The following biography comes from a memo of July 28, 1993.Alson Clark, Head of the Architecture and Fine Arts Library from 1959 to 1987, died on July 2nd. He was 71. He is survived by his wife, Carol. mr. Clark received his Bachelor of Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley in 1946 and his BA in History (1955) and MS in Library Science from USC (1956). Before coming to USC, he worked as an architectural designer and draftsman for Palmer Sabin, a Pasadena architect. He began his career at USC in 1956 as a librarian in the Circulation department of Doheny Memorial Library. During his tenure as Head of the Architecture and Fine Arts Library, the collection grew from 15,000 volumes and 50,000 slides in 1959 to 48,000 volumes and 155,000 slides in 1986. the Library also moved from a small room in harris Hall to a space three times larger in the new Watt Hall in 1974.
After his retirement, Mr. Clark worked as a volunteer at the Huntington Library where he was cataloguing the Library's collection of architectural drawings of Wallace Neff, Gordon Kaufmann, and Reginald Johnson, among others.
Throughout his career, he lectured extensively on Southern California architecture at local academic and other cultural institutions and was on occasion a guest lecturer for various classes in the USC School of Architecture. He was also very active in a number of local architectural preservation organizations.
Mr. Clark wrote numerous articles on Southern California architecture, specifically the period of the 1920s. He was the author of two monographs on local architect Wallace Neff (Wallace Neff: Architect of California's Golden Age, 1986 and Wallach Neff: 1895-1982, Romance of Regional Architecture, 1989) which remain the only major scholarship on the architect. He also contributed essays for several exhibition catalogues, the most recent being "Reginald Johnson: Regionalism and Recognition" in Johnson Kaufmann and Coate: Partners in the California Style, 1992.
At the time of his death, he was working on an exhibition catalogue for the Huntington Library of architectural photographs from their collections, The Mediterranean Tradition in Southern California Architecture, 1905-1935.