March 8, 2025 Ι Metropolis Magazine
The question at the heart of Women Architects at Work: Making American Modernism (by Mary Anne Hunting and Kevin D. Murphy, Princeton University Press) is very simple: “What is Modernism?” Focusing on early women Modern architects with special attention on graduates of the Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, the first institution to offer graduate degrees in architecture and landscape architecture to women, the book returns to the porous boundary between the design philosophy these women recognized as a world-shaping aesthetic and the liberated social reality it promised. For women architects in the early 20th century, Modernism was to be both.
From 1915 to 1942, the Cambridge School was one of the first to combine the teaching of architecture and landscape, pioneering cross-disciplinary collaboration for its all-women student body. Readers learn about dozens of its graduates, but are also offered snapshot retrospectives on eminent designers that didn’t attend. The book, by architectural historians Mary Anne Hunting and Kevin Murphy, is a mostly encyclopedic telling, with only a smattering of original conclusions connecting these women to the world today.
The book hints at women architects’ engagement with a sort of proto-critical regionalism, born out of alienation from the fiercely guarded boys club of the International Style. Again and again, the authors argued that women architects looked to local materials and traditions over dogmatic purity. Influenced by Corbusier’s idea of a house as a machine for living—perhaps the least domestic way to describe a house ever conceived—these women experienced Modernism and domesticity as opposing poles of a design spectrum that they had to navigate between. Socialized to respond to domestic space, women’s estrangement from International Style orthodoxy meant confinement to residential design isolation. They embraced this role with the grit of a reformer, if not the zeal of a revolutionary, per their background as upper-class women who were able to afford working for free at the exploitative behest of men.
There are superlative moments the book clarifies expertly. There’s Eleanor Raymond’s 1931 house, built for her sister Rachel, in Belmont, Massachusetts, the first Modernist house in New England, swiping this title away from Water Gropius, who’s own house in the town of Lincoln was not completed till 1938. In 1965, Mary Otis Stevens authored an essay on “critical domesticity” in concrete and glass. This house, likely the first Brutalist house every built, was an austere and flowing zone of intersecting planes and curving walls, with few formal divisions of space and no interior doors. Otis Stevens sought to remove the hierarchical spatial relations separating children and parents as a gesture toward familial democracy.
The book makes it clear that these liberated social relations were why women were attracted to Modernism. Women designers made good on this potential by designing places that could trace a tentative path toward communalism; where the architecture could facilitate collective professional and familial responsibility, and where men were often supporting characters or not present at all.
The Six Moon Hill tract in Lexington, Massachusetts, designed and developed by The Architects Collaborative which included two women founders (Sarah Pillsbury Harkness and Jean Bodman Fletcher), was designed with four acres of community recreation space, including a swimming pool and tennis court. The architects planned the street and cul-de-sac not as a primary circulation axis but as an outdoor social center and zone for play, because “we thought cars were the enemy,” recalled Pillsbury Harkness.
But just as often, we see all the ways architecture was inhospitable at best and hostile at worst to women, as when famed SOM architect Natalie Griffin de Blois was fired for refusing date a co-worker.
Women architects of the early 20th century often found the glass ceiling somewhere between help-mate to man and skilled practitioner, but could rarely be recognized as visionaries. Histoires of women architect virtuosos are difficult to tell for the obvious reasons (sexism), but also because scholars tend to be attracted to designers with a clear creative progression, Without ample clients willing to execute their visions, women didn’t get the resources to design in great volume and develop this arc. This is likely why Women Architects at Work is such a pointillist account, touching on dozens of designers, and substituting an atomized collage for a few singular narrative trajectories.
The emphasis on residential design is fortuitous in some ways. These architects’ period of influence coincides with the New Deal years, and the first attempts at mass housing in America. With residential design, women were grasping at “how they could employ its concepts to facilitate more open-ended social roles, in contrast to the previous century, when interiors seemed staged and forced a person to play a certain part,” the authors write. The home was a place of prescriptive and patriarchal authority, and the Modern project for the women of Women Architects at Work was creating places where the choice between domesticity and design could be a capricious and joyous one.