Women in American Architecture
Susana Torre (Editor)
Whitney Library of Design, 1977
Hardcover | 8-1/4 x 11 inches | 224 pages | 250 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-0823074853 | $25.00
ORGANIZER'S DESCRIPTION:
In 1977, The Architectural League, through its recently established Archive of Women in Architecture, organized a book entitled Women in American Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective in conjunction with an exhibition by the same name. Guided primarily by Susana Torre with support from other founding members of the Archive, the book aimed to present the range and quality of women’s work, as both practitioners and commentators, in the fields of architecture, planning, and design. Following an introduction by Susana Torre, the book is divided into five parts with chapters contributed by thirteen women well known in architectural journalism. They delve into how professional women have designed for and written about women as workers in the home, describe the varied careers of women architects from the mid-19th century through the 1960s, explore the position of women as architectural critics through four women’s careers, analyze the contemporary perspective of women in the profession in 1977, and summarize women’s spatial symbolism.
Essays by Susan Fondiler Berkon, Sara Boutelle, Doris Cole, Dolores Hayden, Carolyn Johnson, Naomi Leff, Lucy R. Lippard, Jane McGroarty, Judith Paine, Suzanne Stephens, Mary Otis Stevens, and Gwendolyn Wright.
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dDAB COMMENTARY:
One of the references in Barbara Penner's informative foreword to the 2020 reprint of Catherine Bauer's 1934 book Modern Housing, which I reviewed a couple days ago, is an essay by Suzanne Stephens in Women in American Architecture, the book published as a companion to an exhibition of the same name that opened at the Brooklyn Museum in February 1977. It is not the most comprehensive piece referenced in Penner's text, but it is one of just two books that I have in my library (the other is The Modern Architecture Symposia, 1962-1966: A Critical Edition, which documents a series of events at Columbia University that Bauer participated in). Bauer is one of the critics in Stephens' essay, "Voices of Consequence: Four Architectural Critics," alongside Jane Jacobs, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, and Ada Louise Huxtable. Although Bauer is given only five columns of text, just like the other three critics, Stephens covers much of her career, both before and after the publication of Modern Housing. It would take another two decades for a proper book-length treatment of Bauer, with Houser: The Life and Work of Catherine Bauer by H. Peter Oberlander and Eva Newbrun published in 1999.
As mentioned, Women in American Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective came in 1977 as both a book and an exhibition, both organized by the Architectural League of New York through its Archive of Women in America, and both curated/edited by architect Susana Torre. Although WAA is not the first book to focus on women in architecture (it's bested by at least Doris Cole's From Tipi to Skyscraper: a History of Women in Architecture from 1973), the companion exhibition must have been the first to do the same. (It's revealing that Women Artists: 1550-1950, an exhibition that also opened at Brooklyn Museum in 1977 called itself the "first international exhibition of works by women artists.") Many texts I've come across that mention WAA focus on the exhibition, often calling it "a landmark exhibition," but outside of the photos on the League and Torre websites, there's very little archival information to be found on the show itself.
The book is fairly easy to come across for not too much money, but it's hard to say how it relates to the content of the exhibition. The exhibition was mounted on easels resembling drafting tables, while the book is structured into thirteen chapters spread across five thematic sections. If the content devoted to Theodate Pope Riddle (1868–1946) is any indication, the exhibition display was fairly straightforward, with a short bio and captions to images of a few projects. Although there is overlap in terms of images, the chapter that discusses Riddle — Judith Paine's "Pioneer Women Architects" (first spread, below) — positions her alongside other architects in a text that is more contextual than biographical, more narrative than standalone profile. Put another way, instead of the exhibition boards leaping directly into the book, the information from the exhibition appears to be spread across the pages in scholarly essays designed to fit the thematic sections.
One part of the book that appears to take the format of the exhibition nearly directly to the printed page, and therefore stands out from the rest, is Naomi Leff's "Historic Chart Relating Architectural Projects to General and Women's History in the U.S." The timeline spans from 1630 to 1977, ending with the WAA book and exhibition. In between, in white text on black pages (fifth spread), is a dense chronology of events, publications, and buildings: a mix of architecture and women's history, as the title makes clear. It's a satisfying end to an important book, one that still illuminates on projects that have been forgotten or — in the case of Chloethiel Woodard Smith's La Clede Town and the House in Lincoln (MA) by Mary Otis Stevens with Thomas McNulty — demolished in the decades since.
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