Marion Mahony Griffin (1871-1961) was a founding member of the Prairie School and did significant projects in the US, Australia, and India, but she is not well-known today. This is partly because she was a master collaborator who contributed to the careers of Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Burley Griffin. She was also an extraordinary delineator who created many iconic renderings for both men.

Marion Lucy Mahony graduated from MIT in 1894 with a degree in Architecture, the second woman to do so. Mahony returned to her hometown of Chicago and went to work for her cousin Dwight Perkins. In 1895 she became Frank Lloyd Wright’s first employee and in in 1898 she was among the first group to sit for the Illinois state licensure exam. She passed, likely becoming the first woman in the US to earn an architecture license.

“I cannot, in whole conscience, recommend architecture as a profession for girls,” architect and Dean of MIT’s architecture school Pietro Belluschi said in the 1950s. This statement is found at the end of a brochure titled, “Should you be an Architect?” His career advice first ran as a public service advertisement in popular magazines like the Saturday Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Journal and Collier’s before New York Life Insurance reprinted it in 1959 as a stand-alone brochure.

In the article, Belluschi directed all his remarks toward boys until the last paragraph when, after allowing that some women have done well in architecture, he said, “[I]t takes an exceptional girl to make a go of it. If she insisted on becoming an architect, I would try to dissuade her. If she still insists, she may be that exceptional one.”

“The greenest building is the one already built,” historic preservationists say today. Although it is unlikely that Mary E. J. Colter was motivated by sustainability goals in 1935, her preservation of several buildings on the Bright Angel Lodge and Cabins site at Grand Canyon reduced the project’s impact on the environment.

As part of the new project, Colter remodeled the existing Powell Lodge and preserved two nineteenth-century buildings. One of these, the Bucky O’Neill Cabin, was built of notched logs in 1895 and expanded in 1900. After Bucky O’Neill’s demise in the Spanish-American War, the cabin was used for many years as the lobby for the old Bright Angel Hotel. Most of this hotel and camp would be demolished to make way for the new lodge and cabins, but Colter remodeled and added on to the Bucky O’Neill Cabin, keeping it as part of the new complex.

Julia Morgan (1872 – 1957) designed more than 700 buildings in a range of styles during her long career. Her projects included homes, churches, clubs, hotels, schools, colleges, warehouses, and other commercial buildings. Her most well-known project is probably Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California, the estate she designed for newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst over a period of more than twenty years.

Morgan was born in San Francisco in 1872 and earned a degree in Civil Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley in 1894. She began working as a drafter for architect Bernard Maybeck who encouraged her to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. When the École opened evening classes to women in 1897, Morgan headed to Paris.

“Women can paint at an easel, but physically they are quite unfit to work at a large drawing board,” an editorial in London’s The Building News opined in 1908. The Western Architect reprinted this opinion from across the pond, apparently finding the idea that reaching over a large drawing board “is physically more than any woman should be called upon to bear” compelling enough to share with its readers. It is unclear who these gentlemen thought operated laundry-wringers, labored with men in the fields, worked in the chain factory, or performed all manner of other physically demanding tasks.

The concern of these male architects for women’s physical comfort and womanliness is an example of benevolent sexism. Unlike hostile or overt sexism, benevolent sexism is couched in terms that seem courteous, protective, or gallant.

Mary Colter incorporated methods that today are considered sustainable in the design and construction of the Bright Angel Lodge and Cabins at the Grand Canyon in 1935. These methods include minimizing site disruption, using locally extracted materials, repurposing waste materials, preserving and reusing existing structures, and tying the sanitary plumbing into a water reclamation system. These strategies were employed for aesthetic or practical rather than environmental reasons.

Colter designed the Bright Angel Lodge and Cabins in the Grand Canyon Village as an informal, rustic village. The main lodge included the lobby, shops, restaurant, kitchen, and offices. The lodge was connected by covered walkways to seven guesthouses. There were also fifteen free-standing cabins of one to four units each and several small utility buildings. Construction began in 1935 with one contractor for the main lodge building and another for the cabins and other smaller structures.

Beverly Lorraine Greene (1915 – 1957) is believed to be the first African-American woman in the US to become a licensed architect, in 1942. She graduated with bachelor and master of science degrees in Architecture and Architectural Engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1936 and 1937 respectively. Her employers included Isadore Rosenfield, Edward Durrell Stone, and Marcel Breuer.

While at the University of Illinois, Greene was the only female and only Black member of the student chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers. A Chicago native, Greene worked for the Chicago Housing Authority before moving to New York in 1944. There she accepted a scholarship to Columbia University where she was awarded a Master of Architecture degree in 1945. Greene was a member of the Council for the Advancement of the Negro in Architecture, as were her three New York employers.

“There was the awful problem or prospect of matrimony, which upset so many plans and calculations,” commented architect Leonard Stokes in 1902 after listening to a speech about the suitability of women to practice architecture. “As a woman was expected to look after her house…he did not see how she could, as an architect, look after her practice as well.”

Successful professional women in past centuries recognized the challenges of maintaining a career after marriage, with many choosing to remain single in order to pursue their professional passions. Today the “awful problem of matrimony” is less awful and more equal—but it is unequal all the same. Inequity in unpaid work—cleaning, cooking, laundry, etc.—exists in the homes of opposite-sex couples regardless of their ages, according to a Gallup report. It is a persistent rather than a generational problem, and it reinforces the lower wages for paid work for women.

Mary Colter included a number of sustainable strategies in her design for the Bright Angel Lodge and Cabins that opened in Grand Canyon Village in the mid-1930s. Although these strategies were incorporated primarily for practical or aesthetic reasons rather than out of environmental concerns, they foreshadowed methods used in today’s sustainable buildings. This post will focus on strategies related to the buildings’ site design.

The Bright Angel Lodge and Cabins are located near the south rim of the Grand Canyon not far from the railway depot. When it opened, the Lodge building housed the lobby, restaurant, kitchen, shops, lounge, offices, and restrooms. Seven guesthouses were connected to the lodge by covered walkways, and there were fifteen cabins of one to four units each. There were also several utility buildings.

“I earnestly ask the Directors to consider whether it was wise to admit women at all unless they have achieved some signal distinction in the profession,” Boston architect C. H. Blackall wrote to the secretary of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in 1907. “Signal distinction” was not a requirement for AIA membership as detailed by the organization’s bylaws. Blackall was recommending a higher standard for membership for female architects.

Today, the gatekeepers in architecture are still overwhelmingly male and women perceive gender bias at far greater rates than men do. This creates a recurring condition: More men become firm leaders more quickly than women because of gender bias; overwhelmingly male firm leaders, when unaware of gender bias, don’t implement measures to reduce bias in hiring and promotion; gender bias persists. Women leave the profession. Men continue to dominate it. And so on.

Louise Blanchard Bethune (1856 – 1913) was among the first women to practice architecture in the United States. Based in Buffalo, her firm designed a number of institutional, commercial, industrial, and residential projects in western New York. Bethune was aware of the special position she held owing to her gender. She achieved a number of professional “firsts” while also advocating for equal fees for equal service.

One of Bethune’s best-known works was the Hotel Lafayette completed in 1904 and pictured here. The hotel is located on Lafayette Square in the center of downtown Buffalo and is still operating today.

Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter worked as an artist, decorator, and architect for the Fred Harvey hospitality company from 1902 until her retirement in 1948. On January 9, 1958, the day after Colter died, newspapers from Connecticut to California carried her obituary. The Los Angeles Times described her as a “nationally known architect, designer and decorator.” The Santa Fe New Mexican called Colter an “internationally known architect, designer and decorator.”

So how is Colter is so little-known now compared to how well-known she was in 1958? Colter is not entirely unknown today; she is best-known in the Southwest where her work had the greatest influence, and two books have been written about her work (Grattan, 1992 and Berke, 2002). But I know very few architects or architectural historians who learned about Colter in school or are familiar with her work.

Mother Joseph (born Esther Pariseau) participated in designing and building two orphanages, eleven hospitals, seven academies, and five Indian schools in the Pacific Northwest between 1856 and 1902. One example of her work is Providence Hospital in Seattle, pictured above around 1891.

Esther Pariseau was born in Quebec in 1823 where her parents taught her carpentry, academic subjects and the domestic arts. She joined the Sisters of Charity of Providence in Montreal in 1843 and took the name Joseph after her father. The diocese sent her with four other missionaries to the Pacific Northwest Territories in 1856.

As design and construction for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago got underway in 1891, a competition was launched to find a woman to design the Women’s Building. The winner would be compensated $1,000 as compared to the $10,000 awarded to the men appointed to design other Exposition buildings. In addition to earning a fraction of the pay, the female architect was expected to provide more services than her better-paid male colleagues.

While many things have improved for female architects since 1891, pay is still inequitable. Full-time female employees were paid on average just 77.6% of what their male architectural colleagues earned in 2019. The best way to change this inequity in compensation? Pay transparency.

Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter (1869-1958) worked as an architect and decorator for the Fred Harvey hospitality company that in turn worked for the Santa Fe Railway. Colter is not widely known yet her work influenced decades of Fred Harvey and National Park Service architecture. She designed the viewing tower in Grand Canyon National Park shown above.

I created The Architectress newsletter to explore the history of women practicing architecture and allied professions in the US. In addition to an Accolade and an Outrage, each issue will feature Mary Colter, for she is the architect and decorator who brought me to this project.