Wright Brothers
National Memorial

Alfred Easton Poor (1899-1988)
[Winning Design for the Wright
Brothers National Memorial]
Kill Devil Hill, Kitty Hawk, North Carolina
Graphite and charcoal on paper, 1930
Prints & Photographs Division

Alfred Easton Poor received his early training in architecture at the University of Pennsylvania under famed architect Paul Cret. This dramatic nighttime rendering is an excellent example of Poor's skill and is one of a set of presentation drawings submitted by the architect and his partner, William Perry Rodgers, to the 1930 competition for the Wright Brothers National Memorial.

Their wing-shaped monument, completed in 1932, features a beacon rising sixty feet above the ninety-foot sand dune in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, where the first flight of a power-driven airplane on December 17, 1903, took place.