Women Architects at Work: Making American Modernism (Princeton University Press) is deeply researched, fastidiously documented, keenly intelligent, and utterly fascinating—a revelation, really. In it, the architectural historians Mary Anne Hunting and Kevin D. Murphy unwrap the long-obscured history that reveals the many ways in which women architects changed the path of architecture and design in America, documenting the sometimes subtle, often overlooked, as hindsight proves, long-lasting contributions of women who brought modern thinking and modern design to the forefront.
The book, many years in the making, is a true work of scholarship. To underscore the extent of the scholarship, there are 1,121 footnotes. And though it is jam-packed with a mind-boggling number of names and places, what emerge are dozens of what one would call “aha!” moments that somehow lend an entirely new perspective on what
we know—or thought we knew—about the twentieth century. “Oftentimes,” says Hunting, “it was about putting pieces together or connecting the dots.”
The too-long unsung impact of brilliant, highly educated, talented women becomes abundantly clear as does their reach beyond mere bricks and mortar into furniture, housing, museums, and much more. It’s something we might have suspected but had no way of knowing, except in bits and pieces. Or, as Hunting says: “The tremendous contributions of women to American modernism (not just design, but advocacy, promotion, documentation, marketing, and education) are far greater than scholars have recognized.”
There are many reasons this history has been obscured, ranging from the biases that still prevailed against women at mid-century to the secondary roles they were assigned, with the credit largely going to their male coworkers, partners, bosses, or even husbands. As Hunting points out, “Think of the women at MoMA: curating, organizing, documenting, and designing exhibitions, for example, under the name of a prominent male figure.” Others more simply followed societal norms and deferred to their husbands. (There are, of course, exceptions.) Hunting, now an independent scholar based in New York, was Murphy’s PhD student when he taught at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, and that is where the project was first conceived. Murphy now holds the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University where he is chairman of the Department of the History of Art and Architecture. As the project evolved, they were thwarted (as so many were) by Covid but also were racing against time as they tracked down the “rapidly aging” descendants of the pioneering women architects.
The starting point for the book is the Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, which was founded in 1915 to educate women who were denied (with rare exceptions) admission to professional schools in these fields. Independent at first, it eventually became part of Smith College and closed in 1942, the same year that Harvard began enrolling women in its architecture program. It was in that same era that women’s colleges (notably Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, Bryn Mawr, and Bennington) had hired art historians who were inculcating an enthusiasm for modernism in their students.
Among these early evangelists for modern art and architecture—just as one example—was Alfred Barr, who taught at both Vassar and Wellesley and would go on to become the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “I think one aha! moment was realizing that the women’s colleges played a huge role in the development of modernism in the US,” Murphy says. The enthusiasm for modern architecture, which in the school’s early years was primarily practiced in Europe, helped shape the Cambridge curriculum and set it apart from other schools of architecture.
A handful of the women profiled in Women Architects at Work were comparatively famous—among them Anne Tyng (perhaps most famous, ironically, for her long extramarital relationship with the architect Louis Kahn) and Sarah Harkness, who with Jean Fletcher, helped found The Architects Collaborative, a renowned Cambridge-based firm that included Walter Gropius. Eleanor Raymond was well known as an architect and an innovator, and her lifelong partner, Ethel B. Power, also an architect, gained prominence as the editor ofHouse Beautiful and then as an author.
But far too many others have remained unsung—at least until now.
For Hunting and Murphy, the research was in many ways a race against time, seeking long-buried archives, seeking out relatives (all the architects covered in the book have died). Little had been documented before this. And yet, the breadth and depth of their research is remarkable. It is admittedly slow reading, but as a record of a heretofore unknown and remarkable movement in the history of modernism, it is truly exhilarating.
