Joseph Edward Carbonell III
2 September 1941 – 20 August 2025
A devoted husband, steadfast father, loyal neighbor, dedicated community member, Joseph Edward Carbonell III, architect with Moeckel Carbonell Associates, died at his home in Delaware on Wednesday, August 20th after a long illness with Huntington’s Disease. He was surrounded by his wife of nearly 61 years, Lynn, and their three children, Mercy, Mac, and Serena.
Serena celebrates knowing her father was born in Virgo season on September 2, 1941, in Washington D.C. to Joseph E. Carbonell, Jr. and Virginia Cannon Carbonell. Joe grew up in Greenville, Delaware and spent childhood summers with family in Havana, Cuba. On August 28, 1964, Joe and Lynn were married in a garden. In 1969, he received his Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Virginia Architecture School. They moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts where Joe began practicing with the architectural firm, Hugh Stubbins. The story goes that when Joe was applying for a position, Mr. Stubbins asked, “How soon can you come to work here?” Joe pulled a #2 pencil out of his breast pocket. Mr. Stubbins said, “Oh, there is a desk right there. Have a chair at this desk.”
In 1971, Joe returned to Wilmington to join his father’s architecture firm, Whiteside, Moeckel and Carbonell. Joe and Lynn gravitated to the Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania landscape, raising their children in an 1832 Eastlake stone home on an old farm among state-champion native trees. Joe installed a deer fence to regenerate the land, helped Lynn plant bountiful gardens, and happily shucked peas while watching a Phillies game. For 40 years, they opened their home to friends, family and guests, sharing their love for horticulture, architecture, culinary arts and artistic expression. Together they created what a friend calls, “an atmosphere of appreciation, of artistry and communal sharing: a way of living.”
With his kind charm, humility, and generosity, Joe extended his respect for historical preservation and his vision for creative enhancement and adaptive reuse to the wider Wilmington community. His inaugural 1970’s project was designing the Whiteside, Moeckel and Carbonell office in an old Bancroft Mills building on Hill Road. On the Riverfront, Moeckel Carbonell Associates (MCA) was the first to renovate an 1880’s building and 1 Avenue of the Arts became the office for MCA and Mitchell Associates. Their presence spawned Joe’s collaboration with the Riverfront Development Corporation of Delaware (RDCD) to envision and to revitalize the riverfront’s industrial echoes and artifacts into community life with an emphasis on environmental changes and awareness.
At the same time, Joe applied his intrigue in modernist architecture to the design of The Delaware Theatre Company, The Contemporary and Ronald McDonald House. With MCA, his architectural spirit extended throughout the city, including the adaptive reuse of the Delaware Center for Horticulture and the renovation of the Wilmington Public Library. Exemplary of his commitment to historic integrity is the design of what a dear friend called her “hovel” into a beloved home. At MCA, Joe often hired interns to encourage young people to enter architecture.
A believer in civic engagement, Joe was dedicated to serving and at times leading community organizations: Delaware AIA, the Historical Society (what he sweetly called “The Hysterical Society”), Delaware’s Community Housing Inc., Gilpin Hall, Ronald McDonald, Wilmington Club, Pennsbury Township Commission and Conservancy. On spring afternoons, he was there to umpire for The Westover Wildcats.
To the Rotary Club of Wilmington, Joe expressed his loyalty by attending meetings in various cities through Europe on a family trip in 1978. When Serena traveled alone to Hong Kong, Australia and India in 1994, he placed a Rotary pin on her bag knowing its world-wide significance and possible assistance. Joe served on the Rotary Board and as President. As a longtime member of the UVA Jefferson Scholarship Committee, he shared his awe for the students’ reflections in their essays and loved their answers to his signature question: “If you could be any vegetable, what kind would you be and why?”
Joe’s children remember the ways he allowed them the freedom to wander, to experiment, to seek creativity. He supported their education, their artistic independence and their athletic lives. At their squash matches throughout the eastern seaboard, Joe was present, his constancy of encouragement, quiet and humble. He valued time immersed in being with his family and tending to the tasks of keeping up his Chadds Ford property. Joe liked the challenge and the rhythm of repairing his old mower. He made the plans for gingerbread houses and Lynn baked the cookies. Together they assembled impressive, edible renditions of the Brandywine River Museum, of Bartram’s Garden, and friends’ private houses. One friend remembers how Joe stayed up late into summer evenings with a puzzle. “He would take a puzzle piece, turn it around in his hand and place it perfectly,” she remembers.
At times, Joe’s imagination and family care came through in pertly, often celebratory surprises: huge numbers to teach his children to count carved from wood left behind; a Big Mac Halloween costume made from old cardboard boxes with red and green tissue paper; a life-size doll house designed in his modernist touch; cryptic, cheerful handwritten notes on scraps of paper with his architectural font and hidden in books. A man of certain rituals, each December he carefully cracked open walnuts, folded a dollar bill, glued the shells back and tucked each into stockings to discover on Christmas morning. On holidays and each September, he celebrated others’ aesthetic creativity, whimsical gestures, quirky gifts: Lynn’s presentation of paella and often crabs on his birthday; Kye’s geometric, pastel cake created for his 80th; an old ceramic vase a child made in 2nd grade taken out of the attic and wrapped up again - just because. His laugh bellowed when friends brought him unexpected, hysterical, sometimes irreverent gifts. With Mac and Laurice’s children, he kindled wonder and adventure. “Grampa” taught Leo how to make a fire, how to drive the John Deere tractor, and celebrated Leo’s emerging passion for baseball. Into the barn and blackberry bushes and bamboo forests, “Grampa” wandered with Kye in exploration.
Throughout his life, Joe took the time to share his knowledge and ways of seeing. Many recall that he would pull out a black pen from his pocket and sketch buildings and maps on paper napkins or old receipts at dinner. In his basement darkroom, he glowed red in the safelight to reveal the shadow of a face. Years with a 35 mm Nikon blurred into an iPhone 12 and still Joe captured moments in time to preserve memory: his small children with sailboats at the Tuileries Garden; the massive geometry of Vasarely; a building under construction or strangers on a street in Charlottesville, Virginia.
“The world interested him,” a friend remembers. “People, places.” Over the years, Joe and Lynn traveled with friends and family through Mexico, the United States and much of Europe. Delighted to be with others and at ease alone, he collected shells on Cape Cod shores, studying their intricate forms. On the tiny island of Patmos, Joe wandered into a local church to see the tiled floor and became known as “The Tall Man,” when asked by the parishioners to fill their lanterns with olive oil. In his later years, he returned to Cuba as a volunteer for church preservation. Joe never lost his appreciation for others’ curiosity and learning, listening to their stories.
“The Colosseum,” he whispered towards the end of his life while looking at a slideshow of the photographs he took from 1966 - 2014. Even in his last months, Joe could identify the mitered edges in a slide of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water; the name of the owner of a garden in Oaxaca, Mexico; the foundational use of light and room in a structure he most admired, The Louis Kahn Library. While Huntington’s Disease may have stolen Joe’s ability to huck the baseball with his grandchildren in the yard or to laugh hard with a friend on a tour of English gardens or to enjoy a momentary foxtrot, he greeted old and new friends to his home with a high-five and a gentle smile - his wonder into their lives still so present. His infectious laugh will echo in memory.
Lynn, Mercy, Mac and Serena want to thank Delaware Hospice and those who have made contributions in Joe’s memory. Joe donated his brain tissue to the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center for Huntington’s Disease research. Future contributions can be made to Huntington’s Disease Society of America at https://hdsa.org/get-involved/donation-opportunities/505 Eighth Avenue, Suite 1402 New York, NY 10018.
A private celebration will be held at a future date.
