William J. Conklin

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William J. Conklin (May 2, 1923 – November 22, 2018) was an American architect and archaeologist. He designed the U.S. Navy Memorial and helped plan Reston, a planned community in Virginia. In archaeology, he studied Incan textiles, Quipus (knotted record cords), and textile preservation, including the unwrapping of the Incan mummy Juanita.

He was born in Hubbell, Nebraska, where his father was a banker and state legislator. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Doane College, earning a chemistry degree in 1944 and leading the student council. He then joined the U.S. Navy during World War II as an electronics technician in the Pacific, serving on a ship near Japan when the first atomic bombs were dropped.

In 1950 he earned a master’s degree in architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. He co-founded the firm Conklin & Rossant with James Rossant and later started Conklin Costantin Architects. His work won more than fifty awards. He served as president of the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects and as vice chair of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. He supported historic preservation while also encouraging modern updates, such as painting Ward’s Island Bridge in bright colors.

Conklin’s interest in textiles grew after a trip to Machu Picchu. He explored how the Incas used Quipus and knots to record information and suggested that dyed fibers could carry additional data. He wrote about fifty papers and books on Andean textiles and was a research associate at the Institute of Andean Studies in Berkeley and at the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C. He helped form ARC (Arts, Religion, and Contemporary Culture) in New York with notable cultural figures.

He married Barbara Mallon at Doane College, and they had one son, Chris. Barbara became curator of the American Museum of Natural History. He had a sister, Ruth Conklin, who married U.S. Congressman and District Court Judge Robert V. Denney. The Conklins lived mostly in New York and later in Washington, D.C., near the Navy Memorial and the National Archives. In 2008 he wrote to President-elect Barack Obama with an idea for the inauguration, proposing a moment where Obama would step from his limousine near the Navy Memorial. Obama followed a version of this idea in 2009. The Conklins hosted journalism students from Doane College on their balcony.