Mary McLeod on the Pioneering Women Architects Around the World
For this issue of The Historic Traveler, when we celebrate women, it’s only natural that a publication dedicated to showcasing historic locales should choose to illuminate the incredible pioneering women of architecture. In many cases, their breakthrough structures are still with us today and are standing tall in cities on the American continent, in the U.K. and Europe, and even Latin America. In some cases, their works are lost, but their legacy can be seen today in their influence, and in paving the way for women architects today.
Thus, we have invited one of the leading figures in the world on this subject to be our expert and guide. Dr. Mary McLeod is the co-editor of the website Pioneering Women of American Architecture and author of the book Charlotte Perriand and Art of Living. She is professor of architecture at Columbia University, where she teaches architecture, history and theory. She has also taught at the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU, Yale University, Harvard University, University of Kentucky, University of Miami, and the Institute of Architect and Urban Studies. She received her BA, master’s in architecture and PhD from Princeton University.
We’re going to ask her to take us on a journey to explore the heroic women who broke down the barriers for women in architecture and their legacy—their historic buildings.
Jackie: Mary, please first tell us what drew you to the field?
Mary: I happen to go to college in 1968, which was obviously a moment of incredible political fervor. But it was also a moment when the second wave feminism, — what we called at that time the women’s liberation movement — really took off. Women’s issues were part of my being from the very get go. I was the only woman when I started in my architecture class at Princeton, but I was very lucky to have lots of support. I was also very fortunate to start teaching at schools that supported women, first at Kentucky and then at Columbia University, where the dean, Jim Polshek probably hired more women faculty than almost any other architecture school, with the exception of Berkeley. As early as 1983, I organized a series on women in architecture at Columbia, and I participated in the first event in which The Society of Architectural Historians focused on Women in Architecture.
Jackie: What spurred the creation of your Pioneering Women website.
Mary: Beverly Willis, herself a pioneering woman and an important practitioner in California–a technical innovator—moved to New York, and started a foundation called the Beverly Willis Architectural Foundation, because she decided it would be great to support the history of women architects.
She asked Victoria Rosner and myself to edit the website. Victoria is currently the dean of the Gallatin School at NYU. We did not choose the original women to feature. There was a jury of three people. They only spent a day, and they chose 50 names. We started off with those names, but it’s evolved over the years. It’s an ongoing project. Victoria and I felt it was important to diversify ethnically, racially, and regionally. So, there’s been some shifts in the names. Also, for some of the original names, we simply could not find material. It’s really detective work! Some of these women, like Julia Morgan, are well known, but other women, you have to go to family papers. You have to look at original old magazines. It’s even in their college records. It’s a lot of fun, but also a lot of work!
Jackie: So let’s start at the beginning. Can you tell us about the first women who made their mark, what they went through and what they achieved? Let’s initially start with the U.S.
Mary: The U.S. was among the first countries to allow women to study architecture. The other place that was very early was Finland. But in the U.S, some of the land grant colleges, even as late as around 1868 started admitting women architecture students, but very few. We have quite limited records of whether these women actually practiced or matriculated. But we do know that MIT by the 1880s was taking women in. Some of those women practiced, but many of the early women did not have regular professional training. They either worked as apprentices, which was common also for men, or they went to interior design school.
Which is the case of Mary Nevan Gannon and Alice Constance Austin. It’s interesting to note that the training was diverse for the early women architects. Sometimes they came from the decorative arts, sometimes they even came from charity work. Their careers span those who are even self-taught. Take for instance, Theodate Pope Riddle, who was a cousin once removed from Philip Johnson, the leading American architect who designed the early modern and postmodern architecture. Theodate came from a wealthy family and hired private tutors to teach her architecture.
One of the earliest pioneers was Sophia Hayden, among the first women graduates at MIT. She won a competition for a building to be built at the 1893 World’s Fair. It was the women’s building, a kind of neoclassical building, somewhat smaller scale than some, but still a monumental project! She got paid a pittance of what the male architects got for their projects and commissions. Unfortunately, most of the buildings at the 1893 World’s Fair no longer exist so you can’t see Hayden’s work.
Jackie: Let’s look at the first women architects who made their mark and whose works remain.
Mary: Let me start with the ones where your readers can actually visit some of her works. Probably one of the most famous is Julia Morgan. She built many, many buildings and had a very prolific career. She was the first woman architectural student at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, but she did not have an easy time there. She managed, nonetheless, to get her training and by 1903, she had designed the bell tower at Mills College in Oakland, California. Early on, she did Saint John’s Presbyterian Church in Berkeley. But probably her most famous project from 1919 all the way to 1947, were her buildings for Hearst Castle at San Simeon which is open to the public. You can see her amazing accomplishments there. But if you’re in Berkeley, there’s a lot of her work to see. One of my favorite buildings is the swimming pool at the Berkeley Women’s City Club. It’s really a spectacular building. Many of her commissions came from women like YWCA, a woman’s club or a women’s college, but not exclusively, obviously, with a famous client like Hearst. Her professional life dominated her career; we have no knowledge of her romantic life. (Editor’s note: see more in the sidebar excerpted from Dr. McLeod’s website.)
Jackie: One of my personal favorite buildings is the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner Building that she designed for Hearst.
Mary: Yes! But let’s look at another early California architect that I recommend seeing. That’s Lutah Maria Riggs. And she worked in the Santa Barbara and Montecito regions on the coast. She did the Vedanta Temple and many private houses that might be harder to locate. What made her interesting, was her combination of Spanish colonial with modern architecture. As she advanced in her career, she became increasingly modern. Like Julia Morgan, she did not marry. However, she drew a lot of attention for driving around in her roadster all over town! A very sensitive architect, Lutah was acutely conscious of how to site a building in its location.
Pre-dating Julia Morgan and Lutah Marie Riggs you’ll find Mary Jane Colter. She was a principal figure in the Fred Harvey Corporation. (Editor’s Note: Fred Harvey revolutionized American hospitality and travel by establishing the first early chain of high-quality trackside restaurants and hotels along the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway.) Not trained as an architect, Mary Jane Colter did not even apprentice as an architect — which had been the case of Lutah Marie Riggs. Colter was an artist, teacher of design and crafts, and very interested in Native American artifacts. Fred Harvey did many of the hotels associated with the national parks, and Mary Jane Colter did a series of buildings that still remain today.
Around the Grand Canyon, there is The Hopi House, The Hermit’s House, The Lookout Studio and The Rock Tower. These are all in the National Register of Historic Places. Some people maintain that she wasn’t a registered architect and other people signed the drawings, but I think there’s little doubt that the style, the aesthetic are hers. She also did hotels — in Gallup and Lamy NM. What is little known is that she did the interiors. If you know the La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe, she’s responsible for most of the interiors, some of which are quite intact.
Mary Jane Colter inspired a lot of what we think of as southwest style. It’s quite eclectic. She sometimes combined artifacts from various Native American tribes, which might not be seen as politically correct these days, but she had a wonderful sensibility that very few can resist — the charm and mood that her interiors inspire.
Jackie: So we’ve spoken at length about the Women of the West. Let’s transition to the East Coast.
Mary: One of the earliest practitioners was Louise Blanchard Bethune. Almost all the old 19th century schools in Buffalo were designed by her, and she also did the Lafayette Hotel.
Also born in early 1867 like Louise Bethune, was Theodate Pope Riddle—whom I previously mentioned—cousin of Philip Johnson. Interestingly, she was one of the survivors of the Lusitania, sunk by a German submarine in 1915. She was a very important architect for the East Coast region, probably most known for a boy’s school she designed called Avon Old Farms School in Avon, CT, done in the arts and crafts style, and is still an operational boarding school today. She worked on it from 1923 to 1926. Theodate started off as more of a neoclassical architect, but evolved in this softer, more picturesque style. Before that she had done a Westover school, more neoclassical and aesthetic.
I want to mention a fascinating African American architect Amasa Lee Meredith (pictured on the left), who, in Virginia in 1939, designed the first modernist house. She was also a lesbian, and lived with her partner Dr. Edna Meade Colson there. Called Azurest South, it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and currently located on the campus of Virginia State University. There’s been talk about restoration, and it is likely to be open to the public after that. In 1947, Amasa Lee Meredith started developing with her older sister Maude a groundbreaking 120-lot subdivision in Sag Harbor on Long Island called Azurest North — a community for middle class African Americans professionals. These were very modest little houses. The novelist Colson Whitehead grew up going to Azurest North.
Another pioneering American that I want to mention is Jane West Clauss (pictured on the righ). She was the first woman architect to work for Le Corbusier in Paris in 1932. (Editor’s note: Le Corbusier was the French-Swiss architectural designer, painter, urban planner and writer who was one of the pioneers of modern architecture.) Jane West Clauss grew up in Minnesota, in an academic family — and was clearly a real adventurer to go off on her own to Paris at that particular moment. She then met a German emigre architect who had done projects for Philip Johnson and Alfred Klaus. They married and worked on Tennessee Valley Authority projects, while they lived in Knoxville. With him, Clauss designed a series of houses that are known as Little Switzerland in Knoxville. They’re not officially open to the public. But for now, you can see them from the outside. This was early in her career, in the 30s.
Jane West Clauss later moved to Philadelphia, where she taught for years at Beaver College, now called Arcadia University. There she designed the federal courthouse building, but also other buildings, including individual homes, etc. But what I would really single out if you happen to be in Knoxville, is to try to find these modernist houses again. Bringing modernism to Knoxville in the 30s was quite an accomplishment.
Jackie: How about Canada? Who do we have there?
Mary: There’s one woman I’d especially like to acknowledge, Blanche Van Ginkel (pictured on the left). Born in England, she came to Canada as a child during World War II and began her studies there. She then went to work for Le Corbusier in France– and became famous for her part in helping design the roof terrace of one of his most important buildings in Marseille, the Unité D’habitation.
Blanche married an interesting Dutch architect, Van Ginkel, and they established an important practice in Montreal. What they’re probably most famous for is doing the master plan for the Montreal World’s Fair. She also invented an interesting transportation system. Blanche went to Harvard after she came back from France, and then taught at Penn for a while, which was also an important school for women architects in the 50s. Blanche van Ginkel did a lot of great work on parks and many urban projects, plus she worked for indigenous communities in the west of Canada.
Jackie: So approximately when was it that women started to get really good commissions?
Mary: Obviously Julia Morgan got good commissions, but I would say it’s not until the last 30 years that women got some kind of parity, even the last 15 years. It’s when women started regularly doing skyscrapers and big corporate buildings!
Take Natalie de Blois who was absolutely talented. She had studied architecture in the 40s at Columbia during World War II. That’s when a lot of women entered the profession because the men were all in the war, thus, there were spaces for women in the architecture schools. Among that contingent were Jean Fletcher, Sarah Harkness who studied at Harvard in the 40s, and Natalie de Blois who was at Columbia.
Natalie de Blois worked for Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, a big corporate firm and is really the design talent behind some of their most important buildings of the 50s and 60s — Lever House, Union Carbide, and my very favorite building, the 1960’s Pepsi-Cola Headquarters, later bought by Olivetti, a total gem, which is still in great shape. One of the tragedies recently to me was her Union Carbide building, which Chase Manhattan owns, being ripped down just a couple of years ago. There was quite the fuss about the loss of this Natalie de Blois building. She is certainly someone who was doing major commissions in the 50s, but under the auspices of a corporate firm.
Jackie: Why don’t we start looking at the women on the international stage?
Mary: I would say that the first place we see women really entering the schools is in England with some regularity. In England, with the advent of World War I, the Architectural Association began taking women students. A standout from that period is Elizabeth Whitworth Scott. She won a competition to design a major building. They had no idea it was a woman who did the drawings when she entered, and the project was for The Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon! That building, done in the late 20s, still exists.
Elizabeth Scott came from a family of architects. Her grand uncle was George Gilbert Scott, a famous Gothic revival architect. She got this major commission and went on to do other buildings, mostly domestic work in England. I might mention she became a “housing consultant” or specialist.
Elizabeth Denby, who, under Maxwell Fry, worked on two of the early modernist housing complexes in the 30s. One I especially appreciate is called Kensal House, which was sponsored by a gas company, and is a model housing project with collective amenities, youth centers, a shop (gendered mostly for men), a woman’s area for sewing and socializing. There was also a nursery school. She insisted on things like having a place to dry your laundry without having to go to the roof. People forget how hard laundry was in those days. Or a place to store strollers on the ground floor so people didn’t have to carry the stroller up flights of stairs. She was very sensitive to the needs of women, where housework could be very burdensome in that period.
Jackie: You’ve done a lot of your own research in France. Tell us about the subject of your book Charlotte Perriand?
Mary: Her early work was mostly interiors for Le Corbusier, some of it still visible, for example, in the kitchen of his own apartment. Among her contributions was to some of Le Corbusier’s premier works, the Villa Savoye built in 1929 in Poissy, France—and Villa La Ruche in Paris (now a UNESCO World Heritage icon of modern architecture). Charlotte Perriand is credited with the interiors.
That was later in her career, and her lifespan was long, from 1903 to 1999. Among Perriand’s works: she designed a beautiful mountain chalet called Mary Bell in the Savoie region. And you can actually stay in a ski resort called Le Arc that she was partly responsible for, especially the interiors. Interestingly, she worked on this huge ski resort from the 60s and 70s where you can actually ski out your unit. if you can’t quite make it to Savoie, go to Art Institute in Chicago where they have a model.
Another early modernist is Irishwoman Eileen Gray, who moved to Paris. She had studied art, not architecture, but she took private architecture lessons. Why Eileen Gray is important is that she designed a very early modernist house in the south of France, on the Mediterranean in Roquebrune, called 1027. You can visit it.
Let’s turn to the German pioneers. There’s a woman architect who was Viennese by birth, Margarete Schütte-lihotzky, and she designed one of the most iconic examples of Rationalized Modern Architecture meant to reduce household labor, the Frankfurt Kitchen. They were so popular that there were at least 10,000 of them installed in Frankfurt housing complexes by the architect Ernst May. And you can visit one in his own house in a project called Römerstadt. You can actually see them all over the world because suddenly museums discovered Margarete Schütte-lihotzky! Including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Museum of Applied Arts in Frankfurt, The Design Museum in Denmark and The Minneapolis Institute of Art. People were eager to sell them when they discovered the amount museums would go to pay for them.
Margarete Schütte-lihotzky was so influential. First, I should say she was a sensation with her cropped hair — an ultra-modern woman for the 20s. There were even songs written about her! She left Germany for political reasons to go the Soviet Union in the 30s, then went to Turkey, came back and fought Hitler before being imprisoned. Lihotzky, because of her leftist politics, didn’t get that many commissions in West Germany or her native Austria. But she did build quite a few schools, daycare centers and other things in the 50s and 60s in Eastern Europe within the Soviet bloc.
Jackie: Let’s swing over to South America.
Mary: The most significant figure was actually Italian, but spent her career in Brazil. Lina Bo Bardi, 1914-92, was one of the first Italian women students. Italian schools didn’t start taking women till the 1930s. She left Italy after World War II and came with her husband to Sao Paulo, Brazil. Among her amazing projects was her own Glass House, done in 1951. Her husband was a curator of art and was retained to do a major art museum called MASP (Sao Paulo Museum of Art). Lina Bo Bardi worked with him to redesign the building, which can be considered early brutalist work, quite powerful.
And my very favorite project is called Secpompeo, a renovation of old factory buildings and some new buildings she did in 1977, for workers to have leisure time and culture. It’s an absolutely beautiful work. It’s really one of the great buildings and complexes of the last half of the 20th century. If you get to Brazil, I recommend you see Lina Bo Bardi’s work, and not just in Sao Paulo, where there’s a lot. She also designed a renovated project in Salvador. And there interesting things throughout Bahia. She was very interested in Brazilian folk culture. Lina Bo Bardi is someone I admire a lot – and I think is very inspirational to many younger women studying architecture today.
Julia Morgan: A Woman of Many Firsts
Julia Morgan (1872–1957) was a woman of many firsts: one of the first female engineering majors at the University of California, Berkeley; the first woman admitted to study architecture at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in Paris; and the first licensed woman architect in California. Over her 46-year career, she designed more than 700 buildings, primarily in California, and is best known for Hearst Castle, William Randolph Hearst’s spectacular estate at San Simeon.
Born in San Francisco and raised in Oakland, Morgan studied civil engineering at Berkeley because the university had no architecture school at the time. After graduating in 1894, she worked with architect Bernard Maybeck, who encouraged her to study at the École des Beaux-Arts. After three unsuccessful attempts at its rigorous entrance examination, Morgan passed in 1898 and became the first woman to enroll in its architecture program. In 1902, she became the first woman to receive its Certificat d’Études.
Returning to California, Morgan worked for Berkeley campus architect John Galen Howard before receiving her state license and establishing her own practice in 1904. One of her earliest commissions, El Campanil at Mills College, was a pioneering reinforced-concrete tower. When it survived the devastating 1906 San Francisco earthquake unscathed, Morgan’s expertise in reinforced concrete suddenly became particularly valuable. She was hired to rebuild the damaged Fairmont Hotel — and completed the enormous undertaking within a year!
Morgan’s practice flourished. She designed churches, libraries, schools, clubs, commercial buildings and hundreds of residences in styles ranging from Arts and Crafts and Mission Revival to Tudor, Venetian Gothic and Neoclassical. Her houses were conceived around the people who would inhabit them—their comfort, activities and family life. Women’s organizations and clients played an especially important role in her career, and she designed at least 30 buildings for the YWCA in California and elsewhere.
One of Morgan’s most important supporters was philanthropist Phoebe Apperson Hearst, who commissioned her to remodel her Pleasanton estate and later helped secure Morgan’s appointment to design the YWCA’s Asilomar Conference Grounds on the Monterey Peninsula. Over 15 years, Morgan designed 16 buildings there, using redwood, exposed wood trusses, stone fireplaces, native plants and winding pathways to create the rustic Arts and Crafts character for which Asilomar became known.
Phoebe Hearst also introduced Morgan to her son, newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. After first designing the Hearst Examiner Building in Los Angeles, Morgan began work in 1919 on Hearst’s hilltop estate at San Simeon. What began as the idea for a relatively modest bungalow grew into Hearst Castle, an extraordinary pan-European complex incorporating architectural elements Hearst collected and shipped to California. Morgan oversaw not only its design but also workmen, artisans, materials and warehouses of artifacts, continuing her work for Hearst for more than two decades.
Morgan was also an accomplished designer of swimming pools, combining architectural drama with her engineering expertise. Her most elaborate examples were Hearst Castle’s Neptune Pool and indoor Roman Pool. The latter evoked ancient Roman baths with blue-and-gold glass tile, marble statuary, skylights and alabaster lamps, while sophisticated heating and ventilation systems were discreetly incorporated behind the spectacle.
Morgan retired in 1951 and died in 1957. For decades, her contribution to American architecture received surprisingly little recognition. That began to change with renewed scholarship about her work, particularly Sara Boutelle’s 1988 biography. In 2014, Morgan achieved one final historic first when she became the first woman to receive the American Institute of Architects’ Gold Medal, its highest honor—more than half a century after her death.
Summarized from Pioneering Women Architects of America, research conducted by Julia Donoho and Alexandra Lange with Karen McNeill, Edited by Dr. Mary McLeod and Dr. Victoria Rosner. To see more, go to https://pioneeringwomen.bwaf.org/julia-morgan
Image Credits: Selected images via Wikimedia Commons: King of Hearts, Heatherawalls, (WT-en) Jpatoka, Binche, Valueyou, Mfield, and Christos Vittoratos (CC BY-SA 3.0); Austin Smith (CC BY-SA 4.0); Peter Cook and Julian Osley (CC BY-SA 2.0); Rossstatham (CC BY 2.5); Atakra and Robert Doisneau (CC0). Julia Morgan, Roman Pool, Hearst Castle, San Simeon, California, 1927–32: photograph by Karen McNeill; AJ Belongia, Maurizo Mucciola.
