Women in Architecture: Beyond the Pioneers

This year marks a century since Eileen Gray began designing her iconic summer villa, E.1027, off the coast of Cape Martin in Roquebrune, France, for herself and her then-partner, the architect Jean Badovici. Completed three years later, E.1027 became an icon of modernist design that famously drew Le Corbusier’s envy. Today, E.1027’s dramatic story, and that of its author, encapsulates both the achievements of, and obstacles faced by women in architecture across the last century and a half.

In my Women in Architecture seminar, now in its third iteration, my students learn about Gray, her work, and the complicated relationship she had with her famous male colleagues and the field of architecture in general. She is one of the many pioneering women in architecture and design that we encounter throughout the semester, including Louise Blanchard Bethune, Julia Morgan, Lin Huiyin, Charlotte Perriand, Minette de Silva, Amaza Lee Meredith, Alison Smithson, Norma Merrick Sklarek, and Denise Scott Brown, to name only a few! These women are notable not only for the ground they broke, leading the way for the generations that followed, but for the exceptional quality of the architecture they produced and the technological innovations they contributed to the built environment. Their experiences also shed light on the many obstacles and challenges women have navigated in crafting their careers, their paths providing a roadmap for the future.

I first conceived of the Women in Architecture course in 2015 following the Women in Architecture 1974 | 2014 symposium held by WashU’s College of Architecture, an event that gathered together women architects, educators, and writers such as Nasrine Seraji, Sherry Ahrentzen, Mary McLeod, dean emerita Cynthia Weese, and Beverly Willis, as well as WashU alumni including Hannah Roth, MArch ’74; Janet Hurwitz, MArch ’75; and Mary Ann Lazarus MArch ’78. The three-day event marked the 40th anniversary of the symposium of the same name held at WashU in 1974, which was chaired by Roth and was the first of its kind in the United States.

As I assisted with the proposal for the symposium, it became clear to me that although four decades had passed since Roth and her classmates had called attention to the concerns of professional women in the field, the architecture curriculum still lacked robust representation of women and their achievements. Inspired by the symposium, along with the Women in Architecture student group that formed around the event, I proposed a seminar on the topic with the aim of creating space for further conversation and an opportunity for students to delve deeper into existing scholarship through independent research.

Around the same time, I had become intrigued by a pioneering woman architect in Japan, named Hamaguchi Miho¹. Her name cropped up throughout my research on Japan’s postwar new towns, but it was difficult to get a sense of who she was as an architect and how she fit into the bigger picture of postwar Japanese architecture. Yet I knew that, somehow, she was important. With the help of our library I was able to acquire a copy of her treatise, “Nihon jūtaku no hōkensei” [“The feudalism of Japanese dwellings”] first published in 1949, a volume that gave me a clear sense of both her voice as an architect and how she positioned herself within postwar architectural discourse². At the same time, as a stumbled over the kyū kanji (old-style Japanese characters) in her book and muddled through Japanese-language secondary sources in search of Hamaguchi, I became aware of the limits of our knowledge about women architects outside of the West in English-language scholarship and the pressing need for more research.

The independent readings can also form the basis of a bibliography for their independent research projects, which have developed along several rich trajectories. Some students have focused their research on the current state of the field, with projects exploring topics such as the role of mentorship in supporting women of color in architecture, the gendered distribution of awards in architecture compared to film, and approaches to addressing persistent gender disparities in architectural education. Others have taken a biographical approach, researching figures including Elsa Mandelstamm Gidoni, Ethel Bailey Furman, and Deborah Jaffe Cohen, and women-led design groups such as Matrix. Still others have delved into more theoretical and historiographical topics, examining the historical documentation of women architects, the ways the gendering of space impacts the built environment, and consequences of gendered representations of architecture in the age of AI datasets.

Research in this class is not limited to independent projects. Throughout the semester, my students also collaborate on a group timeline, determining the scope, exhibition format, and design language together. The students are tasked not only with selecting the content they wish to share with their peers at the Sama Fox School, they also must manage the project as a team, establishing intermediary deadlines and delegating tasks. The project both helps to share what the students have learned throughout the semester with their peers and gives them the chance exercise the project management skills so central to design practice in the professional world.

The first time I taught Women in Architecture, in the spring of 2016, my students crafted an accordion fold-out that charted pioneering women in the design fields. When I returned to WashU in the fall of 2024 and began teaching the seminar again, however, this project began to quickly evolve beyond what I initially envisioned. Inspired by a workshop with Assistant Professor Megan Irwin, who teaches communication design and typography at the Sam Fox School, my fall 2024 class created a series of zines that not only presented a timeline of key women in the design fields along with major events in women’s history, but also a global map of women architects, a zine introducing several pioneering women in the field, one correcting records of misattribution in articles about architecture, and finally, a zine exploring the interdisciplinary ways women have engaged with design across the last two centuries. Copies of the zine were put on display in the Givens Hall lobby and intended for passersby to take with them, and I was delighted to discover when the show was over that only a couple copies remained.

This semester, my students have proposed a series of comics featuring various women architects that will introduce the different themes explored in the course through their perspectives. The exhibition, which will be installed at the end of the semester on the walls of Givens Hall, will include both enlarged panels of the comics, along with smaller pamphlets printed with a risograph that viewers can keep. Mark April 20 in your calendar for the exhibition opening, and stay tuned for more details as it takes shape! We hope you will stop by to see our seminar’s work.

^{1. In keeping with East Asian convention, I list the family name followed by the given name for Japanese and Chinese architects.}

^{2. Hamaguchi Miho, Nihon jūtaku no hōkensei (The feudalism of Japanese dwellings) (Tokyo: Sagami shobō, 1953).}

^{3. Kitagawa Keiko, Dainingu kitchin wa kō shite tanjō shita: Josei kenchikuka daiichigō Hamaguchi Miho ga mezashita mono (How the dining-kitchen was born: What the first woman architect, Hamaguchi Miho, was aiming at) (Tokyo: Gihōdō shuppan, 2002), 179.}

^{4. See Laura L. Neitzel, The Life We Longed for: Danchi Housing and the Middle Class Dream in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2016).}

^{5. Kitagawa, Dainingu kitchin wa kō shite tanjō shita, 1, 163–179. Hamaguchi’s design for a compact kitchen unit centered on a stamped, stainless-steel sink was both affordable and mass-producible, offering an alternative to the conventional kitchen that through its efficiency and cleanliness made the kitchen a more comfortable, welcoming space.}