Lulah Maria Riggs: Devoted and Admired Architect
During her fifty-plus-year career as an architect, Lulah Maria Riggs (1896 - 1984) exhibited a strong talent for design, fulfilling her clients’ desires, and sensitivity to the environment. She spent most of her professional life in Santa Barbara, California, where she contributed to the development of a California style of modernism without ever adopting or being constrained by a style herself.
Born in Toledo, Ohio, Riggs moved with her mother to Indianapolis after her father died. There she earned her high school degree at a manual training school in 1914. She moved with her mother to Santa Barbara and earned a certificate in architecture from a junior college in 1917. Riggs went on to study architecture at the University of California, earning her B.A. in 1919 and completing her architecture degree in 1920. With help from a scholarship, Riggs pursued graduate studies in architecture at Berkeley for another year and a half, until, she later wrote, “Family responsibilities necessitated quick exit—and getting to work.”
Four decades later, Warren Charles Perry, FAIA, one of Riggs’s professors at Berkeley, recalled of Riggs, “She was a most unusual student displaying characteristics even in those early years of her career which gave unmistakable promise of her future success. She, as I remember very well, never wavered in her devotion to architecture and in her firm determination to become an architect even in the face of considerable discouragement in the way of preliminary preparation, and she eventually proved to be one of our most distinguished students.”
Classmate Ernest Born described Riggs as “A draftsman of extraordinary facility, her drawings flowing in profusion….[It] seemed incongruous from the hand of a girl.” Born also called Riggs the “strong man” of the studio since she was always working on her designs, helping other students with theirs, or drafting at a factory to support herself. She also served as the secretary of the school’s Architecture Association.
Riggs designed this Santa Barbara theater with George Washington Smith. (Jason Rick, 2015, CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED)
After completing a summer internship, Riggs joined the Santa Barbara firm of George Washington Smith in 1920 and quickly worked her way from drafter to chief designer. Smith and his wife brought Riggs with them on trips to Mexico, Europe, and North Africa where Smith encouraged her to sketch and study the architecture. After an earthquake leveled much of Santa Barbara in 1925, Smith and Riggs’ design work in the Spanish Colonial style came to national attention. The next year, Riggs built her own house in this style, saying she chose to build so she “could walk to work.” Riggs lived and sometimes worked out of this house for the rest of her life.
Riggs earned her architectural license in 1928. In 1930, her employer George Washington Smith died after a lengthy illness. Riggs formed a partnership with co-worker William Allen Horning and the pair completed the firm’s work. Owing to the Depression, Horning and Riggs agreed to dissolve the partnership in 1931. Riggs opened her own firm, and Horning went to work in the art department at MGM Studio.
Observers often remarked on Riggs’s sensitivity to siting buildings. Landscape architect and developer A. E. Hanson hired Riggs in the early 1930s to head the architecture department developing the community of Rolling Hills. She helped lay out and design the master plan for the 8,000 acre project. Thirty years later, Hanson wrote, “I would unhesitatingly recommend Miss Riggs…for any architectural project, regardless of its size, whether it be land planning or the design of structures, and for the supervision of both of these.”
Riggs stayed busy with residential and small commercial projects into the early 1940s. When World War II forced her to shutter her office in 1942, Riggs found work with her former partner in MGM’s art department working on set designs.
Riggs had become a member of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in 1936. In 1941 she became president of the Santa Barbara AIA. From 1942 to 1946, she served as the chapter’s secretary, conducting all business by mail owing to the disruptions of war. For the next eight years, Riggs continuously served as treasurer, president, or vice president of Santa Barbara’s AIA chapter.
In 1946, Riggs left Hollywood and returned to Santa Barbara and architecture. For four years, she practiced with partner Arvin B. Shaw, III, a former employee. That partnership ended in 1950 when Shaw wanted to move back east and work for a larger firm. Riggs practiced alone for the next three decades.
A number of Riggs’s projects won awards, and some were published in House Beautiful, Sunset, House and Home, Architectural Record, and other periodicals. Some of her exquisite renderings were exhibited and published nationally. Riggs served on the California Council of the AIA and a number of local, state, and national committees focused on historic preservation. She was known to routinely work sixteen hour days.
In 1959, Riggs was nominated to the AIA College of Fellows in recognition of her design work. More than thirty colleagues wrote letters of support for her candidacy, many unsolicited. “Miss Riggs possesses a creative imagination, sensitivity and skill rarely found in any one individual in the profession,” Robert S. Grant wrote, continuing, “The work of Miss Riggs has been a continual progressive evolution reflecting intelligent uses of new materials and changing living patterns yet remaining free of stylistic influences and clichés.”
Several architects noted both how well Riggs’s buildings suited their clients and fit in their Santa Barbara context yet were each unique. “Each design is an entirely new and different experience. Each has a theme which is thoroughly integrated and carried out with meticulous devotion to detail,” wrote Williams C. Hall, AIA. “She excels in design; only because ‘design’ is the best descriptive word for the total conception and execution of an architectural problem….She is already a living legend that does glory to the profession and the practice of architecture,” wrote John Badgley, AIA.
While Riggs earned the respect and admiration of many of her male peers and was recognized with the honor of Fellowship in 1960—only the fifth woman to receive that distinction—she did not escape microaggressions and backhanded compliments such as this: “Lulah is an architect’s architect, with a sensitivity unusual for a woman in a predominantly male profession.”
Riggs continued to practice architecture and volunteer for organizations focused on architecture, planning, and historic preservation. She retired from practice in 1981 when she was about 84. She died in Santa Barbara three years later at age 87.
To see more images of Riggs’s work, visit the online collection of photos and drawings of her projects at the AD&A Museum at UC Santa Barbara.
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Sources:
“Names: Lutah Maria Riggs,” Architectural & Engineering News, June 1962.
David S. Gebhard, “Deaths,” Architecture, May 1984, p. 373.
American Institute of Architects, “Membership Files: Lutah Maria Riggs.”
Irene Cheng, “Lutah Maria Riggs,” in Pioneering Women of American Architecture.
Passport application and census data from Ancestry.com.