Women of Steel and Stone: 22 Inspirational Architects, Engineers, and Landscape Designers

By Anna M. Lewis

An inspiration for young people who love to design, build, and work with their hands, Women of Steel and Stone tells the stories of 22 female architects, engineers, and landscape designers from the 1800s to today. Engaging profiles based on historical research and firsthand interviews stress how childhood passions, perseverance, and creativity led these women to overcome challenges and break barriers to achieve great success in their professions. Subjects include Marion Mahony Griffin, who worked alongside Frank Lloyd Wright to establish his distinct architectural-drawing style; Emily Warren Roebling, who, after her husband fell ill, took over the duties of chief engineer on the Brooklyn Bridge project; Marian Cruger Coffin, a landscape architect who designed estates of Gilded Age mansions; Beverly L. Greene, the first African American woman in the country to get her architecture license; Zaha Hadid, one of today's best-known architects and the first woman to receive the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize; and many others. Practical information such as lists of top schools in each field; descriptions of specific areas of study and required degrees; and lists of programs for kids and teens, places to visit, and professional organizations, make this an invaluable resource for students, parents, and teachers alike.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chicago Review Press
• Release date: Jan 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781613745113

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Index

INTRODUCTION

THE WOMEN WHO helped build the world we live in—female architects, engineers, and landscape architects—had strong wills that helped them break through into professions at a time when women were not welcome or sometimes were not even allowed. These women had strengths, passions, and interests as they were growing up that led them to accomplish amazing achievements. They were all determined women who wanted to create, whether it was a building, a bridge, or a beautiful environment. Most of these spirited women saw the problems they faced entering male-dominated fields more as stumbling blocks or challenges than as outright discrimination. With a few exceptions, the support of their families helped them reach their goals. The women’s suffrage (right to vote) movement, the civil rights movement, social reform, America’s industrial leaders, and the Roaring Twenties all influenced their diverse life stories.

Women have always played an important role in the creation of houses and buildings. In the hunter-gatherer days, women tended to the home while men went off to hunt. From teepee to cave to log cabin, women have always worked to create safe, nurturing, and healthy environments for their families and communities, and there is early evidence that shows women assuming the role of builder. In 16th-century France, Katherine Briçonnet designed and supervised the building of the Chateau de Chenonceau between 1513 and 1524, while her husband was away fighting at war. In 17th-century England, 19-year-old Lady Elizabeth Wilbraham traveled and studied architecture in the Netherlands and Italy while on her honeymoon. She later set up an architectural office and designed Wotton House in Buckinghamshire and possibly 400 other buildings. Sir Christopher Wren, now known as England’s greatest architect, may have studied under her and created 18 churches with the help of her designs before he went on to build more than 50 churches, including St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.

In Families and Farmhouses in Nineteenth-Century America, author Sally McMurry presents many home plans designed by women which were published in 19th-century farm journals. The 1847 house plan by Matilda Howard of Zanesville, Ohio, won the $20 prize from the Committee on Farm Dwellings for the New York State Agricultural Society. Mrs. Howard’s design provided detailed instructions on site and room placement, materials, and cost. Mrs. Howard explained, In the construction of this plan, it has been my object to combine utility and beauty, as far as practicable with the labor-saving principle.

After Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, she and her sister, Catharine, wrote The American Woman’s Home in 1869. Their book lays out the domestic concerns of the 19th century and details a house plan with particular attention paid to areas often ignored by male designers of the 19th century, such as the kitchen. Various chapters concern the need for exercise, both physical and mental, fresh air, gardening, hygiene, clothing reform/removing binding corsets, and the ventilation and heating of the home.

In the late 19th century, women from middle-income families (if they worked outside the home) were typically expected to enter nursing, teaching, or writing professions. In her popular self-help book What Can a Woman Do?, Mrs. M. L. Rayne wrote about the careers that were socially acceptable for a woman. They included medicine, law, agriculture, manufacturing, business, dressmaking, education, and the arts. Careers in architecture, engineering, and landscape architecture were not mentioned. Women from wealthy families were told to use their extra energies by doing charity work. The medical community in 1900 even gave excess energy and overuses of intellect a name: neurasthenia, or nervousness.

The neurasthenia cure for men was to send them out west to rope cattle, hunt, and hang out with cowboys. A few men who went west for the cure were writer Mark Twain, painter Thomas Eakins, and Theodore Roosevelt. Meanwhile, the cure for women was for private doctors to seclude them, possibly in bed, with no visitors, no books, and a bland diet. This was the prescription for reformer Jane Addams and writer Edith Wharton.

In 1900, when 29-year-old Martha Brookes Hutcheson decided to enter the new program in landscape design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), her parents begged her to change her mind, for fear that her decision would affect their social standing. They even offered to send her to Europe, to allow her to design their family estate. But Martha said, I was fired with the desire … in spite of the fact that it was considered almost social suicide and distinctly matrimonial suicide for a woman to enter any profession. Martha ultimately chose to attend MIT—though she circled the block three times before getting the courage to climb the steps to the university.

The government was indirectly instrumental in changing the role of women in architecture and related fields thanks to the Morrill Act, created in 1862 and signed by Abraham Lincoln. The Morrill Act granted government land to colleges for free. Although the Morrill Act did not require that institutions open their doors to women, by 1890, every state included the admission of women in its land grant charter. This enabled women to get college degrees to start working professionally in the areas of architecture, engineering, and landscape architecture, among other fields. Soon thereafter, women began making headway in those industries. In 1873, Mary L. Page became the first woman to earn an architecture degree from the University of Illinois. In 1890, Sophia Hayden became the first woman graduate from MIT’s four-year architecture program. In 1904, Marian Coffin graduated from MIT as a special student from the landscape architecture program. In 1905, Nora Stanton Blatch Barney became the first woman to receive a degree in civil engineering from Cornell University.

An article in the 1901 New-York Daily Tribune titled Occupations of Women: What the Field of Architecture Offers to the Well Trained, Practical Woman reads:

It must be obvious that women have a more intimate knowledge of the requirements of a home than men usually have. They know of necessity why bedrooms should be properly partitioned, not merely divided by portieres, which leave the occupant of each room at the mercy of every trifling noise in the other. Their personal experience teaches them that fully one-half of the comfort of a house or apartment depends upon the closet room. They would never think of building a small apartment house in such a way that butcher and baker and candlestick maker must carry their goods up the front stairs—as I have seen done.

The architect, engineer, and landscape architect all work hand in hand to create a building and its environment. In 1893, respected art and architecture critic Mariana Van Rensselaer brought new recognition to the garden and defined the landscape architect as a gardener, an engineer, and an artist, who like an architect considers beauty and utility together. In an article written by turn-of-the-20th-century landscape architect Beatrix Farrand titled The Garden in Relation to the House, she explained that the arts of architecture and landscape gardening are sisters … not antagonists…. The work of the architect and landscape gardener should be done together from the beginning … not, as too often happens, one crowding the other out.

Working in concert, the architect, the engineer, and the landscape architect build our world, whether steel beam by steel beam or stone by stone. Women throughout history have made and continue to make increasingly important contributions to this realm, and it is both vital and fascinating to look back at women’s history, while looking forward to the amazing architectural achievements sure to come.

PART ONE

ARCHITECTS

ARCHITECTURE WAS FIRST recognized as a profession in the United States in 1857. At first, students learned through apprenticeship or study in Europe. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Architecture and Planning offered the first formal architectural curriculum in the United States, followed by the University of Pennsylvania in 1868, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1870. In 1871, Cornell University began offering the first four-year program in architecture, and Margaret Hicks became its first woman graduate in 1878. The US census listed only one woman architect in 1870. Twenty years later, in 1890, there were 22 women architects declared. By the 1900 census, there were 100 women listed. The first women architects, such as Louise Bethune, were trained in architectural offices. Many others worked with their husbands, but the women’s work was not always recognized because their husbands alone signed the architectural drawings.

In January 1898, 12 architects took the first licensing exam in Chicago’s city hall, in response to the world’s first licensing law passed by the Illinois General Assembly in June 1897. Marion Mahony was one of those 12 architects, and she passed.

In 1913, Lois Lilley Howe and Eleanor Manning established one of the few architectural firms of its time run solely by women. Howe did not mince words when it came to the prospect of making a living as an architect: As a means of livelihood for a woman, architecture is precarious and unadvisable, unless she has wonderful natural capacity combined with great tenacity of purpose, to which may be added exceptional opportunities. She went on to describe the prejudice against women as so great as to make it almost impossible for a woman to learn her trade. Nonetheless, she worked to support younger women entering the profession by offering apprenticeships in her firm.

Today, about 40 percent of architecture students are women. The Bureau of Labor Statistics and a 2009 American Institute of Architects (AIA) Survey state that in 2008, there were 141,200 women architects employed in the United States, and 16 percent growth is expected by 2018. According to studies conducted in 2012 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, more than 21 percent of architects are self-employed, which is three times higher than the self-employment seen in other fields.

In the last decade or so, there has been increasingly more discussion about the role of the woman architect. Created in 2002, the nonprofit Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation has been instrumental in promoting women architects in the industry. When Mattel introduced Architect Barbie in 2011, everyone looked around and asked, "Where are the women architects?" This book furthers the conversation about women in architecture; it brings to light women’s contributions to the field and will hopefully enlighten and ignite the aspirations of a new generation of designers, dreamers, and creators who will build our world to never-before-seen heights.

AMERICA’S TOP ARCHITECTURE SCHOOLS 2013

Based on responses to a 2013 survey sent to 282 American architectural and architectural/engineering offices employing more than 40,000 professionals, Architectural Record magazine compiled the following list of America’s top architecture schools. Bear in mind that the ranking of these schools is rather subjective; the schools vary greatly in terms of their academic and technical strengths. Currently, there are 125 schools in the United States offering professional graduate and undergraduate architectural degree programs.

Top 10 Architecture Undergraduate Programs

Cornell University

Southern California Institute of Architecture

Rice University

Syracuse University

California Polytechnic State University

University of Texas at Austin

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Rhode Island School of Design

Iowa State University

Auburn University

Top 10 Architecture Graduate Programs

Harvard University

Columbia University

Yale University

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Cornell University

Southern California Institute of Architecture

University of Virginia

University of California, Berkeley

Washington University in St. Louis

University of Cincinnati

LOUISE BETHUNE

Paving the Way

Louise Bethune.

Chicago Public Library

As a young child, Jennie Louise Lulu Blanchard was teased by a male classmate, who jokingly proclaimed, Lulu, girls can’t be architects. The teasing was later recounted in the 1893 book A Woman of the Century: A caustic remark had previously turned her attention in the direction of architecture, and an investigation, which was begun in a spirit of playful self-defense, soon became an absorbing interest. That interest turned into determination, and Lulu proved that young man wrong by becoming the first woman architect in America.

Jennie Louise Blanchard Bethune was born on July 21, 1856, in Waterloo, New York. Her older brother died when he was young, leaving Louise the only child of Emma Melona Williams and Dalson Wallace Blanchard. Dalson’s ancestors were French Huguenot refugees, and Melona’s family came to America in 1640, landing in Massachusetts from Wales.

Due to her poor health, young Louise was homeschooled until she was 11. She couldn’t have had better teachers than her parents: her father was a mathematician and school principal at Waterloo Union School, and her mother was a schoolteacher. When Louise was 12 years old, the family moved to Buffalo, New York, so she could attend Buffalo High School, where she became known as Lulu by teachers and classmates. After high school graduation, Louise taught, traveled, and studied for two years in preparation for enrollment at Cornell University.

Mrs. Bethune refuses to confine herself … believing that women who are pioneers in any profession should be proficient in every department.

In 1876, she began work as a draftsman for architect Richard A. Waite and gave up her plans to study architecture in college. She worked from 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM and the pay was low, but she had access to the office library. After five years as a drafter and assistant, she opened her own office in Buffalo. She was only 25 years old, and she was already the first woman architect in America. In December 1881, she married Robert A. Bethune, a former coworker, and he joined her in her architecture practice.

In the 23 years that the office was open, the firm designed 15 commercial and 8 industrial buildings, many schools, and several other public buildings, including a police station, a church, and a prison. One of Louise’s areas of concentration was public schools, though she refused to have her work pigeonholed. Indeed, an 1893 biography stated that Mrs. Bethune refuses to confine herself exclusively to that branch, believing that women who are pioneers in any profession should be proficient in every department, and that now at least women architects must be practical superintendents as well as designers and scientific constructors, and that woman’s complete emancipation lies in ‘equal pay for equal service.’

Louise opened her architecture firm at an opportune time: Buffalo was expanding its school system, and Louise designed 18 schools in all. Louise and Robert took all commissions that were available to them, and they designed a plant for the Iroquois Door Company, the Erie County Penitentiary women’s prison, grandstands for the Queen City Baseball and Amusement Company, and the transformer building that brought electricity from Niagara Falls to the Buffalo trolleys. The late 19th century saw a turn toward new scientific developments in sanitation, ventilation, fireproofing, and function, all of which were elements that Louise incorporated in her designs. The firm implemented innovative techniques and materials in their design for Denton, Cottier & Daniels music store, one of the first structures built of steel-frame construction with fire-resistant concrete slabs. In Louise’s school buildings, she designed wide hallways with two fire exits throughout all parts of the school, now a code requirement for all public buildings. Louise also used heavy timbers, layered hardwoods, and brick construction for fireproofing.

Buffalo’s Hotel Lafayette in Lafayette Square is Louise’s best-known building. It took six years to design and build, and cost a whopping $1 million. When the doors were opened in 1904, the seven-story, 225-room hotel was considered one of the most perfectly appointed and magnificent hotels in the country. Made of steel frame and concrete, the French Renaissance-style building was designed implementing new fire codes, a very important safety issue as cities and buildings were growing. Each room in the seven-story building had hot and cold running water and a phone, which were considered luxuries at the turn of the century. The landmark is now on the National Register of Historic Places, and a $35 million rehabilitation project in 2012 has restored the building to its original grace and grandeur.

Hotel Lafayette, Buffalo, New York.

Library of Congress, LC-D4-71141

Louise and Robert had one child, Charles W. Bethune, born in 1883. They employed another architect around the time that their son was born, William L. Fuchs, and made Fuchs a partner in 1890. The firm eventually changed its name to Bethune, Bethune, and Fuchs.

Louise became a member of the Western Association of Architects in 1885 and was elected the first female member of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in 1888. When both organizations merged, she became a fellow of the AIA.

HENRIETTA DOZIER

The third woman to become a member of AIA was a southerner, Henrietta Dozier. the first female architect in Georgia, Henrietta graduated from MIT in 1899 with a degree in architecture. her first office was in Atlanta; then, in 1916, she moved her practice to Jacksonville, Florida. Throughout her career, she hid the fact that she was a woman by signing her correspondence and blueprints with various

Reviews for Women of Steel and Stone

[nbmars · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The author profiles 22 women who pioneered in architecture, engineering, and landscape design. The stories are probably eye-opening for many readers. You will undoubtedly recognize many of the names of the men for or with whom most of these women worked; this is because it was the men who ended up either taking or just receiving all of the credit for the achievements of the women.For example, you may have heard the names of Frank Lloyd Wright, Robert Venturi, and John Roebling. But few people know that Marion Mahony Griffin established Wright’s distinctive drawing style, or that Denise Scott Brown pioneered the urban planning innovations for which Venturi gets credit, or that Emily Roebling handled the position of chief engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge for most of its eleven years of construction because her husband was paralyzed and bedridden. Perhaps the only woman in this book from before the present day whose name has wide recognition is that of Julia Morgan, but that's because she actually worked alone on the famous Hearst Castle at San Simeon, California.One aspect of these women's careers that probably won’t surprise you is all the obstacles they faced from gender prejudice. Some universities even had gender quotas in architecture and engineering, because to admit women would be to “waste space” on students who would just get married and be mothers instead of professionals. Most of these stories have relatively happy endings, because all of these women ended up as giants in their fields. For example, Norma Merrick Sklarek became the first black woman to be made a fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 1980. In New York, she had done outstanding work at the firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. But when she moved to California, she was turned down for work 19 times before getting a job at Gruen Associates. She only later learned that Gruen had never before hired either a woman or a black as an architect. She ended up working there twenty years, and becoming the head of the architecture department.There are great stories like that all through this book, and it is also quite up-to-date, including such contemporary stars as Zaha Mohammed Hadid, probably the most famous architect alive today, whose work is celebrated all over the world.Better yet, the book is full of additional and very useful resources. There are lists of top schools specializing in these fields; notes at the end of each chapter with titles of books about each person; text boxes highlighting careers of women who are also notable but aren’t covered by full chapters; and at the end, an annotated list providing (1) websites with programs for kids and teens on architecture and engineering; (2) great places to visit online; and (3) links to relevant professional organizations.Evaluation: This is a truly interesting and even inspirational book. If you are a female, you will marvel at what you learn about these pathbreakers, and if you are a male, you will get insight into the distorted views of reality often promulgated by the dominant discourse.