Innovative Residential Architect Eleanor Raymond
Eleanor Raymond (1888 – 1989) became known for her modern residential designs and innovate use of materials and technologies during her more than fifty years of practice. She was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts and graduated from Wellesley College in 1909. After travelling around Europe, she returned to the Boston area where she took a course in landscape architecture. She began volunteering in her instructor’s landscape architecture office and in 1917 enrolled in the Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture for Women. There her primary design interest shifted to domestic buildings.
In 1927 Raymond opened an office with her former architecture professor, and in 1935 she established her own architecture office in Cambridge. Although Raymond’s training was in the classical tradition, she gravitated toward modern design. She drew a link between vernacular architecture and modernism in her 1931 book Early Domestic Architecture of Pennsylvania: Photographs and Measured Drawings. “[O]bservation of the modern movement, both abroad and at home, and a close study of these old Pennsylvania buildings will clearly show that the motives and ideals of both are the same,” Raymond wrote. Raymond admired “how sincerely these houses and farm buildings manifest their function, how perfectly they are adapted to site and how simply they are expressed in the best materials at hand….”
Rachel Raymond House, 1931. (Courtesy of the Frances Loeb Library. Harvard University Graduate School of Design)
After returning from another trip to Europe where she visited the Bauhaus, Raymond designed a house in Belmont, Massachusetts for her sister Rachel in 1931. The women agreed the house would be in the International Style, but Eleanor Raymond eschewed concrete and stucco in favor of the dominant New England building material: wood. The exterior finish was rough-sawn matched wood boards. The Rachel Raymond House was believed to be the first modern home in Massachusetts.
Telkes and Raymond (r.) outside the Sun House they designed, c. 1948. (Courtesy of the Frances Loeb Library. Harvard University Graduate School of Design)
Doris Cole, an architect whose research about Raymond’s work includes a 1981 interview with her, writes of Raymond, “With an architectural practice spanning from 1917 into the 1980s, she witnessed tremendous changes not only in American living patterns but also in construction materials and methods. Almost immediately, she embraced new technologies and began experimenting with new materials.”
Raymond’s most well-known work might be the 1948 Dover Sun House in Dover, Massachusetts, “a house depending entirely on the sun for space heating,” as a 1949 Architectural Record article reads. Raymond’s design had to accommodate both the space heating system and its architectural requirements including a limited depth and south-facing orientation. Engineer Maria Telkes designed the solar collector and experimental heat storage system for the home which she would occupy. While ground-breaking, Telkes’s heat storage system started to fail after two years.
While Raymond is known to have designed more than 200 projects, not all have survived. The Rachel Raymond House was demolished in 2006 and the Dover Sun House was demolished in about 2010.
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Sources
American Institute of Architects, 1956 American Architects Directory.
Doris Cole, “Pioneering Women in American Architecture: Eleanor Raymond.”
Sarah Allaback, The First American Women Architects. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008.
Eleanor Raymond AIA, Early Domestic Architecture of Pennsylvania: Photographs and Measured Drawings. New York: William Helburn Inc., 1931.
Nancy Gruskin, “Designing Women,” in Kristen Frederickson and Sarah E. Webb, editors, Singular Women: Writing the Artist. Berkeley: University of California Press: 2003.