The Routledge Companion to Women in Architecture

Anna Sokolina, Anna Sokolina

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000387360
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'architecture

The Routledge Companion to Women in Architecture illuminates the names of pioneering women who over time continue to foster, shape, and build cultural, spiritual, and physical environments in diverse regions around the globe. It uncovers the remarkable evolution of women's leadership, professional perspectives, craftsmanship, and scholarship in architecture from the preindustrial age to the present.

The book is organized chronologically in five parts, outlining the stages of women's expanding engagement, leadership, and contributions to architecture through the centuries. It contains twenty-nine chapters written by thirty-three recognized scholars committed to probing broader topographies across time and place and presenting portraits of practicing architects, leaders, teachers, writers, critics, and other kinds of professionals in the built environment. The intertwined research sets out debates, questions, and projects around women in architecture, stimulates broader studies and discussions in emerging areas, and becomes a catalyst for academic programs and future publications on the subject.

The novelty of this volume is in presenting not only a collection of case studies but in broadening the discipline by advancing an incisive overview of the topic as a whole. It is an invaluable resource for architectural historians, academics, students, and professionals.

PART I
Women in the Early Profession and Leadership: Preindustrial Age to Early Twentieth Century

From Domestic Realms into Public Life and Culture

Part I presents research on early professionals in the field and provides an overview of women’s leadership with an emphasis on the challenges they had to overcome and their remarkable accomplishments within the rigid cultural confines of the domestic sphere, public life, service, and culture. The chapters cover the timespan from the preindustrial age to the ingrained conservative settings of the first half of the twentieth century.

The inquiry begins with an essential probe into the meaning of professional equity while constructing new territories of influence. In Chapter 1, “Did Women Design or Build Before the Industrial Age?” Shelley E. Roff traces archival data of early modern Europe in England, France, and Italy from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. Her discoveries vector and redefine the common approach to women’s agency in the field. Roff’s studies confirm that women did play active roles in the built environment in Western Europe, in particular elite and bourgeois women, who influenced architectural design as patrons and advisors, and women of lesser means who were on occasion employed in building-related crafts and construction labor. While their earliest activities as true designers and builders can be linked to the cultural phenomenon of the Renaissance, the rediscovery of antiquity was a catalyst that transformed the identity of the architect and opened the traditional building industry to those who were not master builders. Roff proves that both men and women began to design and build as artist-architects and as amateurs, yet women engaged with architecture mostly from the margins of the profession. Only nineteenth-century industrialization brought a dynamic change in the nature of work and lifestyles, opening the door for greater numbers of women to work outside the home. The mechanization of the building industry and changing attitudes toward gendered education and work paved the path for women to move toward specialized knowledge in the craft and profession of architecture in the twentieth century.

In Chapter 2, “For Homeowners and Housekeepers: The Architecture of Minerva Parker Nichols in Late Nineteenth-Century America” by Margaret (Molly) Lester, societal contexts are documented through the lens of gender in the architectural profession. This chapter examines how Parker Nichols established and sustained her career by specializing in projects for women. Though her formal independent practice lasted eight years and was concentrated in the Philadelphia area, she fostered a clientele of architectural and social significance and designed over sixty commissions, which were extensively covered in the press, and yet she is rarely recognized for her contribution to the field. Lester documents the scope of work of Minerva Parker Nichols with a particular focus on her female clients and the design of women’s clubs in an era of growing economic independence for women. This chapter presents a case study revealing one of the earliest careers of a successful woman and the spaces she designed and built while creating a novel business model as an architect.

Brian Adams uncovers the life and work of a prolific artist, Nell Brooker Mayhew, and her extraordinary contribution to architecture and interior design in Chapter 3, “Nell Brooker Mayhew and the Arts and Crafts Movement in America.” While profiling her from her early childhood in Illinois, the author follows her career as a faculty member at the College of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California, Pasadena; as the owner of an art gallery; and as a talented painter who pioneered a color etching process that allowed her to create unique artwork from a repetitive process of reproduction. At the height of the Arts and Crafts movement, these ideals were manifested in her work exhibited throughout the United States and Europe. Adams emphasizes the significance of her collaborative projects with her sister, Adelaide Danely Royer, an interior designer, and her brother-in-law, Urbana, IL, architect Joseph William Royer—collaborations that presented her with the opportunity to succeed as a design professional. The author proves that Brooker Mayhew’s studies and etchings of the Spanish missions of Southern California, highly regarded by proponents of the Arts and Crafts movement, documented and helped to preserve these vanishing monuments, and he highlights the pivotal role of her etchings in popularizing the Spanish Mission style.

Catherine R. Ettinger in Chapter 4, “ ‘Designing Houses Is Like Having Babies’: Verna Cook and the Practice of Architecture in the 1920s and 1930s,” analyzes women’s presence in the field of practical architecture as it expanded in the United States in the early twentieth century. Among women practitioners, Ettinger portrays Verna Cook as one of the most successful. Cook designed over sixty suburban homes, had her designs published as an “Ideal House” on the cover of the popular magazine Better Homes & Gardens, and was the only woman to participate as a professional architect in the 1939 New York World’s Fair’s legendary exposition, the Town of Tomorrow. This chapter reviews Cook’s work and the strategies she employed to gain access to the male-dominated field. Based on archival documents, published interviews, and articles from the 1920s and 1930s, the author argues that Cook used the discourse of domesticity to her advantage and, due to her skills as a housewife writing for home magazines, presented herself as a most capable architect with broader expertise in the design of houses.

In contrast to Cook’s professional success, Chapter 5 documents “The Forgotten Art of Florence Hope Luscomb.” The authors, Mary Anne Hunting and Kevin D. Murphy, focus on Florence Luscomb, who was among the earliest female graduates in Architecture of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and of the women’s Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture in Massachusetts, where she was a student shortly after its founding in 1916, and later worked with the women’s architecture firm run by Idah Anna Ryan, where she was eventually made a partner. Her work as an architect, however, was greatly overshadowed by her contributions to the women’s suffrage movement. Luscomb’s political activism continued into her late eighties; she opposed McCarthyism and supported the women’s movement. Among her little-studied architectural works the authors discovered a modest cabin she designed and built for her own use in Tamworth, New Hampshire, in 1940, which brings to light her reliance on vernacular New England dwellings and was typical of the work of Cambridge School graduates who were concerned with simplicity and functionality. Luscomb’s colleagues, including architect Eleanor Raymond, also built themselves rural retreats which functioned as autonomous spaces and continued nineteenth-century experiments in “scientific” home management by reformers such as Catherine Beecher. The authors provide rich architectural context for interpreting Luscomb’s “room of her own.”

In Chapter 6, “ ‘This Is Not A Success Story’: Florence Fulton Hobson, Architect in Northern Ireland,” Tanja Poppelreuter highlights the career of an early Irish architect and her ability to find ways to practice that did not result in a success according to traditional parameters but speaks of resilience and a will to adapt to the sociopolitical vagaries and the challenges that professional women encountered in the early twentieth century. World War I, the Easter Rising, and the Irish Civil War had profound impacts on the building industry, and still Fulton Hobson became the third woman architect to be licensed by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and the first professional woman architect in Ireland. She designed and built commissions not only for her family and friends but also for the Irish White Cross and for the Belfast Corporation. The author follows Fulton Hobson from her studies at the School of Art in Belfast, to her apprenticeship in the Belfast practice of James John Phillips and James St. John Phillips and her work for Edward Guy Dawber and James Glen Sivewright Gibson in London, to her work for the Belfast Corporation as an Assistant to the Royal Commission on Health and Housing. In her 1911 article “Architecture as a Profession” Fulton Hobson reflected on the ways in which she negotiated her role as the only woman in an all-male profession. Poppelreuter concludes by revising Fulton ...