Blume and Cannon

Robert Bryan Cannon, Jr., was born in Rutherfordton, North Carolina, on November 11, 1919. After serving in the US Navy for five years and during World War II, Cannon earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Architecture at Clemson in 1953. His work history before partnering with Blume in Columbia in 1959 is unclear, but in later years he served as a President of the South Carolina Chapter of the AIA. He died on January 31, 1999, in Columbia. Cannon’s known Columbia works include the office building at 1213 Lady St., the 1965 Richland County Law Enforcement Center, St. Andrews Baptist Church, and the Middleburg Mall Office Park. Together with Blume and their later partner Augustus Louis Ott, III (under the firm name Blume, Cannon, and Ott), Cannon was involved in the conceptualization and planning of the Riverbanks Zoo and the restoration of the Robert Mills Building on the South Carolina State Hospital campus.

E(dward) Stewart Blume, Jr., was born December 9, 1931, in Columbia, SC, and he studied at Clemson, earning a Bachelor of Science in 1953 and a Bachelor’s Degree in Architecture in 1954. After serving in the US Army from 1954 to 1956, he worked as a draftsman for Jesse W. Wessinger (1956-1958) and for Heyward W. Singley (1958-1959). Blume claimed direct credit for the Inman (1961) and Jonesville (1961) armories in his 1962 AIA Directory entry, and as an associate employed by Singley at the time of Singley’s death, it can be reasonably assumed that he personally supervised the completion of the McCormick and Saluda armories started by Singley and finished by Blume and Cannon in 1960. Blume’s other principal works in Columbia included the Montclair Drive Elementary School, Forest Lake Presbyterian Church, and the Arden Telephone Building, for which he won a Merit Award for Design in 1966. In 2006, Blume released his novel Strangers on the Shore, a love story about an architect and his client set in 1962 Columbia. As of 2013, he still resided in Columbia.