Women in Affordable Housing, Part I: The “Exceedingly Practical” Architects
Schenck and Mead Model Development Ellen Wilson Memorial Homes. From Journal of the American Institute of Architects, July 1915.
By Kate Reggev
For architects and planners, affordable housing — i.e. housing that fits within the means of even the lowest income earners — has been an area of research, reform, and design opportunities for centuries (if not longer!). And in the second half of the 1800s in the United States, this was very much the case, with the influx of immigrants causing cities like New York to just about burst at the seams.
Right around that time is also when women started entering the architectural profession, in both academic and office settings (Louise Blanchard Bethune, for example, opened her office in 1881, and Mary L. Page, the first woman to graduate from an architecture school, completed her B.S. from the University of Illinois in 1879).
You’ll remember that we’ve previously discussed the general sentiment in the 1800s and early (okay, even through the mid-) 1900s that if women had to practice architecture, it should really be only on residential projects, given their supposed “domestic expertise” and the intimate relationship between women and the home; and if they had to work on residential projects, it should really only be single-family homes or interiors, because, after all, that’s what women knew!
Gannon and Hands, Exterior of Model Tenement. Harpers Bazaar, July 10, 1897.
Many of these early female architects were indeed interested in designing homes, from high-end country residences to middle-class bungalows. However, many — if not most — were also deeply committed to big-picture, large-scale improvements to cities, in particular affordable housing. In fact, the second female graduate from an architecture school, Margaret Hicks (1858-1883) from Cornell in 1880, gave a commencement speech on the tenement house, a multi-family housing typology known at the time for its overcrowded, often unsafe conditions. Tenements, she purportedly stated, “must have light and air, closets, and bedrooms” — which may sound pretty obvious to us today, but was by no means even the bare minimum at the time.
Other early female architects were also actively interested in affordable housing and how to improve the typical tenement. Gannon and Hands, one of the earliest all-female firms in the United States established in 1894 (flashback to when we talked about their school, the New York School of Applied Design for Women, here!), engaged in deep research when it came to housing reform.
For the design of a model tenement (what we might think of as a “concept” tenement building addressing the typology’s gravest problems) in New York City in the 1890s, founders Mary Gannon (1867-1932) and Alice Hands (1874–1971) spent years doing hands-on research for the project: "We spent two years in preparatory work... we visited all the down-town tenements. We studied every detail of existing conditions, talked with the tenants, learned what were their objections and what they would suggest to promote better living," Hands described in an 1899 report called “What Women Can Earn: Occupations Of Women and Their Compensation.” What’s more, their research also involved living together in a tenement on Forsyth Street in the Lower East Side in 1894 for several months (their neighbors assumed they were factory girls!), so that they could truly understand the tenement way of life.
The model tenement design that came out of their deep research was envisioned to be situated across two lots (each typically 25 feet wide), could accommodate up to 44 families, and was noted for its large central courtyard with apartments surrounding it. Harper’s Bazaar wrote about it, the text accompanying a rendering of exterior and one of the charming interior courtyard. Enlivened with greenery and onlooking neighbors standing on bracketed terraces, its depiction was more reminiscent of a quaint European village than a downtown tenement. The terrace, as architectural historian Bethany Jean Laskin pointed out in her expertly-researched thesis on Gannon and Hands, also ingeniously functioned as the common corridor to take residents from the stairs to their apartments. “Rather than the long, dark corridors of past tenement designs that were considered dangerous and isolating, Gannon and Hands' tenement created an openness that provided a greater sense of safety and community,” Laskin explains.
Schenck and Mead Ellen Wilson Memorial Homes Floor Plans. From Journal of the American Institute of Architects, July 1915.
It appears that the pair also designed a version of their model tenement to fit on a single lot for a competition, which was published in Vogue and several other national and local journals and magazines. Over the next few years, the firm and their tenement designs were the subject of an extraordinary amount of press, almost all overwhelmingly positive. Progressive reformer and advocate Jacob Riis, famed for his (somewhat staged) striking photographs depicting “How The Other Half Lives,” praised the design and even mentioned it in one of his books.
So where were these thoughtfully-designed, well-received tenements actually constructed? That, Laskin notes, is a key question. Long story, short: it appears that no model tenements were ultimately constructed under Gannon and Hands’ name for a variety of reasons, and that they even went into a partnership with a firm run by two of their former professors to try and get them built, to no avail. Laskin muses that the reasons ranged from and could be a combination of funding issues to potential gender discrimination in the approvals process. What is clear, though, is that their designs proved that women could indeed expertly design excellent multi-family homes.
Gannon and Hands, Courtyard in Model Tenement. Harpers Bazaar, July 10, 1897.
Two short decades later (and with good housing for the poor still very much unresolved), another New York-based firm run by two female architects, Anna Pedleton Schenck (1874 – 1915 and Marcia Mead (1879–1967), were similarly interested in affordable housing, often at a larger planning scale than individual buildings. The two designed developments of entire city blocks and neighborhoods in Washington, D.C.; New York City; Bridgeport, Connecticut; and more. In Bridgehampton, for example, the firm designed 87 one- and two-family row houses for local working-class families. Although the development was cited near factories that had ramped up production related to World War I, they were organized around gardens and a playground and emphasized safety for the families.
Despite the duo’s relatively short collaboration due to the tragic death of Schenck in 1915 from pneumonia, they received several significant commissions and lots of positive press. One of their most notable projects was the competition-winning design for the Ellen Wilson Memorial Homes (1916). The proposal consisted of a city block of small dwellings, each with its own backyard and front entrance, as opposed to a shared one or one off of DC’s notoriously dark and dreaded alleyways. Designed to accommodate 250 Black families working for World War I-related production, the vision Schenck & Mead had was progressive, considerate, and all-encompassing: not only did they propose everything from spaces for children (playground, pool, and a day nursery) to a health clinic and provisions for a settlement/social worker, they also envisioned it as a financially self-sustaining community. While the project was sadly put on hold due to the war, I think it was one of the firm’s strongest examples of holistic, people-centric design that was, in many ways, way ahead of their time.
Throughout the rest of the twentieth century (and, frankly, well into the twenty-first!), as the United States continued to grapple with affordable housing and, later, publicly-funded housing, women continued to be at the forefront of housing design. Into the 1920s and 1930s, female architects like Elisabeth Coit and Henrietta Dozier continued to be interested in low-cost, affordable housing; simultaneously, women were at the helm of planning and advocacy (more on that next time!). When World War II enabled more women access to higher education and jump started certain areas of the economy (especially postwar construction), it also opened the door to more female architects practicing in the public realm, especially in large-scale public housing and veterans’ housing.
Gannon and Hands Model Tenement Rendering, Vogue Aug 12, 1897.
So in the end, were (and are?) women really the people best positioned to design homes? Alice Hands of Gannon and Hands certainly thought so. “There is an immense unworked field for women in architecture, especially the planning of dwellings," she noted in 1899. "Their familiarity with the requirements of a home makes them exceedingly practical,” she continued. In a way, Hands is not wrong: certainly the traditional gender roles of the time kept women at home and historically made them experts in the practical needs of a home. But to translate those needs into a full-fledged design with an understanding of materials, form, shape, style, and engineering — let alone a design for a multi-family building or an entire city block — was seen as entirely beyond the abilities of most, if not all, women.
On the other hand, today, I think we acknowledge that meaningful, in-depth research and, significantly, participatory design (ahem, possibly living in a tenement and pretending to be factory girls in order to connect with and understand the plight of your fellow tenement-living neighbors, for example) are both key to successful design project and can be done by anyone, regardless of gender. As we strive towards a society where all genders may spend equal amounts of time in a home and understand it with the same amount of nuance, perhaps we’re also heading towards a world in which all genders have equal “familiarity with the requirements of a home” and therefore equal capacity to design it.
Resources
The First American Women Architects by Sarah Allaback
Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of Housing, Work and Family Life by Dolores Hayden Ph.D
The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods and Cities by Dolores Hayden Ph.D
The American Woman's Home by Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe