Original link to the commentary >>

The Lone Heroic Architect Is Passé

Beverly Willis is the founder of the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation. She is also a fellow of the American Institute of Architects.

May 14, 2013

It’s never too late to correct a stupid mistake. When extraordinary accomplishments in architecture, design and engineering are being honored, those who were directly responsible for the work should be equally recognized regardless of gender. Give Denise Scott Brown the recognition she deserves.

But this speaks to a broader issue in the professions, as well as the current challenge facing the Pritzker Prize. When the prize was founded, individual architects, or those in partnership (married or not), were responsible for the complete work — small in comparison to current projects. Today’s mega-buildings are not the hands-on work of one or two people, but rather of a large interdisciplinary team. The lone heroic figure — let alone exclusively a male one — is a thing of the past. The fallacy that only men execute the best designs is the reason that extraordinary work by female architects and engineers is not in the history books. Moreover, from the business end, recognition of creative work in the design world is critical to a designer’s ability to both qualify and compete for future commissions.

Today’s great buildings, and accumulated bodies of work, are being designed by an architect-organized team of many specialists with cutting-edge computer software, much like the teams needed to produce major motion pictures. This means that for building design to be honored correctly and fairly, it should have an award similar to the Oscar, which honors the entire team behind a movie with its best picture designation, and also singles out specialties like sound mixing and visual effects.

Organizers of the Pritzker Architecture Prize should rethink how it will award design professionals in the future, as well as reconsider the amount of money being given to the recipient, especially if it wants to approximate something akin to the Nobel Prize for design (which doesn’t exist). The Nobel Prize money is over a million dollars, not $100,000.

Read other responses in this discussion.

Read the BWAF Briefly April 2013 newsletter

In this issue:

• Women of 20th-Century American Architecture
• Creating Dialogue Through Denise
• BWAF at SAH Annual Conference in Buffalo, NY
• Joan Blumenfeld, FAIA, Makes a Place
• Built By Women: Longue Vue Gardens
• Other News:  Recent Press
• April 2013 Bookshelf & more

Project Chair

Diane Favro

Diane Favro is a professor of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA and former president of the Society of Architectural Historians.  Her research focuses on ancient Rome, women in architecture, and the pedagogy of architectural history.  Her publications include Streets: Critical Perspectives on Public Space, The Urban Image of Augustan Rome, articles on ancient architecture, gender issues in architecture, and methods of architectural history, as well as exhibitions on women architects.  She is Director of the UCLA Experiential Technologies Center, which creates real-time digital models of historic environments, and promotes humanities research using new technologies.

College/University Affiliations: San Jose State University (BA); University of California, Santa Barbara (MA); University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D.); University of California, Los Angeles (current faculty, Department of Architecture and Urban Design; Director of the UCLA Experiential Technologies Center).

Project Co-Directors

Victoria Rosner

Victoria Rosner is currently Senior Associate Dean of the School of General Studies at Columbia University, where she also teaches classes in the Department of English.  She is also the author of Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life as well as co-editor of Design and Feminism: Re-visioning Spaces, Places and Everyday Things. Victoria also writes about literature and popular culture for The Huffington Post.

College/University Affiliations: Columbia University (BA, MA, Ph.D., Professor, Senior Associate Dean, and Director of the Post baccalaureate Premedical Program).

Mary McLeod

Mary McLeod is a professor of architecture at Columbia University. She is co-editor of Architecture, Criticism, Ideology and Architecture Reproduction, and is the editor of and contributor to the book Charlotte Perriand: An Art of Living. She has received numerous fellowships and awards, including a Fulbright Fellowship, NEH award, and grants from New York Council of the Arts and the Graham Foundation.

College/University Affiliations: Princeton University (BA, M.Arch, Ph.D.); Harvard University (former faculty); University of Kentucky (former faculty); University of Miami (former faculty); Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies (former faculty); Columbia University (current faculty, Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation, and Planning).

Gwendolyn Wright
Gwendolyn Wright is Professor of architecture at Columbia University where, in 1985, she was the first woman to receive tenure in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. She also holds appointments in Columbia’s departments of history and art history. Academic awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Getty Fellowship, and election to the Society of American Historians which honors literary quality.

College/University Affiliations: New York University (BA); Columbia University (M.Arch, Ph.D.).

C. Ford Peatross
C. Ford Peatross is the founding Director for the Center of Architecture, Design, and Engineering at the Library of Congress. He oversees the nation’s largest collection of design related images and objects. He is the editor of Capital Drawings: Architectural Designs for Washington D.C., author of John Margolis: Roadside America many other definitive works.

College/University Affiliations: Wake Forest University (BBA); University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (ABD); Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London.

Sarah Whiting
Sarah Whiting is the William Ward Watkin Professor and Dean of the Rice School of Architecture. Previously, she taught at Princeton University, Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, the Illinois Institute of Technology, the University of Kentucky, the University of Florida. As a teacher, writer, and designer, her work revolves around architecture’s catalytic relationship to politics, economics, and society, focusing especially on the modern subject (individual as well as collective) and the way that this subject affects and is affected by architecture and the city.

College/University Affiliations: Yale University (BA); Princeton University (M.Arch); Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D.).

National Advisory Council

• Diane Favro, UCLA, Chair
• Annmarie Adams, McGill University
• Kathryn Anthony, University of Illinois
• Wanda Bubriski, Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation
• Meredith Clausen, University of Washington
• Gabrielle Esperdy, New Jersey Institute of Technology
• Thomas Fisher, University of Minnesota
• Cynthia Hammond, Concordia University
• Monica Pennick, University of Wisconsin
• Avigail Sachs, University of Tennessee-Knoxville
• Despina Stratigakos, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
• Abigail Van Slyck, Connecticut College

Click here for a list of the major donors for the project.

Rocco Termini and Kelly Hayes McAlonie, AIA, Louise Blanchard Bethune boosters and SAH tour leaders.

Leading the tour were two Bethune boosters: Rocco Termini, the visionary developer of the property, and Kelly Hayes McAlonie, interim associate vice provost of the University of Buffalo’s Capital Planning Group and immediate past president of AIA New York State. Hayes McAlonie co-curated an exhibit about Bethune’s life and prolific career that opened in 2011 at the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society.

Termini, a Buffalo native and one of the city’s leading developers, understands the cultural and economic value of preserving key historic structures as exemplified by the $35-million rehabilitation project of the Lafayette Hotel.

The Women’s Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, NY, was a must-see stop en route to Buffalo for the 66th Annual Conference of Society of Architectural Historians. On July 19, 1848, the First Women’s Rights Convention took place at which Elizabeth Cady Stanton presented to an audience of about 340 the Declaration of Sentiments, that includes these powerful words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.”

Bethune and her firm, Bethune, Bethune & Fuchs, designed the original seven-story steel frame and concrete building with its richly chromatic façade of red brick and white terracotta. Subsequent additions were by Esenwein and Johnson (1916-17,1924-26), and in 1942 the lobby was transformed into the Art Moderne style. When it opened in 1904, the Lafayette was considered one of the 15 finest hotels in the whole country, with its lavishly decorated public rooms, elevators, and each room featured hot and cold running water and a telephone.

The recent restoration was completed in 2012, and the hotel now comprises a mixed-use complex with 115 one and two bedroom rentals, 34 hotel rooms, several bars and restaurants (from affordable pub to haute cuisine), retail, and extensive banquet facilities. The restoration was the work of architect Jonathan Morris of the Buffalo firm Carmina Wood Morris.

Hotel Lafayette, 391 Washington Street, Buffalo, NY. Designed by Louise Blanchard Bethune of Bethune, Bethune & Fuchs, and opened in 1904, the building was listed in 2010 on the National Register of Historic Places, and re-opened in 2012 after a multi-year, $35-million restoration.

Another BWAF connection to Buffalo was found on the grounds of the Darwin D. Martin House complex, the magnificent suite of buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright.  Built at the same time as Bethune’s Layette Hotel, Wright’s work exemplifies his Prairie Style and ranks as one of his finest residential works.  In 2009, after 12 years of extensive reconstruction and restoration efforts that are still ongoing today, the Martin House opened the Eleanor and Wilson Greatbatch Pavilion, a 7,775 sqf. visitor welcome and interpretive center designed by Toshiko Mori Architect.

SAH conferees gather in the sleek, lustrous Visitor Center (2009) designed by Toshiko Mori before embarking on a inside tour of Wright’s Darwin Martin House, seen here framed by the wall of glass.

In her 2010 Women of Architecture presentation at the National Building Museum, Toshiko Mori articulated the design’s intent to “enhance the Martin House through contrast rather than imitation,” yet continue “Wright’s own lifelong interest in innovation through the exploration of new materials and technologies.”  The glass façade, for example, reflects the public nature of the visitor building’s program—and literally reflects Wright’s structure—while contrasting with the heaviness and introversion of Wright’s design.  SAH members flocked to the site throughout the conference, and the Visitor Center was a fitting and festive venue for the conference’s Closing Reception on Saturday evening, April 14.

Carole Ann Fabian, Director of Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University, and one of the speakers at the SAH Closing Reception at the Darwin Martin House Visitor Center (Toshiko Mori Architect, 2009), shares some stunning facts and figures regarding the vast archives of Frank Lloyd Wright which were recently acquired by Columbia University and The Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Architect Barbie at the Women’s Rights National Historic Park exhibit

All photo credits: BWAFArchives

Longue Vue Gardens, New Orleans. Ph.: Flickr user Navin75

The Sterns built their original house on their 8-acre estate in 1924; Shipman’s work on the ‘Goldfish Pond’ and ‘Pan Garden’ began in 1935. In 1928, she replaced the former kitchen garden with a ‘Walled Garden,’ which has supplied the house with fresh vegetables and herbs since its completion. During Shipman’s work, the Sterns decided their house did not afford optimal enjoyment of the gardens, and commissioned William and Geoffrey Platt to design a new Colonial Revival house for them in 1939. The Platts, who were the sons of Shipman’s mentor, Charles Platt, worked with Shipman to construct a house that gave the Sterns maximum viewing and use of their gardens. Shipman enhanced the relationship between house and gardens by planting a live oak allée, creating a majestic path to the entry of the new house. William Platt explained in a 1979 interview, “the whole estate was designed as unit—the house and garden must be viewed together.”[1] During and after the construction of the house, Shipman continued to work on the gardens at Longue Vue, installing what is now the only surviving example of her ‘Wild Gardens’.

The oak allée at Longue Vue. Photo credit: Flickr user louisianatravel.

Shipman continued to design new gardens for Longue Vue until her death in 1950. The Longue Vue House and Gardens was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1991, and was later declared a National Historic Landmark in 2005. In the Landmark Commission’s designation summary of Longue Vue, the estate was described as “a stellar example of a Country Place Estate in which architecture and landscape are designed to be interrelated.”[2] Today, Longue Vue has been restored after extensive damage during Hurricane Katrina and welcomes visitors as an educational and cultural non-profit.

Click here to sign the petition on change.org

The change.org petition to recognize Denise Scott Brown in the 1991 Pritzker Prize has gained international support with over 11,000 signatures—we reached out to the petition organizers, Arielle Assouline-Lichten and Caroline James, for their thoughts on the potential outcome and effect.

Photo courtesy of Arielle Assouline-Lichten.

“This campaign is about Denise Scott Brown’s achievements and the rightful recognition of her work as an equal partner and collaborator, but it is also about igniting a discussion on gender and equality in the discipline at large—and gauging if we are where we’d like to be. I think one of the most impactful effects of the campaign has been to bring new awareness to the existing gap between men and women in the field, while showing widespread support for progress and acceptance. Leaders in architecture have taken a stand alongside some 11,000 signatories in what is a critical turning point for the history of women in architecture. The petition has the potential to not only rewrite history, but to lead future generations towards a more inclusive profession.”

- Arielle Assouline-Lichten

Photo courtesy of Caroline James.

“Of course, we would be thrilled if the Pritzker Prize corrects their 1991 mistake and recognize Denise Scott Brown for her equal partnership with Robert Venturi. However, the over 11,000 people to sign their names literally speaks volumes about the essential and seminal role that Denise Scott Brown played in her partnership with Robert Venturi and in the history of architecture. This is very gratifying for us, as well as for Ms. Scott Brown. For me, the Petition is an engine for a greater discussion about inclusion in architecture. These dialogues on the internet, in schools and across firms around the world will continue to raise awareness about how our institutions, as well as ourselves as individuals can transform the architecture and design profession into a more inclusive, and thus more sustainable and relevant profession.”

- Caroline James

Click the links below to read articles related to the petition (newest first)

“Partner Without the Prize”  The New York Times
“Second Time Around: Will Denise Scott Brown Get Her Pritzker?” Architectural Record
“What About Denise?”  The New Yorker
“Media Ratchets Up the Pressure on Pritzker Prize Jury” Architect Magazine
“Q&A with Denise Scott Brown” Architect Magazine
“The Women Behind the Denise Scott Brown Petition”  Architectural Record

What are your thoughts and experience in the architecture and design professions? How do you think we can change the culture of the professions so that it is more inclusive? Let us know your thoughts and ideas by commenting below!

Images courtesy Caroline James/Arielle Assouline-Lichten. Photo Source: Architectural Record

BWAF fully supports the efforts of Women in Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in the petition to recognize Denise Scott Brown for her work in Robert Venturi’s 1991 Pritzker Prize. Please join Beverly Willis, FAIA and the Foundation and sign the petition.

Click the links below to read articles related to the petition (newest first)

“Partner Without the Prize”  The New York Times
“Second Time Around: Will Denise Scott Brown Get Her Pritzker?” Architectural Record
“What About Denise?”  The New Yorker
“Media Ratchets Up the Pressure on Pritzker Prize Jury” Architect Magazine
“Q&A with Denise Scott Brown” Architect Magazine
“The Women Behind the Denise Scott Brown Petition”  Architectural Record

Design professionals cite many reasons, including the sense that architecture involves business and construction, which have both been traditionally considered the province of men. And still persistent is the mythology of the architect as a solo male genius — the Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s “Fountainhead.”

“It’s embedded and the Pritzker Prizes embed it,” said Beverly Willis, an architect who founded the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, which supports women in architecture. “They’re totally outdated, they’re totally passé and if they continue trying to isolate the Howard Roark man, they’re totally irrelevant.”

- Excerpted from “Partner Without the Prize,” by Robin Pogrebin, The New York Times.

You can sign the petition here.

Dear Friends,

Thank you to our friends and supporters! With your help, the Foundation has raised nearly $40,000 to date to meet the National Endowment for the Arts matching grant for “Women of 20th-Century American Architecture.” This project will profile and preserve the legacies of fifty historically significant women architects and designers who helped make and shape the American built environment.

We still need to raise $10,000 to match the NEA grant and we cannot do that without your help.

Donate $100 or more and we’ll send you a special gift, the new edition of the film, A Girl is a Fellow Here, 100 Women Architects in the Studio of Frank Lloyd Wright. You can also send checks: Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, 6 Barclay St., 6th Fl, NYC 10007

We can’t thank you enough for your support!

Beverly Willis, FAIA

Founder & Chair

THANK YOU GIFTS (for donations made after 4/25/13)
$100 +          A Girl is a Fellow Here: 100 Women Architects in the Studio of Frank Lloyd Wright
$1,000 +     Everything in the level above + special acknowledgment as a donor recognized on an Honor Roll permanently associated with “Women of 20th-Century American Architecture”