McGuire and Shook

 In 1916 William C. McGuire and Wilbur Bryant Shook formed a lifelong partnership as Indianapolis architects. Their firm, McGuire and Shook, became especially known for designing numerous schools throughout the city. The first was the Calvin Kendall School No. 62 on East Tenth Street in 1924; it was followed by a new structure for the Clemens Vonnegut School No. 9 in Lockerbie Square (1926), the Frances E. Willard School No. 80 in Broad Ripple (1929), the Christian Park School No. 82 on English Avenue (1931), and the James E. Roberts School No. 97 on East Tenth Street. The schools exhibit a wide variety of styles that culminate, perhaps, with Thomas Carr Howe High School in Irvington, constructed in three phases from 1938 to 1954 in the collegiate gothic mode.          

McGuire and Shook is noted for designing a number of institutional buildings around the state in the 1930s. Many of them were Public Works Administration projects. Among them were buildings at Central State Hospital in Indianapolis, the Indiana State Sanitarium in Rockville, and Muscatatuck State Hospital near Butlerville. The firm also designed an addition to the north side of the U.S. Court House and Post Office in Indianapolis in 1938.    

In the years after World War II, McGuire and Shook designed many religious buildings in Indianapolis, including Trinity Episcopal Church on North Meridian Street; Second Presbyterian Church, also on North Meridian Street; and Beth-El Zedeck Temple on West Seventieth Street. In 1958 the firm became McGuire and Shook, Compton, Richey, and Associates. Even after the death of its founding partners (McGuire in 1960 and Shook in 1961), the firm continued to design important buildings for institutions and private enterprises throughout Indianapolis. In 1989 the firm merged with the Odle Group out of Bloomington, and today Odle McGuire and Shook focuses on creating buildings to house educational and health-care facilities.

Adapted from Glory-June Grieff, “McGuire and Shook,” in the Encyclopedia of Indianapolis, edited by David J. Bodenhamer and Robert G. Barrows (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994)