“Serious Work”: The Women Who Taught Architecture

Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture, Gardening, and Horticulture for Women. Lowthorpe School, Groton, Massachusetts.

School is back in session, and while we’ve previously spent some time delving into what school was like for female students of architecture (whether they attended one of the early schools specially created for women or an HBCU), we haven’t spent much time on the other side of the equation (ahem, drafting table?): women who taught architecture.

For many, educators serve a range of functions, from role models and mentors to future friends or even employers (if you haven’t checked out MA’s inimitable founder Julia Gamolina’s origin story and the role her educators played in the creation of Madame Architect, now is the time; you could also check out Lindsay Harkema recent MA interview as well!). The best professors and educators not only help students learn for the present — the design of a specific project or a method for improving graphic presentation — but also open windows to the world beyond school, showing what is possible within the profession and motivating us beyond the classroom.

Thinking back to my own educational experience in architecture, just over 50% of my studio professors were female between undergrad and graduate schools; while this is, I’m sure, increasingly common today (woohoo!), this was virtually unthinkable until relatively recently. You can imagine: if the sight of an early female architect or a female architectural student were unusual, then the sight of a woman demonstrating, say, watercoloring techniques or giving a design critique to a room of men would have been even rarer!

And yet, as women slowly entered the classroom as students in architecture schools after the turn of the century, they also slowly began to make appearances as educators in architecture schools. Most of the early female architecture instructors taught, fittingly, at early schools for women in design (remember when we dove into that history here?). For example, the New York School of Applied Design for Women hired architect Harvey Wiley Corbett to both design the school’s building and lead the school’s small architectural faculty, but by 1915 he had hired two women to serve as instructors: Anne Dornin, a recent graduate from Columbia’s School of Architecture and a prolific architect in the 1920s (more on her here!) and Ruth Gardner Robinson (referred to in school literature as Mrs. Elbert G. Treganza), who had previously worked at famed decorative arts company Tiffany Studios. Through the 1920s, Robinson remained in academia, teaching decorative arts at Columbia’s Teachers College.

As some of these early women-only design schools began producing graduates, several schools started to hire their own graduates to teach, especially at the Lowthorpe School or the Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. For example, prolific landscape architect Elizabeth Greenleaf Pattee (1893–1991) (did her middle name predestine her for a life designing landscapes?) spent decades teaching landscape design at the Lowthorpe School shortly after her graduation from that institution in 1916; she continued teaching there even after the school merged with RISD in the 1940s and up until her retirement in 1963 — a whopping five decades of teaching! Other female-only colleges like Wellesley and Smith also hired female professors and instructors; Mabel K. Babcock (1862-1931) received her landscape architecture degree from MIT in 1908 and later led an active practice while also teaching landscape architecture courses at Wellesley from 1910-1914. She then acted as an instructor in plant conservation at the Lowthorpe School and ultimately served as the Dean of Women Students at MIT (wow!). Lowthorpe graduate and landscape architect Mary P. Cunningham (1888 - 1934) made her rounds at several women’s colleges, first at Smith, then at the Cambridge School starting in 1919, and later at Lowthorpe from 1932-33.

Despite this, it was still unusual for a woman to teach at a coed (read: mostly male) school in the early 1900s. A rare exception was Rosamond Wolcott, the first woman to receive a Master of Architecture degree at Cornell in 1917. She taught as an assistant while completing the degree, and then was hired at Clemson University’s architecture program. Small caveat: she was hired as a temporary replacement for her brother while he worked for the government; her application letter boldly addressed the elephant in the room: "if you have any prejudice in appointing a woman for the position, I thought that the fact that Cornell had appointed me to a position in their College of Architecture might be an argument in my favor."

Into the 1920s and 1930s and even through the 1940s and 1950s, women at the front of a classroom remained unusual. A unique exception was the intrepid Sibyl Moholy-Nagy (1903–1971), who arrived in the United States in the 1930s with her husband, renowned Bauhaus photographer and sculptor László Moholy-Nagy. Sibyl initially served as his assistant, but by the 1940s she had started to establish herself in architectural academia and criticism. She held academic positions at the Institute of Design in Chicago and was offered a half-time appointment at Pratt Institute in 1951, where she remained for nearly two decades; in fact, in 1960 she became the school’s first female full professor (yes!) — but ultimately left in 1969 because of a conflict over the future of the school. The following year took her uptown to Columbia as a visiting professor. Although she passed away in 1971 at the age of 67, she reached critical acclaim (pun intended): her New York Times obituary stated that the AIA had recently named her “critic of the year” for 1970, and her obituary by close friend Paul Rudoph, published in the June 1971 issue of Architectural Forum, talked about how much “her students loved her” and her “outpouring of books, lectures, essays, and commentary" that was "possibly unequalled [sic] in the architectural world."

Sybil Moholy-Nagy lecturing at Pratt, 1961. Courtesy Prattonia Yearbook, 1961.

Sybil Moholy-Nagy with her male colleagues at Pratt, 1956. Courtesy of Prattonia Yearbook, 1956.

Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s life and academic career is particularly interesting and complex for many reasons, including the fact that she was never formally trained in architecture, history, writing, or criticism (on the other hand, her early career as an actress in Germany must have contributed to her strong presence behind the podium during lectures; you can almost imagine a booming, theatrical voice as dramatic as some of the buildings and theories she would have lectured about). There’s also the fact that she was the widow, collaborator, and biographer of a famed member of the Bauhaus school; but for me, I’m particularly interested in the fact that students typically would have learned from her in a lecture hall rather than a studio environment. It might be that the lack of women teaching studio courses related to the long-believed perception that women weren’t good designers, and therefore couldn’t lead a studio course. It was often thought that women lacked the creative drive and mind to develop truly unique architectural forms and ideas; they might be able to intellectually handle, say, writing or criticism, but the “true genius” of design, the idea of a singular “hero” like Gropius or Le Corbusier, was still reserved only for men.

Another unusual exception from the 1950s — and from the idea that women didn’t have the creativity needed for good design — was Polish-born Stanislawa (Siasia) Sandecka Nowicki (1912-2018), who was educated in Europe before World War II and came to the United States in 1946. After teaching part time at the University of North Carolina in the late 1940s, she was hired as an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s department of architecture in 1951 and was one of the first two female faculty members of the school — on top of being the newly widowed mother of an infant and a ten year old! The then-dean of the school saw massive potential in her: “Getting her was a coup; she could well have been the best teacher we had.” When she became a full professor in 1958, she was the first female full professor of architecture in the country and remained at the school until her retirement in 1977. In 1978, she was awarded an AIA Medal from the American Institute of Architects in recognition for her contributions and influence on the architectural profession and her “profound influence on all who have been privileged to know her as teacher or as colleague.”

Yet the 1960s continued to be a time of few women in architectural academia, although it saw the start of the inimitable Denise Scott Brown’s (1931-) teaching career (don’t miss Kate Mazade’s review of the recent book on Scott Brown here!). By 1960, Scott Brown had: attended the University of Witwatersrand; moved from her native South Africa to London; graduated from the AA with a degree in architecture; married Robert Scott Brown; traveled and worked throughout Europe for three years; moved to Philadelphia and studied at the University of Pennsylvania’s planning department; become a widow; completed her master’s degree in city planning; and became a faculty member at the university while simultaneously completing a master’s degree in architecture (umm, what am I doing with my life? Did I mention that all of this was before the age of 30?!).

After teaching at UPenn until 1965, she then taught at UC Berkeley and UCLA, during which she developed her interest in the cities of Los Angeles and Las Vegas; these cities served as the basis for studio projects at UCLA and ultimately the seminal Learning from Las Vegas (1972), on which she collaborated with Robert Venturi and co-author Steven Izenour. By the late 1960s she was married to Venturi and back on the East Coast, working in Philadelphia and teaching with Venturi at Yale, where she continued to encourage the incorporation of social science methodology when looking at the built environment. She later taught at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. But impressive as all of that sounds — ahem, was — Scott Brown painted a true picture of what academia and architectural practice and criticism was like for her at the time in her outstanding 1982 essay “Room at the Top? Sexism and the Star System in Architecture”:

“When Bob and I married, in 1967, I was an associate professor. I had taught at the Universities of Pennsylvania and Berkley, and had initiated the first program in the new school of architecture at UCLA. I had tenure. My publication record was respectable; my students, enthusiastic… The first indication of my new status [as Bob's wife] came when an architect whose work I had reviewed said, "We at the office think it was Bob writing, using your name." By the time we wrote Learning from Las Vegas, our growing experience with incorrect attributions prompted Bob to include a note at the beginning of the book asking that the work and ideas not be attributed to him alone and describing the nature of our collaboration and the roles played by individuals in our firm."

Equally infuriated by this as I am impressed at Scott Brown’s articulate, mature expression even when she is angered, I try to look on the positive side of things: by the 1970s, Scott Brown was joined by several other female lecturers, professors, and faculty members in architectural academia, in large part thanks to second-wave feminism and the (small) increase in women studying architecture in the 1960s and 1970s — even though her struggle for equal recognition continues to, frankly, today (looking at you, Pritzker Prize! And FYI it’s not too late to sign the petition here.).

Many of these women in the 1970s and 1980s were interested in the then-unexplored and unresearched history of women and gender in the built environment, and their publications and research delved into this history. Dolores Hayden, for example, was a lecturer at Berkeley in 1973 and the first woman hired as a tenure-track assistant professor of architecture at MIT from 1973-1979; shortly thereafter she wrote The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (she later taught at UCLA, where she was the first tenured woman at their architecture school, and Yale, where she was again the first tenured woman at the architecture school; she continued to examine gender and space over the rest of her career). Argentinian-born Susana Torre joined the faculty at SUNY Old Westbury in 1972 and soon co-founded the Archive of Women in Architecture of The Architectural League of New York (which led to the 1977 exhibit “Women in American Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective” that she curated at the Brooklyn Museum). Into the 1980s and 1990s, she held academic positions at Barnard, Parsons, Cranbrook, Columbia, Yale, NYU, and other international universities and continued her research into space and gender.

Other schools across the country also began to hire women: at USC, Deborah Sussman served as a visiting critic from 1963-1973; Claire Forrest, RIBA, as a tenure-track assistant professor from 1975-1976 but tragically died in a car accident; Noel Phyllis Birkby as a lecturer from 1978-1980, among other guest lecturers in the late 1970s. Pratt hired beloved Mimi Lobell (1942-2001) in 1972 as a visiting professor; she became a full-time professor in 1976, received tenure in 1986, and taught there until her death in 2001, teaching design studios for students in their first through fifth years along with a range of lecture and elective courses. Like Torre, Lobell was deeply involved in women’s issues, and had a particular passion for feminine spirituality in design and history; she was also one of the originators of the “Women in Architecture'' exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum in 1977. Former research assistant to Sibyl Moholy-Nagy Regina Goldberg Weile taught as an adjunct professor at Cooper Union from 1975-2004, and Yale alumna Judith Chafee (1932–1998) taught architecture at the University of Arizona starting in 1973 until the 1990s.

To be clear though, these women were still few and far between. Dolores Hayden wrote in her Intellectual Trajectory Talk at Yale, “Storytelling with the Shapes of Time,” that her experiences in academia in the 1970s and 1980s led her to believe that “Architecture was a field where men did not want qualified young women doing serious work.” She started her teaching career, she explained, “in an era when the majority of faculty members were male, so, in addition to every other challenge faced by an intellectually ambitious young person, I confronted gender discrimination and sexual harassment.”

Despite the environment that Hayden and others dealt with, many of these women remained in architectural academia into the 1980s; in 1982, Denise Scott Brown noted that “during the eighties there has been a gradual increase of women architects in academe.” These women continued their research into gender and space while educating a growing number of aspiring architects and designers. The growth in both the female-identifying numbers of faculty and students (slowly) continued into the 1990s and 2000s, although "tenured women faculty represented less than 3% of all architecture faculty in 1990,” noted Sherry Ahrentzen and Linda N. Groat in their 1992 essay “Rethinking Architectural Education: Patriarchal Conventions & Alternative Visions from the Perspectives of Women Faculty.” HBCUs also started to hire women, including Renee Kemp-Rotan at Howard starting in the 1980s and Carla Jackson Bell at Tuskegee, who became the school’s first female tenure-track professor in 1991.

Thirty years later, in 2020, ACSA records indicate that 38% of program faculty identify as women — a major increase since the 1990s, of course, but still not parity, and only 40% of women reported being tenured faculty as opposed to men’s 55%, and women earn less than their male counterparts. Long story short, as in many other fields, women still haven’t reached parity with men, and the numbers are even worse for women of color.

So where does that leave us? What does this mean? For me, it brings up two things: the importance of having mentors that, in some way, connect with and reflect the student body students, inspiring dreams and goals of where their careers can go. Seeing and learning from female faculty implicitly suggests that there is a place for women in the profession.

I also think that women at the head of the classroom also creates a different learning environment. If we think back to the Beaux Arts pedagogy, we can certainly acknowledge that many of its tenets and traditions — say, the concept of a male “hero” architect or individual “starchitect” as the sole, God-like creator or even the origins of the Beaux Arts Ball — would have been different if half the faculty were female (think: probably no naked women at raucous parties and fewer nude female models…). As one respondent to a 1990 survey mentioned in Ahrentzen and Groat’s paper stated, “the modernist concept of the 'hero' has thoroughly permeated architectural education — and these are heroes, not heroines.” And the experience is even more challenging for female student of color in architecture; a recent thesis by Theodore Randall Sawruk, “The Experiences of Women Students of Color Enrolled in Undergraduate Architecture Programs in the US,” notes that students cite feelings of isolation and alienation that cause them to disassociate, abandon their goals, or leave architectural programs — in part because of a lack of mentors and professors that look like them.

More recently, it was an exciting moment in the 2010s when several women were selected to be the deans of various architecture schools, from Howard and Yale to Columbia and Pratt to Cornell and the University of Virginia. Although many of the women who served as deans have since stepped down or moved on to other positions, it has been suggested that perhaps it does say something when women are not only at the head of a classroom but at the head of an entire school — we hope.