Phillip Mack Caldwell was born in 1942 in the United States, attending Burges High School, in El Paso, Texas, before studying at the University of Texas at Austin. Following his graduation in 1964, he moved to Yale University where he completed a Master of Arts in Architecture in 1969. In 1970 he travelled to the UK where he enrolled on the postgraduate programme run by the Architectural Association’s (AA) Department of Development and Tropical Studies, in London. Tutored by Mario Novella, Caldwell was awarded the AA’s postgraduate Diploma in 1971. A return to Texas followed and from 1974-75 he was the president of the Architects Design Group, in El Paso, prior to establishing his own practice, ‘Mack Caldwell Architect’ in 1976. He re-entered academia in 1981, earning a Diploma from the Louisiana Universidad Autonoma de Cd. Juarez, in Mexico and subsequently became President of a firm called ‘Adobe Builders’. He has been an associate professor in the College of Architecture at the University of Oklahoma from 1990 to 2008 and was the emeritus professor in 2019. Caldwell’s works and research interests are in the field of solar design. He was the recipient of the Solar Design Award from the Solar Energy Research Institute at the Housing and Urban Development in 1978. In 1984, he renovated the building of the Peter and Margaret DeWetter Center on the UTEP campus. In 1983, he won the Outstanding Architecture Design award Texas Society Architects.

 Sources:

• Architectural Association Student Register, 1970-71. AA Archives.
• Architectural Association Membership Register, 1974. AA Archives.
• ‘Texas Solar Incentives’, Texas Architect, March/April, 1980, Vol. 30, No. 2, pp32-33.
• McCullar, M. ‘Solar Adobe in El Paso’, Texas Architect, Jan/Feb, 1981, Vol. 31, No. 1, pp32-34.
• University of Oklahoma College of Architecture, Newsletter, Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring 1999, pp12-13, 36-57