Women Architects at Work tells an alternate history of modernism in the U.S.
Women Architects at Work: Making American Modernism | Mary Anne Hunting, Kevin D. Murphy | Princeton University Press | $65Its impossible to work on marriage and collect recipes, investigate gardenias, observe behaviors of pregnant women, think about the education of children, the managing of a house, gardening, holidays and everything that Ive been doing with half my mind and all my heartand at the same time to work just hard enough to be paid.While this sounds, eerily, like many of the texts Ive fired off to friends in the last five years, it is an entry from the 1943 diary of Mary Coss Barnes, an American architect trained at Londons Architectural Association School of Architecture, writer, curator at the Museum of Modern Art, and a frequent and integral collaborator with her second husband. Women have always wanted a lot and to be good at all of it. Coss was one of at least 100 women architects working in the early to mid 20th century who might have been lost to history had their professional aspirations and achievements not been unearthed and given form and texture in Women Architects at Work: Making American Modernism, an exhaustive work of setting the record straight by historians Mary Anne Hunting and Kevin D. Murphy, the result of 20 years of research. The authors met in Murphys seminar at the CUNY Graduate Center in 2004, where Hunting wrote a paper about Ethel Brown Power, an editor at House Beautiful from 1923 to 1933. Simultaneously, Murphy was researching Powers life and that of her work partner Eleanor Agnes Raymond, a Boston-based architect. Working as a team, Power and Raymond had an enormous and mostly unsung influence on developing and dispersing a regionally influenced European modernism throughout New England and the United Statesa decade before Walter Gropius was heralded for doing the same with the design of his own house in Lincoln, Massachusetts.Women Architects at Work: Making American Modernism (Courtesy Princeton University Press)Powers and Raymond met at the Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture and received certificates in architecture there in 1919. As Hunting and Murphy continued with their research, they discovered that the Cambridge Schoolestablished in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1915 because Harvards Graduate School of Design wouldnt admit womenfostered a widespread community of women architects whose work in mass housing, community planning, industrial design, curating, and more created a transformative cultural moment by practicing a sort of Modernism that was less formally radical but nevertheless functionally and socially progressive. In some cases, this meant designing modern architecture in places where it was unconventional or unfamiliar and slyly relying on the styles functionalism to create comfortable, working homes for other women. In others, it meant softening the formal aesthetics of modernism and blending them with regional materials such as adobe or wood framing to be less shocking and blend in. (References such as these throughout the book remind me of the ways women still must bob and weave, adapt, pivot, accommodate, and compromise to achieveits simultaneously enraging and incredible.) In Women Architects at Work, the authors document stories of the schools alumnae and faculty as well as a web of their contemporaries. (The Cambridge School, officially associated with Smith College, but also very much intertwined with Harvard faculty, closed when the GSD began admitting women during the 194243 academic year.) While the number of trained female architects in the U.S. in the early 20th century was minuscule compared with that of their male counterparts, the long tails of their connections, collaborations, networks, and modes of practice allowed them to reach a larger and broader audience to advance Modernism, write Hunting and Murphy.Eleanor Raymond (Private collection)Throughout eight thematic chapters that coalesce around brief biographies, the book tells an alternate history of modernism in the U.S., focusing on the Cambridge Schools pedagogical evolution and its foundation in principles that reflected modern practice rather than established tradition; women architects work in various programmatic areas; the influence of Europe, Asia, and South America on their practices; andmost compellinglytheir professional survival through collaboration, with each other, their male or female life partners, or family members.Elizabeth-Ann Campbell, watercolor of one of the Cambridge Schools drafting rooms (detail), c. 1936. (Private collection)If obscurity is a through line in Women Architects at Work, its counternarrative is collaboration, to which an entire chapter is devoted. While the architecture profession has been based on collaboration since its beginnings, the widespread peddling of the lone, white male auteur continues. What emerges from Hunting and Murphys research is the degree to which Cambridge School alumnae and their female peers formed a vast and many-tentacled network, referring each other for jobs, hiring each other, and supporting one another in a myriad of ways. In the absence of archivesanother privilege of the time, resources, and attention given mostly to menCambridge School architects social, educational, and professional connections and relationships show the breadth and depth of their endeavors. In several graphic representations, the books authors show these staggering, crisscrossing webs. Though Hunting and Murphy document so many women it can be dizzying, their sheer number, and their permanence on the page and in the indexes, is the point. But Raymond and Power are emblematic of the books spirit: Raymonds career spanned almost 60 years, during which she designed innovative housing and experimented with materials and building systems, including a foray into passive-style housing, like 1948 Dover Sun House, on which she collaborated with engineer Mria Telkes. She founded her own practice and was adept at integrating landscape and architecture. Her own renovated townhouse in Boston, which she shared with Power, became a kind of co-working space for other professional women in their circle. Power, for her part, published many of Raymonds designs, in addition to covering modernism in the pages of House Beautiful in all its complexities, educating her readers with finesse and patience.Amaza Lee Meredith, Azurest South (now the Virginia State University Alumni House, 87 Boissean Street, Petersburg, Virginia, 1939. (Private Collection)Hunting and Murphy also acknowledge the lack of women architects of color in this period, as well as the exclusion of African American, Jewish, and other architects from many middle-class housing communities. They document Black women architects stories when possible, including that of Amaza Lee Meredith, an unregistered architect, teacher, and artist who followed in her sisters footsteps to establish the waterfront community Azurest North, developed in Sag Harbor on Long Island after World War II.Though the book sweeps the reader back a century in time, the sexism, classicism, and racism midcentury architects faced feels, in some ways, painfully current in both architecture culture and our political moment. Although statistics dont necessarily reflect the lived experience of women practitioners, todays numbers are at least somewhat heartening.Hunting and Murphys project details the erasure of women in modernism as much as their contributionsits a necessary if painful symbiosis. As they write in their conclusion to Women Architects at Work, Without the inclusion of women in the narrative of Modernism, our comprehension of this dynamic movement is impoverished. Thanks to the authors, it has also been enriched.Laura Raskin writes about architecture, design, and culture.
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