The American School team is proud to partner with the University of Oklahoma Libraries to begin an oral history project. The project will collect and preserve stories from alumni, family, friends, and clients of the American School. Dr. Shooka Motamedi, lecturer of architecture at the University of Oklahoma, is conducting these interviews, which will be transcribed and uploaded onto the OU Libraries searchable platform in the coming months.
Our first interview, with Bob Bowlby (OU Architecture, Class of 1957), was a delightful conversation filled with anecdotes about his time at OU and beyond. Bowlby (b. 1934, Oklahoma City) studied at OU and later worked for Bruce Goff in Bartlesville before becoming a licensed architect in the early 1960s. Around the time he designed the well-known Founders Bank in Oklahoma City, he became a prolific architectural photographer. He took photos of many mid-century buildings in Oklahoma and beyond for various publications. Over the years, he lived and worked in Kentucky, Houston, Denver, Lake Tahoe, and Carmel before returning to Denver, where he settled permanently. Today, Bowlby’s photograph and slide collection is held by the American School Archive.
If you or anyone you know would like to be interviewed as part of the American School oral history project, please complete this form.
Header image: The Founder’s Bank, designed by Bob Bowlby and completed in 1964 in Oklahoma City (demolished in 2018). Photograph by Julius Schulman.
The University of Oklahoma College of Architecture is proud to announce that Model Schools in the Model City, authored by Director of the Institute for Quality Communities, Amber N. Wiley, Ph.D., has been named one of ten finalists for the 2026 ASALH Book Prize for Best New Book in African American History and Culture.
This semester, students in the LA 5535 Studio: Ecological Planning and Design, led by Prof. Afsana Sharmin, took on an ambitious hypothetical project to redesign key parts of the OU campus. Their mission: to tackle the critical real-world challenge of stormwater management through innovative green design.
Petya Stefanoff, Chair of the Educational Committee with the American Planning Association, Oklahoma Chapter (APA-OK) and Gibbs College PhD candidate, has developed a new training program for local government officials. The program, focused on land use, zoning principles, and land development, recently certified its first graduates with Certified Citizen Planner status.
