Marcia Mead Designed Happy Communities

“Enthusiasm for the rights of women has led two young feminists in New York to establish the first firm of its kind in existence--a firm of women architects,” the March 8, 1914 New York Times reported of the partnership of Anna Pendleton Schenck (1874 – 1915) and Marcia Mead (1879 – 1967). In fact, Schenck & Mead were not the first partnership of “girl architects” in New York City; Gannon & Hands had opened its doors there twenty years earlier.

Partners Schenck and Mead, who in the Times article were quoted as if they were one person, said “We feel that the movement for women has gone beyond the point of argument; the thing women must have now is the opportunity to try themselves.” Schenck received her architectural education by working in architectural offices and studying in France. Mead was the first woman to graduate from the Columbia University School of Architecture. She was well-known on campus as designer for the Superintendent of Buildings and Grounds.

The partners were interested in designing housing but also communities. “When people’s living conditions are proper, they are going to be happier and more constructive,” the architects told the Times reporter. In 1915, their design for a neighborhood center won first prize in a national competition. Sadly, Schenck died that same year. Mead continued her architectural career without her, maintaining the firm name Schenck & Mead for several more years.

In late 1916, an article in The Wildwood Magazine, a national publication focused on architecture, planning, and interior design, lauded the firm’s designs of boarding houses for immigrants, a city block in Washington, DC planned with housing for 1,000 unsheltered people, the Summer Home for the Aged in Akron, Ohio, and single-family homes in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Unusually for this time period, the article focused on the firm’s design work rather than on the gender of the work’s designer—although that did not go unmentioned.

The “Connecticut Development,” Bridgeport. All images from The American Architect, February 6, 1918.

The firm received acclaim in 1918 for its design of a community in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Designed to help meet the war-time shortage of housing for manufacturing workers, it was located on a city block near the factories. The development consisted of 87 one and two-family two-story row houses that housed 139 families, organized around gardens and a playground. “The houses were artistically grouped, the streets so laid out as to form a model village. The numbers of rooms ranged from two to five, meeting the needs of the childless family as well as those of the worker who had several children,” the New York Times reported. “The aim toward which the builder worked was privacy of family life and beauty of environment.”

Mead was admitted as a member of the American Institute of Architects in 1918. In the 1962 membership directory for the organization, the major works listed for her firm Marcia Mead Architect, AIA included the following: Housing for Colored Families (Washington, DC); Clubs for Women War Workers, 1st World War for the National YWCA in Jersey City, Buffalo, Detroit, and Bridgeport; and several single-family homes. She had also worked for McCalls and lectured at the Teacher’s College of Columbia University.

Marcia Mead died in Los Angeles in 1967 at age 88.

Please subscribe to The Architectress.

Sources:

“Girl Architects Organize a Firm,” New York Times, March 8, 1914: 15.

George B. Ford, "Neighborhood Centers," Journal of the American Institute of Architecture, vol. 3, no. 5 (May 1915): 223.

Don D. Mungen, “Women’s Part in Municipal Housekeeping,” The Wildwood Magazine, Christmas, 1916: 25-29.

“The Bridgeport Housing Development,” The American Architect, February 6, 1018: 129 – 147.

“Where Workers live as Comfortably as Rich Men,” New York Times, August 17, 1919.

American Institute of Architects and R.R. Bowker, “1962 American Architects Directory.”