Jade Snelling Architecture, International Archive of Women in Architecture (IAWA)

The Unrealized Vision of Architect Merle Easton’s “School Street Concept:” A Window Into Public Education Reform in 1970s West Philadelphia

The Merle Easton Collection is fully processed and the finding aid is available here.

Born in 1940, Merle Easton grew up in Sitka, Alaska, a port town on Baranof Island, southwest of Juneau, just to the west of British Columbia. She attended several schools in the Pacific Northwest before ultimately earning her Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Washington in Seattle in 1966. Interested in patterns of urban development and accounting for community needs in design, she developed a plan for a Community Center in central Seattle for her thesis project.

Following graduation, Easton found steady work in the Mid-Atlantic states. She worked independently, but also with agencies focused on concerns around urban renewal, affordable housing, and community displacement. As an independent architect, Easton developed the “street school” concept that was an outgrowth of the Mantua-Powelton Mini-School (MPMS) in West Philadelphia. Her conceptual design was intended to become a template for decentralized, modular schools, using inexpensive prefabricated units, integrated into their local neighborhoods. While the mini-school itself wasn’t a product of Easton’s design, it was her direct inspiration. An urban renewal project focused on refurbishing an abandoned factory building to house a small, integrated, and community-controlled school, the Mini-school sought to implement a radically different curriculum in a “found” space. The school served roughly 120-150 students (nearly all Black) in the two years it was open, all drawn from the surrounding area, and was meant to be a bridge between the middle class Powelton neighborhood and the predominantly Black and underserved Mantua neighborhood.

Riffing on the underlying philosophy of the Mini-school, Easton collaborated with neighborhood activist and MPMS principal Forrest Adams to develop a design geared toward scaling the existing school into a “mini-school system.” This prototype would offer affordable and sustainable growth that would expand the school without disrupting community life – it would rehabilitate and reuse space and resources, minimize waste and impingement, and weave community life and experiential learning into the fabric of elementary education. Easton developed drawings, scale models, and a film to promote the concept and get critical buy-in from the Mantua and Powelton communities and various funding agencies.

The project was written about in two issues of Progressive Architecture, Design and Planning: The New Schools by James Morisseau, and in Women in American Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective, edited by Susana Torre. In Torre’s book, Easton’s vision is described as “designed to cut time and expense in school construction, to revitalize high density inner city neighborhoods and to provide a more complete and relevant education including the entire community in the process. The school utilizes ‘found’ spaces, such as streets and empty lots. Prefabricated classrooms and toilets, multimedia domed meeting rooms and retractable barrel vaults plug into a community and draw upon people, existing businesses, and institutions as educational resources” (Torre 164). Adams and Easton both advocated for the idea of a “street school” as more cost effective than the traditional alternatives, arguing it would cost $7-10 per square foot compared to $21-30 per square foot of conventional school construction (Progressive Architecture 34). And yet the idea failed to garner enough critical traction to be fully realized.

The Mantua-Powelton Mini-School foundered for a few reasons, some rooted in a lack of critical oversight, others located in the novelty of its power structure. In Seven Schools, a 1972 publication from The Young Great Society Building Foundation, the authors cite the fact that the school had too little time to fully develop multiple radical approaches to education. This, coupled with not making good on its promise of engaging the community, lack of continued funding, and disagreements among its teachers regarding both curriculum and discipline, made for chaotic implementation and practically doomed the school from the start (Goldfarb et al. 33-35). On top of these problems there was the additional stressor of the refurbished factory being poorly adapted as an educational environment.

The mission of the school and, later, the “school street concept” was and continued to be community empowerment, but as Mark R. Shedd, superintendent of the School District of Philadelphia from 1967 to 1972, admitted in a private interview: “In the early days I thought community control was the thing. Now I think shared power is more realistic. I don’t think the central administration or the board or the superintendent can abdicate. I don’t think that’s proper or realistic. The mini-school represented, in part, an abdication of our responsibilities. We didn’t insist from the outset on the proper kind of management controls… We should have insisted upon a much closer audit and monitoring function. But we didn’t” (Shedd as qtd. on 35). Here there are multiple interlocking structures at play: the educational system itself, local power structures, community participation incentives (needed to generate buy-in), zoning (and redlining), resource allocation, and so on. While the mini-school and Easton’s “school street concept” were distinct from each other, I think it’s an interesting exercise to map the lessons of the mini-school onto the larger vision of the “street school.” That’s not to say that the school street or mini-school system would necessarily have failed in its implementation, but the exercise aims to understand how fraught it can be to navigate multiple entrenched systems while trying to generate innovative design solutions.

After her work on the mini-school Easton went on to work as a draftsperson, job captain, and staff architect at several firms and on a variety of projects, including hospitals, churches, and schools. As job captain at Victor H. Wilburn & Associates, she produced a report, included in her collection, analyzing the programs of the Wilmington Housing Authority and proposing measures and policy adjustments to make their programs more effective. In the introduction to the WHA report she summarizes the problem with Wilmington planning: “policy sprawl.” Quoting an interviewee: “‘Policy sprawl’ – that ungraceful, bits-and-pieces spread of plans and projects without any overall vision to offer the public” (representative of Gauge Corporation quoted in WHA Report). A consistent thread running through Easton’s materials is her commitment to “big picture” thinking about long-term development and planning and I’m so glad her collection is now fully accessible to researchers.

References

  • Epstein, Ed. Race, Real Estate, and Education: The University of Pennsylvania’s Interventions in West Philadelphia, 1960-1980. Diss. University of Pennsylvania, 2020.
  • Goldfarb, Lawrence, Peter Brown, and Thomas P. Gallagher. Seven Schools: A Story of Community Action for Better Education. The Young Great Society Building Foundation: Philadelphia, 1972.
  • Materials relating to the Mantua-Powelton Mini-School and “school street concept,” Folders 9-13, Box 2, Merle Easton Architectural Collection, Ms2021-028, Special Collections and University Archives, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Va.
  • “School in the Streets” in Progressive Architecture. New York: Reinhold, October 1970. Print.
  • Torre, Susana (ed.). Women in American Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective : A Publication and Exhibition Organized by the Architectural League of New York through its Archive of Women in Architecture. Whitney Library of Design, New York, 1977.
  • Victor H. Wilburn and Associates, Progress Report to Wilmington Housing Authority, Folder 7, Box 2, Merle Easton Architectural Collection, Ms2021-028, Special Collections and University Archives, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Va.

 

 

Jade Snelling Architecture, International Archive of Women in Architecture (IAWA)

Thresholds: A Look at the Margaret Hayward Playground and Structuring Spaces for Play

Earlier posts exploring Beverly Willis’s work can be found here and here. As those posts dealt with a residential renovation and the adaptation of technology to large-scale housing developments, this post is concerned with urban design of public spaces.

Part of an axonometric drawing, Margaret S. Hayward Playground, San Francisco, Ca., c. 1981. From the Beverly Willis Architectural Collection, Ms1992-019, Special Collections, University Libraries, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

In 1978 Beverly Willis, noted architect, artist, and photographer, was commissioned to rehabilitate a public space and pre-existing playground that serves the Laguna and Golden Gate neighborhoods of San Francisco. Her charge was to design and construct a small recreation building on this site, a two-block plot that already housed tennis courts, play structures, and a small storehouse. As discussed in the posts mentioned above, Willis’s design philosophy is heavily influenced by symbolic imagery. Indeed, in her book Invisible Images, she discusses her fascination with the power of images at length: their capacity to generate ideas, to captivate us, to contextualize architecture and ultimately to connect humans to nature. But here she also took her primary audience into account, namely children, and thus considered how young people on the threshold of young adulthood might interpret spaces and images differently than their grown-up counterparts.

  • Exterior elevations, Margaret S. Hayward Playground, San Francisco, Ca., February 20, 1981.
  • Schematic plan, Margaret S. Hayward Playground, San Francisco, Ca., October 10, 1979.

When conceptualizing a small building for the park, she wanted to evoke and foster the idea of play, and to frame the building as an invitation to play. She designed what she characterized as a “toy” building, which served the dual purpose of sparking children’s imaginations and enabling other functions, i.e., serving as an administrator office, restroom, and a service kitchen for park events. It serves a host of functional needs while it also works with the idiosyncrasies of the site.

As Willis wanted the building to feel fully integrated with the rest of the block, the building’s segmented design allowed the small structure to sprawl and fan out, creating a pavilion that descended via concrete steps to the play pit. The way it’s structured gives it the slight feeling of a dais. She designed an asymmetrical wall at an angle from the building with a child-sized arch such that there would be some fluidity between the practical and playful elements of the park. No doubt, the building exploits an unusual, exploded structure (akin to something you’d see in an axonometric drawing) to maximize its magical, whimsical appeal.

I’ll leave you with Bev’s own words:

“I designed the building to be lower in height than the tallest play equipment—like a toy building. The structure fans out of its tight corner site, and diagonal walls shift through the structure, like the joints of the armadillo shell. The façade stops at a wide walkway, bordered by three tiered steps. Together, these elements create an illusion of a stage platform. On the right wing ‘stage’ wall, which extends past the building, I placed an arched opening that leads nowhere but beckons the young to pass through and explore. The painted arch opening and circular moon above are as magical as Alice’s looking glass, leading from everywhere to everywhere” (Willis 87).

References

  • Willis, Beverly. Invisible Images: The Silent Language of Architecture. National Building Museum, 1997.
  • “Margaret Hayward Park Playground Building.” Beverly Willis Archive, Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, https://beverlywillis.com/architecture-project/0716/.
Jade Snelling Architecture, International Archive of Women in Architecture (IAWA), Women's History

Nature and Geometry: River Run and Beverly Willis’s Classicism With a Twist

As part of an ongoing effort to digitize records representing Beverly Willis’s significant works and projects, I’ve been highlighting some of her work in posts here. In November 2019 I wrote a post about her firm’s work in developing a program called “CARLA” or Computerized Approach to Residential Land Analysis and its use in a land development project (Pacific Point Condominiums). This week I’ll be looking at a smaller scale, but no less stunning, project: the River Run Residence. The house itself is beautiful, but I wanted to examine how it embodies Willis’s approach to design. When looking at a final product (a building facade, polished interiors) it can be easy to forget just how many choices went into creating something cohesive. Yet looking at design records can tease out some of the labor and give perspective on the process of designing and building that’s often obscured or mystified in the way we talk about and look at architecture. While this post won’t go deeply into the design process, it will touch on a few of the generative ideas and organizing principles behind the final building.

Section, River Run Residence, 1983. From the Beverly Willis Architectural Collection, Ms1992-019, Special Collections, University Libraries, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

The axis of Beverly Willis’s design philosophy hews to that line between formal and informal: the formal geometries of classicism and the informal rusticity of regionalism. Willis believes that at its core, design is about the investigation of the symbolic content of forms/shapes, and the manipulation of images (for more on this, see Invisible Images). When thinking about design, it can be a long and iterative process of drafting, layering, modeling – leaving aside sourcing materials and overseeing construction – this amounts to creating and blending images to form novel yet coherent aesthetics.

The Willis-designed Palladian villa cum rustic ranch in Napa Valley, called River Run, is emblematic of this mode of design thinking. The balance of the colonnaded portico, dramatic windows, grand approach mixed with the redwood shingle siding – classicism inflected by the vernacular – are all the more impressive given River Run’s relaxed atmosphere as a retreat. This is an interesting example of how works are often colored by different influences that are channeled through a designer. “While she abided by general principles of symmetry and proportion, the local shingle style — with its spreading roof, plentiful windows, and use of natural colors and regional materials — was also a powerful influence” (58-59). Willis seems to view it as a process of simplification – synthesis and streamlining. “Although the house is quite large, it displays a consistent economy of lines and means. It draws from the vocabulary of classicism, but there’s nothing complicated about it” (Willis qtd in Nelson 60). The nature and geometry mentioned in the title – and, indeed, Willis’s philosophy in general – refer to some of the central tenets of classicism and classical philosophy – that there are natural ideals that humans gravitate toward, that shapes and forms reveal a hidden geometry.

Further reading

  • Nelson, Christina. “Modern Retreats.” Home. 1986: 58-61.
  • Nelson, Christina. “Powder Room Poise.” Home. August 1986: 70-74.
  • Willis, Beverly. Invisible Images: The Silent Language of Architecture. National Building Museum, 1997.
Jade Snelling Architecture, International Archive of Women in Architecture (IAWA), Women's History

Introducing CARLA: Pioneering Technology in Urban Planning

The Beverly Willis Architectural Collection, open for research at Special Collections and University Archives, holds many treasures: sumptuous drawings, correspondence, and photographic materials documenting the work of one of America’s great twentieth century designers. One such project we’ll be highlighting here shows Willis and Associates, Inc.’s, (WAI’s) work on an early land analysis program called CARLA. CARLA, or Computerized Approach to Residential Land Analysis, was a program developed by the firm in the 1970s that was on the vanguard of employing computing applications in site development.

The programs aim was to reduce construction costs by instrumentalizing and automating much of the initial planning process and environmental impact research. To this end, the firm enlisted the skills of a young urban design grad student, Jochen Eigen, to study and model the architectural planning process. His work aggregated and analyzed data on the proposed project’s user needs and the site’s zoning and topography (via a client-submitted map), which was then correlated with an internally developed database that contained information on thousands of residential sites and floor layouts – planners would iterate through the process repeatedly to determine ideal land allocations for building.

CARLA001

At the time of CARLA’s advent, land analysis was a fairly lengthy ordeal. It would take companies 4-6 months using traditional methods before they would be able to properly estimate financial cost and environmental impact. Implementing and using this new tool reduced that timeline to about three weeks. The process would result in a site perspective, analysis of soil and natural drainage patterns, areas of a plot suitable for development and areas in need of cut and fill. The program allowed easy comparison of design solutions and their respective costs.

While CARLA was specifically geared toward site analysis, it is still ancestrally linked to modern computer aided design programs. Its primary function was to optimize land use by determining the best planning unit, its placement on a parcel, the cost of doing cut and fills, etc., and these are all necessary design considerations that are layered into modern CAD/BIM software (the BIM stands for Building Information Modeling). The program turned a time-consuming, bespoke research process into something comparatively data-driven and efficient, enabling Willis’s firm to maintain its competitive edge during the recession of the 1970s. At the time of its implementation, its aim was to get more contracts for lucrative housing developments, while it also addressed another fundamental need, namely, environmental considerations in urban design.

The first such development WAI used the software for were condominiums commissioned by the Alpha Land Company, to be located on a sloping 9-acre beachfront property. In her book Invisible Images, Willis writes about the beginning of her work on the Pacific Point Condominiums, and the inadequacy of available tools for assessing cost and estimating damage to existing ecosystems. Early iterations of mapping and topographical analysis programs were created by the government during World War II and later adapted for use by oil companies for industrial use; by 1971, the Kansas Geological Survey department at the University of Kansas had developed a mapping and contour program called SURFACE II. This program would form the backbone of Eigen’s/WAI’s land analysis software. Willis recalls,

With these tools I carefully planned stepped terraces on the bluff side of the site downward toward the ocean and designed a bridgelike entry to the three-story building’s mid-section. My design used diagonally placed interior walls that slice through the apartment facades, elongating one side like a fan. These subtle diagonal wall planes direct the eye to a breathtaking view of the Pacific Ocean.

PacPt_reduced

PacPt001
Top: presentation drawing for Pacific Point Condominiums; bottom: photograph of development, found in Invisible Images

The history of CARLA’s development is further documented here. Some of the firm’s internal documentation of the software’s development is available in the Beverly Willis Architectural Collection and will soon be digitized and made available online as part of the library’s new digital platform.

Jade Snelling International Archive of Women in Architecture (IAWA)

Barn Raising: Documenting an Architectural Transformation

Architectural documentation evolves throughout a project’s life-cycle: ideas are conceptualized and committed to paper for the first time in the form of rough sketches, then iterated through during the collaborative design development phase, then, after meticulous research and calculation, transformed into construction or working documents and specifications. Designs are refined, change orders made, and construction and as-built photographs shot. What’s left in the end is a mass of records that instill in the viewer a sense of the design process, ideally.

To illustrate this cycle, I’ve put together a gallery of images from one of Eleanore Pettersen‘s projects, in which she transformed a dilapidated barn into a residential and studio space for her own use (the project did not, in fact, involve any actual barn raising, as my title may have confusingly suggested!). Looking through these pictures, her achievement really feels remarkable – I can’t help but admire the execution of her vision and wonder at this dramatic metamorphosis. Please, peruse at your leisure!

Ms2003_018_F013_001_PettersenBarn_Ms_002

Ms2003_018_F013_001_PettersenBarn_Ms_001
Rough sketches on legal pad paper, with particular attention to spatial details and measurements

Barn_before2

Barn_before
Photographs showing the space before undergoing renovations

Ms2003_018_F013_005_PettersenBarn_Ms_002
Sketches refined throughout the design development phase of the project

Ms2003_018_F013_013_PettersenBarn_Ms_001

Ms2003_018_F013_008_PettersenBarn_Ms_001
Precisely defined and unambiguous detail rendered beautifully

Ms2003_018_F014_008_PettersenBarn_Dr_001
Reproductions made for site work

Barn_PubMaterials
Spotlight on the project in The American Home

 

 

PettersenHome_photo

PettersenHome_photo2
Photograph of Pettersen in her converted home

Jade Snelling Architecture, History, International Archive of Women in Architecture (IAWA), Just for Fun

The Ineffable Beauty of a Loosely Drawn Shrub: A Gallery of Olive Chadeaynes Architectural Drawings

Among the many things to admire about Olive Chadeayne are her devotion to detail, her naturalistic sensibility, and her ability to effortlessly merge the two. Undoubtedly, the artful blend of looseness and rigidity in her renderings makes them delightfully appealing. There can be something preternatural about architectural drawings – human-made constructions floating around in space can feel a touch unearthly, even austere and uninhabitable. This is perhaps why the loosely freehanded plants, shrubs, and trees in Chadeaynes work can appear so beautiful, even though, examined on an isolated basis, they might appear insubstantial. Their effortless inexactitude is a perfect foil to the precision of an elaborately drawn house – a softening of interrelating straightedges.

Its wonderful to look at a drawing and be greeted by an ameboid palm, a delicate swirl of eucalyptus or pine, the diaphanous outline of an elm, or the weightless curlicue of a shrub. They lend textural complexity and balance to an image, along with other highly stylized details.

Ms1990-057, Olive Chadeayne, Folder 16
Residence for Lineaweaver, September 1940

Of course, inexactitudes and approximations abound in architectural drawings. Architects and designers see these as collaborative gestures toward a client, for whom they want to grant enough space to impose their own creative vision. The looseness can be an invitation to play and imagine – a blurring of boundaries between architect and client, between dwellings and natures endless bounty. Enjoy!

Jade Snelling Architecture, History, Diversity, International Archive of Women in Architecture (IAWA), Women's History

History Is Not a Meritocracy: A Deep Dive Into Confronting Gaps on Wikipedia

In honor of next week’s Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon

History is not a simple meritocracy.[1] So goes the opening salvo of Despina Stratigakos Unforgetting Women Architects, an essay on writing women practitioners back into the historical record. Weve touched on this topic in previous blog posts about the history of women in architecture and the importance of making their work visible, especially online. Yet in advance of the Women in Architecture and the Arts Wikipedia edit-a-thon next Wednesday March 28th, it seemed an opportune time to take another look at the troubling lack of female representation on Wikipedia and within the architectural profession.

When we talk about representation of women on Wikipedia, we actually talk about two distinct, yet intimately connected, issues. One issue is a gender asymmetry in the sites content, the other is an asymmetry in the sites contributors.[2][3][4] Myriad and complex factors contribute to both. Wikipedias structure and ideology, the fact that many of its veteran editors are white and male, the perceived lack of importance and cultural relevance of issues significant to women implicit in Wikipedias criteria for notability,[5] sometimes ruthlessly enforced by the sites self-appointed gatekeepers; these and other factors[6] cause significant lacunae and stark attrition among female editors (who account for 13% of contributors)[7][8] in an encyclopedia that purports to be the sum of all human knowledge.

In fact, some quick research demonstrates the widened scope of notability criteria where men and mens interests are concerned. As a much-circulated New York Times article from 2011 points out[9], and indeed accounts from (sometimes expert) women contributors writing about women[10], there can be a lot of pushback on articles addressing womens interests: nitpicking about sourcing and whether an articles subject is notable enough to warrant inclusion on the site; indeed, articles on women are often flagged as not even adhering to Wikipedias neutrality guidelines. Yet there are lengthy articles and sub-articles about video games, video game characters, male-dominated television shows, and, of course, biographical articles on men in many fields that are often published without challenge.[11] To this point, a research article addressing gender bias in Wikipedias content has found that women on Wikipedia are, on the whole, more notable than their male counterparts, indicating that one must reach a higher threshold of accomplishment as a woman in order to be deemed important enough to merit an article – a threshold that the article characterizes as the glass ceiling effect.[12] Also of note, the article presents evidence that certain topics are overstated in womens biographies and tend to receive more attention than their work, i.e., their personal relationships and family status.[13]

Wikipedia culture is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a microcosm of culture writ large and its participatory homogeneity mirrors that of other kinds of open online forums that depend on user-generated content. The way the site reproduces bias, however, may be exacerbated by its claim to neutrality that is meant to bolster its reliability and credibility. This principle, when coupled with a lack of diversity in its user base, is problematic in that neutrality then comes to be synonymous with a white male point of view. This likely explains much of the resistance and flags that women encounter when they attempt to publish pages about other women.[14] They claim that women should write their gender out of their entries;[15] this may very well be because male editors have become accustomed to perceiving their own form of gendered analysis as the default – it is not, however, neutral.

Many scholars and practitioners (Susana Torre, Denise Scott Brown, Ellen Perry Berkeley, Dolores Hayden, Despina Stratigakos, Lori Brown, and Gabrielle Esperdy, to name but a few) have worked to challenge and dismantle pernicious myths about the architectural profession.[16] Institutions like the International Archive of Women in Architecture and the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation have made the collection of women architects papers a top priority and have helped to recover a cultural past and properly historicize the conditions of womens professional exclusion.[17] Additionally, in recent years scholars, information specialists, and architects have worked to ensure greater representation in online environments – enhancing discoverability of otherwise underappreciated or forgotten historical figures.[18][19][20] Unfortunately there isnt space here to fully unpack all of these womens various contributions to the field and its literature. Please join us next Wednesday in the Multipurpose Room at Newman Library to engage with their analysis more fully and to rewrite digital history! RSVP for the Women in Architecture Edit-a-thon here.

References

1. Despina Stratigakos, Unforgetting Women Architects: From the Pritzker to Wikipedia, Places Journal, April 2016. Accessed 21 Mar 2018. https://doi.org/10.22269/130603

2. Cohen, Noam. Define Gender Gap? Look Up Wikipedias Contributor List. The New York Times, 30 January 2011. Accessed 21 March 2018.

3. Gardner, Sue. Nine Reasons Women Dont Edit Wikipedia (In Their Own Words), Sue Gardners Blog, 19 February 2011. Accessed 21 Mar 2018.

4. Wagner, Claudia, et al. “Women through the Glass Ceiling: Gender Asymmetries in Wikipedia.” EPJ Data Science, vol. 5, no. 1, 2016, pp. 1-24.

5. Davidge, Tania. “How to be ‘notable.'”Parlour: Women, Equity, Architecture website, 24 April 2015. Accessed 22 March 2018.

6. Gardner, 2011.

7. Cohen, 2011.

8. Bear, Julia B., and Benjamin Collier. “Where are the Women in Wikipedia? Understanding the Different Psychological Experiences of Men and Women in Wikipedia.” Sex Roles, vol. 74, no. 5, 2016, pp. 254-265.

9. Cohen, 2011.

10. Vigor, Emily. Down the Rabbit Hole: (Miss)adventures in Wikipedia. Environmental Design blog, UC Berkeley, 3 April 2015. Accessed 21 March 2018.

11. Ibid.

12. Wagner et al., 2016.

13. Ibid.

14. Vigor, 2015.

15. Gardner, 2011.

16. Torre, Susana, 1944, and Architectural League of New York. Women in American Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective : A Publication and Exhibition Organized by the Architectural League of New York through its Archive of Women in Architecture. Whitney Library of Design, New York, 1977. Scott Brown, Denise. Having words. Vol. 4;4.;. London: Architectural Association, 2009. Berkeley, Ellen P., and Matilda McQuaid. Architecture: A Place for Women. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington [D.C.], 1989. Hayden, Dolores. “What would a Non-Sexist City be Like? Speculations on Housing, Urban Design, and Human Work.” Signs, vol. 5, no. 3, 1980, pp. S170-S187. Stratigakos, Despina. Where are the Women Architects?. Princeton University Press, in association with Places Journal, Princeton, 2016. Brown, Lori A. Feminist Practices: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Women in Architecture. Ashgate, Burlington, VT; Farnham, Surrey, 2011. Esperdy, Gabrielle. The Incredible True Adventures of the Architectress in America, Places Journal, September 2012. Accessed 22 Mar 2018. https://doi.org/10.22269/120910

17. Torre, 1977.

18. Moritz, Cyndi. Project Aims to Raise Profile of Women Architects on Wikipedia. Syracuse University News, 1 June 2015. Accessed 21 March 2018.

19. “The Year Five Campaign.” Art + Feminism. Accessed 22 March 2018.

20. “Welcome to Parlour.” Archiparlour. Accessed 22 March 2018.

Jade Snelling Architecture, History, International Archive of Women in Architecture (IAWA), The 1960s

Common Practice: How Human Needs Should Inform the Design of Public Space

Among Melita Rodecks many admirable traits were her keen sense of community engagement, her social awareness and activism, and her recognition of others needs. Her commitment to educating and encouraging citizenry to be active participants in shaping their environments was a defining characteristic of her lifes work, as evidenced by several article clippings and her personal writings.

In the early 1960s, Rodeck became involved in grassroots community organizing and commons-building projects. This, just when the applications of social theory to architecture (and the environmental impacts of design planning on urban communities) were starting to be theorized. These projects were spearheaded by architect-psychologist Karl Linn, whose initial efforts to reflect community needs in common living spaces expanded across multiple cities and transformed into a non-profit called Neighborhood Commons. Rodeck formed part of his team as his Assistant Director when working to revitalize several neighborhoods in the Washington, D.C. area. The projects were innovative in that they depended on an active corps of volunteers and sponsors, often drawn from the communities themselves, but also in their creative re-purposing of old building materials.

Its safe to say that Rodeck became a student of (and later, a full-blown advocate for) responsive design, and, indeed, how architecture functions as environment and structures human relations and communication patterns. In 1969, she co-authored a short guidebook called People Space, to help community leaders cultivate a sensibility for how public and private spaces are structured and how they serve (or perhaps disserve or underserve) their inhabitants. In its introduction she writes about the following design ideal : the process must be seen as organized space flowing from public to private to public space, rather than as a collection of unrelated piles and emptinesses (1). According to this statement, public and private spaces should be informed by continuity rather than fragmentation. The guidebook is filled with fairly detailed instructions and questions for leading and developing discussions. Its divided into several parts, such that participants can create and merge various functional profiles for their city or town.

 

Several years after the publication of the modest People Space, Rodeck wrote yet another piece – this one returning to her earlier work on the Neighborhood Commons projects in a kind of postmortem analysis. One can sense some of her frustration as shes since returned to several of these Commons spaces, only to find them abandoned and neglected. She reflects on some of the shortcomings and difficulties of implementing and maintaining the beautification schemes for urban open spaces, and on the historical developments and sweeping social changes of the 1960s that influenced their lack of upkeep, while still reaffirming the underlying values that the projects represented. In fact, she illustrates a very interesting tension in her report: the occasional ambivalence and indifference of inner city residents to the projects, and the dissonance between what they perceived their needs to be and what architects believed their needs to be.

Her questions and meditations are remarkably timely insofar as our society is becoming increasingly urbanized. Fraught questions surrounding concepts like urban renewal, revitalization, gentrification, and population displacement are being posed with greater frequency and urgency. Her offerings broach the complexities inherent in approaching and sustaining such projects. They certainly give cause for deeper reflection on the “sense of interdependency of people in a defined space.”

Jade Snelling Architecture, International Archive of Women in Architecture (IAWA), Women's History

Building the Builders: Egalitarian Pedagogy and Sustainable Design

When taking part in Frank Lloyd Wrights preeminent architectural school known as the Taliesin Fellowship, Lois Gottlieb came to understand architecture as a kind of Lebensphilosophie, in that she came to consider it a mode of living that touched on and derived inspiration from all aspects of life. Hence the title of her account of her apprenticeship A Way of Life, which deftly highlights the interplay of the rarefied and the mundane, the interdependence of humans and their natural surroundings, and the fluidity between the concreteness of day-to-day living and abstract worldview. Furthermore, it presents art as an act of cultivation and sustained effort, rather than a quasi-mysterious realization of personal genius.Gottlieb005

It’s of note that Wrights teaching style deviated significantly from the norms of his time and tended to subvert the traditional master-apprentice relationship. His radically egalitarian approach to pedagogy came to inform Gottliebs own teaching style and her outlook on the ways humans shape and control the environment. Her first major publication, the book Environment and Design in Housing, first workshopped as a series of lectures at UC – Riverside, articulates the effects of design on both the micro- and macro-scale, i.e., the way the [physical] environment we each create for ourselves and our families does affect every part of our lives [1] and the implications of poor design in terms of ecological sustainability and financial cost. In her view, humans have an unrivaled capacity to adapt the environment to their needs – a capacity that is problematic at scale and exacts high tolls, both from the land itself and from people affected by landslides or other natural disasters (see picture below). In light of these concerns, she advocates a more thoughtful approach based on client needs and leveraging the natural assets of building sites rather than the one-size-fits-all attitude of traditional design. (As a side note, Julius Shulman, famed architectural photographer, worked with Gottlieb on this book as photography consultant. The work itself features many of his gorgeous black-and-white photographs, prints of which are available for viewing as part of Gottliebs architectural collection here at Virginia Tech. Two copies of Environment and Design in Housing are also available for research as part of Special Collections selection of rare books – the captions and broader expositions provide invaluable context for the photographs.)

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Gottlieb’s caption: “The result! The gadgets in the kitchen no longer matter.”[2][3] Photographer: Julius Shulman.
 

Design and Gender Norms

A notable feature of this book is its emphasis on practice and its demystification of architectural knowledge. While much of Gottlieb’s approach is informed by cultivating self-knowledge and considering the dwelling as a vehicle for personal expression, it tends to balance this view with injunctions to draw on the specialized knowledge of experts – lending itself to a kind of tempered humanism and recognition of personal limitations. This methodology, I think, can also be traced to Gottliebs time spent at Taliesin, which, for the time, was certainly unique in its combination of self-reliance and communal dependencies.

A different, but related, novelty of the schools social structure was its disregard for gender norms. It is generally recognized these days that, historically, there have been gender-inflected labor divisions in both the public and domestic sphere. At Taliesin, these traditional divisions were not enforced – men would often perform tasks like preparing dinner while women would thresh wheat. Homemaking was not the strictly circumscribed domain of women, nor was outdoor labor the exclusive domain of men. While her works primary focus isnt on cultural assumptions regarding women, Gottlieb clearly has thoughts on the connections between gender and under-recognized labor. On the subject of domesticity, design, and value, she offers the following observations:

Another attitude toward the occupation of homemaking is that it is nothing or of little importance. An answer to the typical question What does Jane Doe do? is Oh, nothing, or She doesnt work, she is just a housewife. Yet this housewife is supposed to do most of the buying for the family, keep them all in good physical condition, keep them attractively housed and clothed, see to it that the children are educated, and so on and on.

In other situations any of these tasks is considered a field of specialized knowledge…But the homemaker is supposed to have absorbed and be all these things at once, a sort of twentieth-century version of the Renaissance man (without any of the credit for doing so, presumably).[4]

 

It’s clear that Environment and Design in Housing is at least partially intended to serve as a practical resource for homemakers. It’s also clear that the book is meant to bring analysis to typically underserved segments of society and to address real (if hidden) needs.

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Gottlieb-designed home – a great example of California Mid-Century Modern architecture. Photographer: Morley Baer.

References

1. Lois Davidson Gottlieb, Environment and Design in Housing (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 1.

2. Gottlieb, 5.

3. Lois Davidson Gottlieb Architectural Collection, Ms1997-003, Special Collections, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Va.

4. Gottlieb, 231.

Jade Snelling Architecture, History, International Archive of Women in Architecture (IAWA), Just for Fun, Women's History

Looking Back, Moving Forward: Addressing Architecture’s “Woman Question” Then and Now

Forty years ago the book Women in American Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective took shape under the editorial hand of Susana Torre. While the work arose out of an exhibition meant to expose the undervalued contributions of women to the built environment, it evolved into a discursive response to a series of dogged and complex questions concerning the roles of women in society, the exclusions of educational and professional culture, and the ideological underpinnings of tradition. (Torres papers are held by the International Archive of Women in Architecture here at Virginia Tech and the collection contains a wealth of research material related to her work on this exhibition and book project.)

Yet after two-fifths of a century have passed, a few questions linger: Have women made appreciable gains within the profession? Did Women in American Architectures 1977 publication herald a sea change in the attitudes of practitioners and architectural culture writ large? The answer may effectively be found in a book published just last year called Where Are the Women Architects? by Despina Stratigakos: while significant advances have been made, yes, equity (in pay, recognition, representation, etc.) has yet to be achieved. Indeed, in an interview with The Architectural League just four years ago, Torre commented that she had hoped sexism in the field would have become an artifact of the past: I would have hoped that by now this topic would have become entirely passe…that it would be a quaint reminder of another time.

In certain respects, women are still battling a culture that lionizes the exceptional one: a culture that valorizes individualism–the lone genius–while erasing female collaboration and one that lauds exceptional women to justify the marginalization of other women architects (paraphrase of Torres words). The lone genius archetype is partially a product of the narrative structure of many architectural histories (I’m looking at you, monograph). Stratigakos re-examines this emphasis on stardom and its underlying assumption “that the best architecture is created by mavericks.” Alongside assumptions that persist in mainstream treatment of architecture, Stratigakos looks at the bare fact that young women still confront woefully high professional attrition rates and a lack of visibility in educational curricula, the analog historical record, in online content, and among online content creators.

Digitization and Representation: Strategies For Winning Over Hearts and Minds?

Part and parcel of rectifying gender imbalance involves the activist approach of consciousness-raising, which partially entails the documentation and recovery of a cultural past that is often unrecognized or invalidated in historical works. The IAWA, founded in 1985, was itself borne out of Milka Bliznakovs frustration that the historical record for architecture remained so lopsided: as many women grew old or died, evidence of their work was quietly being relegated to the ash heap of history. In some ways the digital era has presented new challenges regarding historical incompleteness.

In recent years, the internet has played a profound role in shaping cultural memory and, in some cases, reproducing bias–where ample content can be found and accessed so easily, many people erroneously believe that most information resources have been made available online and, following from this assumption, (mis-)perceive an absence of online content as a positive demonstration of triviality or non-existence. As Ricky Erway and Jennifer Schaffner noted in their digitization report Shifting Gears, in a world where it is increasingly felt that if its not online it doesnt exist, we need to make sure that our users are exposed to the wealth of information in special collections. The current CLIR grant-funded project to digitize the IAWA’s holdings is underway and one of its express goals is to combat the notion that women architects didn’t exist or didn’t contribute much to the built environment. For those of us working on the project, it’s our belief that the work of changing hearts and minds can begin with something as (seemingly) simple as visibility. Check back in another forty years.