts of an organism; when an old tooth was gone, the new tooth had to fit the space.

Returning to New Orleans, Barry took a position in a well-established firm that was started in the early 20th century which specialized in historic preservation and residential design. Barry developed the special skills in the traditional arts of design, draftsmanship and rendering. In those days and to this day, Fox prepares full-sized working drawings for virtually every feature and detail that couldn’t be described in straight lines and numbers. Barry found that he had come home and discovered his vocation there: practicing Classical Architecture in traditional contexts and historical vernaculars.

In 1977, Barry Fox Associates Architects, LTD. was established, with offices in the former 19th century roller skating rink he renovated as an adaptive reuse for retail and offices in the historic Garden District. The firm is still located at the same office and employs a team of architects and skilled associates practicing in classical design of architecture for 21st century living.

Fox’s residential architectural projects have run the gambit of styles from French Country to French Manor houses, from early 18th Century Colonial, to The Federal Style, and Greek Revival styles, all popular in the South and along the Atlantic Coast.

He has worked on Southern Plantations, and Victorian preservation projects. The New Orleans French Quarter (Vieux Carre) has been the location of many restorations, renovations, and an occasional new residence. A recent home completed in Baton Rouge is in the Italian Mediterranean Style.

Fox is also well versed in the Georgian style, The Adam style, and The Tudor style for both residential and commercial design projects. One of his specialties has been small branch banks

Another idiom Mr. Fox feels comfortable in is the Palladian Style, as seen in the Bryan home in Jacksonville, Florida that was modeled after the architectural work of President Thomas Jefferson, and being similar to Monticello, Bremo, and Poplar Forest, homes that Jefferson personally designed. Other specialties are the Caribbean, French West Indies, and Spanish Colonial styles that are manifested in the McMullan residence in Pass Christian, Mississippi. Many of these former projects are featured in the volume New Southern Classicism, the residential architecture of Barry Fox.