1. Developing a Regional Perspective by Tracing Forgotten Architects and Design Professionals: Women with T-Squares
Gail McMillan
Digital Library and Archives
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Virginia Humanities Conference
March 18, 2005
NEXT SLIDE We’re about to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the International Archive of Women in Architecture, a collaboration between the College of Architecture and Urban Studies and the University Libraries at Virginia Tech. The goals of the IAWA are to both broaden the social perception of the profession as well as to preserve the record of women’s contributions to the design and construction of the built environment.
We say women in architecture to be more inclusive, for example, of women who initially practiced architecture and in related design areas but were often not formally allowed into the professions. In addition to architects, women in architecture includes those who contributed more broadly to the built environment through related venues such as landscape architecture, interior and industrial design, and urban planning.
The IAWA hopes to counteract striking examples of the work of women in architecture being ignored in Virginia and the South Atlantic Region. One illustration is the 1948 journal of the American Institute of Architects that boasted it had reached 1000 registered women. To observe this milestone, it devoted 2 issues to exemplifying women’s work “in every section of the country…” yet not one was recognized for her work Virginia or in the South Atlantic Region.
Kathryn Anthony posed an important question in her book, Designing for Diversity. She asked, “What if Frank Lloyd Wright had been a woman?” Would she have had the opportunity to study architecture? Would she have become the most famous architect in American history and a model for generations of architects? Would Francis Wright have left an imprint on the American landscape? While we know that women such as Marion Mahoney contributed tremendously to Wright’s successes, and that there was no one comparable to Mr. Wright, many Southern architects have not been acknowledged, sometimes merely because they were not men.

2. International Archive of Women in Architecture
This was last year’s IAWA Board of Advisors. They assist the library in collecting the personal papers and business records of women in architecture. By collecting and preserving these materials, the IAWA reduces the serious gap in the availability of primary research materials for architectural, women's, and social history research.

3. The IAWA also has a web-accessible biographical database that serves as a clearinghouse of information about all women in architecture, past and present. In 2001 the Database had grown to nearly 400 names but the South Atlantic was woefully under-represented by fewer than two dozen women, including eight from Virginia.
After a year of concentrated effort enabled by the one-time influx of funds from an ASPIRES grant, the balance tipped so that over 25% of the women in the IAWA Database are associated with the South Atlantic Region, including 32 from Virginia.

4. 7 Women with T-Squares
Let me give you a little HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE on the profession:
In 1870 the United States census listed 2000 architects. Only 101 (<5.5%) of those were from the South; only five (25%) were Virginians, the fewest of the southern states; and only one was a woman.
Potential architectural professionals and particularly family and home-centered women were discouraged from becoming professionals in a variety of overt ways but also perhaps surreptitiously if they read in the 1876 American Architect and Building News that “The planning of houses … is not architecture at all…” Later (1955) distinguished Fellows of the American Institute of Architects such as Pietro Bellushi discouraged many women from considering architecture as a profession when he said, “I cannot, in whole conscience, recommend architecture as a profession for girls… the obstacles are so great…” This discouragement continues as we can see from the AIA 2000/02 survey that revealed the growth of female membership to 13% even though 37% of the architecture students were female.
Though lacking formal education, licensure, or acknowledgement, here are a few who made significant contributions to our built environment.

5. Harriet Abigail Morrison Irwin (1828-1897) 912 W. 5th Street, Charlotte
Hexagonal house, Aug. 24, 1869
First woman to patent an architectural innovation for a dwelling
Economizes space, building materials, and heat; good lighting and ventilation; easier to clean
Harriet Morrison’s contributions stand out in the architectural landscape of North Carolina. Before attending the Institution for Female Education in Salem, North Carolina, she was home-schooled by her father, the Rev. Robert Hall Morrison, the first president of Davidson College.
When she was 20, she married James P. Irwin of Mobile, Alabama, and during the next 50 years, she bore nine children (raising five); published a novel, various articles, and a colonial history of Charlotte; and designed and had built three houses. While perhaps a southern bluestocking who may or may not have believed that a woman’s place was restricted to the home, at 40 she patented her first architectural design -- a six-sided house. Her innovative design has been attributed to her hating housekeeping, particularly cleaning dirt that accumulated in 90º corners.
Resources disagree as to whether her subsequent designs were traditional or hexagonal but we know that in the patent application she described it as an “Improvement in the Construction of Houses,” explaining that it would economize space, building materials, and heat and still have good lighting and ventilation.
The way that her biographers interpret her contributions versus her own description in the patent application demonstrates that they do not give her much credit for the uniqueness and functionality of her design and attempt to keep her in her traditional place by portraying the disgruntled housewife rather than the creative designer. Irwin’s integration of form and function to connect each room in a continuous circular pattern is today recognized as human engineering or ergonomics. Here is a woman who purposefully integrated form and function but over 30 years later Frank Lloyd Wright gets the credit for unifying form and function.

6. Henrietta Cuttino Dozier (1872-1947)
MIT BS in Architecture in four years,1899
1of 3 women admitted
Only woman to graduate among 175 men
3rd woman to join the AIA; 1st woman from the South
Founding member of the Georgia AIA
Only woman recognized among 16 prominent Jacksonville, Florida, architects
After graduating from the Atlanta’s Girls’ High School in 1891, Henrietta Dozier apprenticed for one year in an Atlanta architect’s office, and then studied for two years at New York’s Pratt Institute. In 1895 she moved to Boston and at 27 she earned her Bachelor of Science in Architecture from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Of the three women who began the program, Dozier was the only women among the 175 graduates four years later.
She returned to Atlanta to open her own practice and for the next 13 years she designed churches and was professionally active, including playing a significant role in requiring Georgia architects to register to practice. In 1905, 17 years after the American Institute of Architects admitted its first woman, Dozier became only its third female member and the first woman from the South as well as from an accredited American school of architecture. She was also a founding member of the Atlanta Chapter of the AIA (in 1906), and she contributed to the establishment of the Architectural Arts League of Atlanta in 1910.
About 1916 Dozier moved to Jacksonville where she became Florida’s first female architect. Over 20 years later she described her experiences for the Federal Writers Project saying “…a woman’s general reputation of condensing space and utilizing corners for wall spaces and furniture settings instead of blocking them up with windows, doors, and closets, it gives me the very best ideas for commodious and comfortable homes.” She also briefly described her ideas about an earth-rammed house, one that was durable, vermin-proof, termite-proof, insulated against cold and heat from the outside, with an average expenditure that she estimated would be half the government’s cost. “…It will be Florida’s own house and home, good for the constant use of two or three generations.”
Dozier’s vision helped to shape many of the landmark buildings in Duval County. She was the only woman recently included among the most prominent architects officially recognized in Jacksonville.

7. Leila Ross Wilburn (1885-1965) 1913 Piedmont Park Apartments, Atlanta, GA
Born in Macon, Georgia, Leila Wilburn attended Agnes Scott College and had private architectural drafting lessons. She graduated in 1906 and after a tour of the United States where she is reported to have photographed 5000 interesting design elements, she apprenticed in the Atlanta firm of Benjamin R. Padgett and Son. She received her first commission in 1907, a three-story building for the Georgia Military Academy, which became known as the Woodward Academy in the Sixties. In 1909 she became Georgia’s second woman architect (after Dozier), opening her own architectural office.
Wilburn was part of the national trend in urban apartment dwelling and designed 30 apartment complexes. By 1920 she had 24 duplex designs to her portfolio of efficient living spaces with built-in cupboards, folding ironing boards, and Murphy beds. Atlanta’s Midtown Alliance recently renovated her Piedmont Park Apartment complex.
In addition to these surviving structures, Wilburn is noteworthy also for her production of a series of pattern books that empowered the average citizen to select a design and purchase construction plans for their homes. She published her first pattern book in 1914, Southern Homes and Bungalows. Visit Atlanta’s Candler Park so see some of these.
Wilburn’s practice continually evolved as did her pattern books. In the mid-1950s she published her Ranch and Colonial Homes pattern book. The specifications sold for $15 to $40 with a separate list of lumber and millwork available for $5 extra. Over 300 sets of Wilburn’s house plans have survived due to the diligence of the Atlanta Historical Society. For most of her 55 year career, Wilburn, like Dozier demonstrated a philosophy that lent her skills and talents to those who could not afford individualized designs.

8. Amaza Lee Meredith (1895-1984) Azurest South
One of the first documented African-American female architects, Amaza Lee Meredith, studied art and education at Columbia Teacher’s College. In 1930 she moved to Petersburg where she began the Fine Arts Department at Virginia State College, the separate land grant institution for African Americans.
Meredith designed in the ultra modern, International, style that flaunted tradition. Such avant-garde designs were a radical break from the columns and red brick symmetrical architecture expected in Virginia and the South.
She was also known for her use of color. In the clean, strong lines she used in designing her home, called Azurest South, you can see the bright turquoise or azure roof with its plain metal coping and steel pipe rails that frame it.

9. Amaza Lee Meredith’s Azurest South, Interior
Her interiors had patterned walls, floors, and ceilings. While an art professor, her home was a living design studio. Azurest South is currently used for alumni association meetings and social functions at Virginia State University.
Though lacking formal architectural preparation and training, she produced a distinctive body of work that reached from Virginia, west to Texas, and north to New York. She also is known for Azurest North, an enclave of vacation homes she designed at the wealthy, resort town of Sag Harbor on Long Island.

10. Gertie Besosa-Silva (1923-1983)
Besosa-Silva left her Puerto Rican birthplace to study architecture in New York. We think she was the first Puerto Rican woman to graduate in architecture from Cornell in Among her noteworthy accomplishments: she was president of the honorary association of women architects and her final project, a design for the Casino de Puerto Rico, won first prize.
She immediately returned to the island and became its first licensed woman architect. Besosa-Silva worked with noted architect Henry Klumb on the Puerto Rican Housing Authority where she led the Division of Site Planning.
Though there is no record of her taking her award winning Casino de Puerto Rico design further, it may have been incorporated into the work of Rafael Carmoega Morales ( ) with whom she collaborated and who is noted for his design work for the Casino.
Before permanently moving to Brazil with her husband in 1950, she also designed a few private residences. This is the point at which we have lost track of her.

11. Lolly Tai Ph.D, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh
MLA, Harvard University
BSLA, Cornell University
1988, new Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture in the College of Architecture, Arts, and Humanities, Clemson University
2002, Chair, Department of Landscape Architecture and Horticulture, Temple University
Even while a landscape architect in New York in the Early 1980s, Lolly Tai began having an impact on the South Atlantic Region. Her design work included Drayton Hall in Charleston, South Carolina, and Callaway Gardens in Pine Mountains, Georgia, and the Nashville (Tennessee) Airport.
She moved to South Carolina and joined Clemson University in 1988, the first faculty member in the new Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture.

12. Hilton Head Island Town Hall Xeriscape Interpretive Garden, 1995
Hilton Head Island Town Hall Xeriscape Interpretive Garden, Honor Award: American Society of Landscape Architecture, SC Chapter Honorable Mention for Land Stewardship SC Land Resources Conservation Commission
Not surprisingly, she is a licensed landscape Architect in 6 states (South Carolina, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania), and with a diverse private practice that includes residential estate, commercial, resort, and community planning; recreational facilities; and botanical gardens. She incorporates energy efficiency, water conservation, and wildlife preservation and her designs typically employ an environmentally sensitive approach, incorporating responsible stewardship and designing with the land rather than imposing her designs upon it.
This is her award winning design for the Xeriscape Interpretive Garden at the Town Hall in Hilton Head Island. Xeriscape is a water-conserving method of landscaping.
She was lured back North in She now chairs the Department of Landscape Architecture and Horticulture at Temple University in Philadelphia.

13. Leslie N. Sharp MA Middle Tennessee State University 2002
Historic preservation, graduate thesis on public history
Coordinator for the Historic Preservation Division of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources
National Register of Historic Places
Georgia Women’s History Initiative
Georgia Tech
PhD in History: links between gender, technology, and architecture
Women shaping shelter technology, consumption, and the twentieth- century house
When looking at the history of women’s contributions to the built environment, it would be a grave oversight not to consider the architectural historian and preservationist.
Since the early 1990s Leslie Sharp has contributed to the growing body of history and scholarship reclaiming the forgotten, the lost, the never recognized, and the crumbling architectural history of the South. She has contributed tremendously to documenting women’s work in both the exterior built environment and the interior or near environment. In the scholarship on gender and technology, her discoveries clearly articulate how women influenced and participated in design and construction of spaces, the aesthetics and the placement, in which they lived and worked.
Hired September 2003 by Middle Tennessee State University, Leslie Sharp coordinates the Center for Historic Preservation's National Register, fieldwork, and documentation programs.  Last spring (2004) she completed her Ph.D. at the Georgia Tech. 

14. International Archive of Women in Architecture
Conclusion Women in architecture particularly in the South Atlantic Region have overcome prejudices that initially kept them from receiving formal education, degrees, and professional status. These success stories are the result of perseverance in the face of stereotypes and inequities; some survived the long educational preparation and the rigorous licensing process in spite of isolation and marginalization when they were, indeed, allowed to participate. Eventually formal higher education became an entry point for women into the professions. However, while 37% of the architecture students are female, only 13% of the profession is.
The women I briefly described for you today caught my attention because they were not only adventurous in their designs but they were also ardently pragmatic and wanted to improve the quality of life. When their commissions were private dwellings of modest means, they did not attract publicity or notoriety. Women in the South Atlantic region in particular continue to be ignored as can be seen, for example, by their absence in the first edition of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.
With increasing documentation of women in architecture in our region, the record of women will be 180 degrees away from the image as blushing, bustling, baby-bearing Southern Bells. These women over came social and professional barriers not necessarily to achieve success but to accomplish personal goals such as affordable design implementation. Overcoming social and institutional inequities, they have too infrequently been recognized for their work as designers and planners. But, the International Archive of Women in Architecture continues to gather this evidence and to document them in the IAWA Biographical Directory. I hope you may have the opportunity to share with me even hints or clues about little known women in architecture, landscape architecture, interior design, industrial design, and urban planning so that the upcoming 20th anniversary of the IAWA can more completely reflect their contributions. THANK YOU.