Anne Graham Rockfellow’s Sense of Place
Anne Graham Rockfellow was born in Mount Morris, New York in 1866. By age thirteen, Annie had decided to pursue a career in architecture—a decision apparently supported by her family. One visitor to the Rockfellow home in Rochester, New York was architect William C. Walker. After seeing plans drawn by young Annie, Walker encouraged her to take the Tech course at MIT and offered to hire her when she finished.
Rockfellow followed Walker’s advice and was the first woman admitted to MIT’s two-year program in architecture. While she later recalled most of her fellow students—all male—as “good comrades,” she felt the weight of her singularity. “I felt that the reputation of my sex on my shoulders and worked long and hard,” Rockfellow wrote in 1938. After earning a Diploma in Architecture in 1887, she returned to Rochester and the promised employment with Walker’s firm.
The impact of economic depression that started in 1893 made architectural work scarce. In 1895, Rockfellow moved to Tucson where her older brother John, who taught math at the University of Arizona, had secured a position for her teaching English, Geography, and U.S. History in the university’s “Preparatory Department.” Rockfellow did not enjoy teaching, but she enjoyed the landscape at her brother’s ranch.
After two years, Rockfellow left for a four month bicycle tour of England and France. She carefully observed the built environment throughout her travels. After her tour, she returned to Mount Morris, where she had her own practice from 1898 to 1906. In 1905, she wrote an article for Good Housekeeping about her design of a compact and livable house. She provided floorplans, perspective drawings, and a photo of the exterior “[i]n the hope that this may be of interest and value to the members of a vastly larger community” than the town that knew and commended it. The article brought her more commissions, including one in Canada.
In 1909, Rockfellow moved back to Tucson to live with her brother’s family and help care for her widowed father. In 1911 after he died, she moved to Rochester, New York and opened an office in her house. The frigid Rochester winters wore on her, and in 1915 she returned to Tucson for what she expected would be a two-month stay with her brother and his family.
During that stay, local architect Henry O. Jaastad asked Rockfellow to help with his competition entry for a new YWCA building. When he won the commission, Jaastad invited Rockfellow to join his office. Rockfellow initially declined, instead working on her own commission for a project located in Nashville.
Before joining Jaastad’s office in spring 1916, Rockfellow traveled to the 1915 Panama-California Exposition in San Diego. The exposition’s central buildings were designed by Bertram Goodhue, a student of Mexican architecture. Goodhue’s designs are credited with popularizing the Spanish Colonial Revival style that took root in California before spreading east. Rockfellow recognized the suitability of the style for Tucson’s landscape and history. She later wrote, “I was much pleased and impressed with the architecture of the Fair buildings, and found the ‘lessons’ very helpful for later southwestern adaptation.”
Rockfeller designed Tucson’s Safford School in 1917 while working for Jaastad.
Rockfellow remained a firm advocate for regionally-appropriate design. “Any building that fits into the landscape comes nearer to true architecture than the finest design in the wrong place,” Rockfellow’s transcript from a December 1932 radio address reads. She advocated for the preservation of Tucson’s historic mission and the restoration of other buildings that were “early Spanish-Mexican and Indian types which were used with the beginning of Tucson.”
Rockfeller’s 1928 El Conquistador Hotel.
Rockfellow worked with Jaagstad as his chief designer for the next twenty-two years. She was also very engaged in Tucson’s civic life, serving in different capacities with multiple local clubs. Rockfellow also continued to travel. Her collection of baskets and blankets made by Indigenous people reflected her ongoing interest in southwestern culture and history.
Rockfellow is believed to have designed some 500 buildings over her career. With Jaastad’s firm, she designed schools, churches, and other buildings throughout Arizona and New Mexico. She preferred designing commercial and civic buildings to residential ones, and she considered the El Conquistador Hotel (1928) to be one of her best. It was demolished in 1964 to make way for a shopping center.
Rockfellow retired in 1938 and moved to Santa Barbara, California. She died there in 1954 at age 87. Her obituary in the local paper described “Rocky” as “a leader in the ideas embodying the historical and scenic feeling of Arizona architecture.”
Please subscribe to The Architectress.
Sources:
Sarah Allaback, The First American Women Architects (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008).
Kimberly Ann Oei Kunasek, “Anne Graham Rockfellow: Who was she? What was her contribution to the history of architecture?” M.A. Thesis, University of Arizona, 1994.
Margaret Regan, “Remembering Rockfellow,” Tucson Weekly, January 27, 2000
Annie Graham Rockfellow, “The Nutshell,” Good Housekeeping, January 1905, 116 – 118.
Iris H.W. Engstrand, “Inspired by Mexico: Architect Bertram Goodhue Introduces Spanish Colonial Revival into Balboa Park,” The Journal of San Diego History, Winter/Spring 2012, 57 – 70.