By Marielle Gage, Certified Archivist
Adrien Brody’s recent film The Brutalist is about many things – immigration, the American Dream, trauma — but one additional impact it has had on viewing audience has been to draw our attention to the art of architecture, its concerns and periods, and the architect as an artist.
Architecture is, of course, an ancient field. As long as humans have lived in settlements, we have had to study the science of reliable, durable structure-building. And where there is a building, there is a guiding mind behind that building: an architect. One of the earliest known architects is Imhotep, who designed the Djoser step pyramid in Egypt in the 27th century BCE.
Pyramid at Dahshour, Jackson, William Henry, photographer (1894)
Architects, like other artists and craftsmen, have been at times more and at times less in the public eye, receiving credit or acclamation for their work. Many great buildings in the pre-modern world cannot be attributed to any particular person, either because the names have been lost to time, or the extended timeline of pre-modern construction means many hands touched and edited the master plans. In the early modern period, we begin again to have guiding hands attached to specific works in Europe, as the increased status of the arts persisted past the Renaissance and the individual genius became in vogue.
As architecture required advanced training and/or education outside the home, women were of course a tiny minority of architects in the early modern period. But France’s Katherine Briçonnet (early 16th century) and England’s Elizabeth Wilbraham (late 17th) prove that the field was not entirely devoid of feminine genius. Below, we’ve chosen to highlight just a few historical women who plied their trade in the United States, leaving a mark on both their field and their neighborhoods for generations to come.
Louise Blanchard Bethune – Drafting in a Corset
Architecture in the United States in the 1800’s was largely an ad hoc affair; the American Institute of Architects wasn’t founded until 1857, and until 1865, no university had a program for training architects. Even as architecture began to define itself as a profession, the true architectural work – designing and drafting – was but one of the hats an architect had to wear. Generally, they were responsible for managing the contract, budgets, expenses of a project, as well as overseeing the construction and the workers. It was a demanding job, often requiring ten or twelve hours a day standing; surely not a position suitable for a Gilded Age lady, right?
Well, that assumption was thoroughly destroyed in Buffalo, New York, in 1876, when twenty year old Louise Blanchard walked into the offices of Richard A. Waite and asked for a job. We don’t know what he saw in the young woman – though her determination nearly bleeds off the pages of her biographies, even more than a hundred years later – but he hired her as a draftsman, teaching her the tools of the trade in an apprenticeship.
Five years later Louise left to open her own firm, where she was soon joined by her new husband, Robert Bethune (a fellow graduate of Waite’s draftsmen team). The firm, dubbed “Bethune & Bethune”, soon began to leave its mark on the Buffalo landscape. As the founding partner, Louise became the first known female professional architect in American history. And her ability was noted by her contemporaries – the Western Association of Architects voted to allow her to join their ranks in 1885 (and afterwards changed their bylaws to allow “persons” rather than “men”) and became the first female fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 1889.
Lafayette Hotel, Buffalo, N.Y. Detroit Publishing Co., publisher
Many of Louise’s buildings no longer stand in Buffalo – rapidly changing taste and needs have destroyed many an historic building – but her crowning achievement, the Hotel Lafayette, not only still stands but (following a $35 million renovation in 2012) has returned to service as an active hotel in Buffalo’s downtown.
Unfortunately, while overseeing an expansion of the Lafayette Hotel, Louise suffered a bad fall and never fully regained her health. A few years of illness and pain followed, and then America’s first female architect died prematurely on December 18, 1913, at the age of just 57. Today, her papers can be found at the University of Buffalo.
Ethel Bailey Furman – The Neighborhood Builder
Ethel Bailey was born in 1893 to Mary (neé Jones) and Madison Jefferson Bailey, the second African American building contractor licensed in the city of Richmond, Virginia. The family lived in Richmond until 1908, when they moved to Philadelphia. Sometime in the 1910’s, Madison Bailey arranged for his daughter to study under fellow native Virginian Edward R. Williams, an African American architect practicing in New York City. In is uncertain when exactly Ethel graduated from student to master, but by the 1920 Census she was listing her profession as “architect”. Soon after, she was back in Richmond, drafting in her father’s firm.
Negro Contractors’ Conference, Hampton Institute, Hampton, Va., February 14, 1928. Ethel Furman is sitting in the center of the front row. Ethel Bailey Furman Papers, Library of Virginia
Furman’s success was not flashy – she won no prestigious national projects or write-ups in national publications, merely a description in Norfolk’s Journal and Guide as “one of Richmond’s leading business women” in 1925. But over the course of her career, she designed and built more than 200 buildings. Her clientele were largely middle class, like her, and she designed homes and churches with comfort and sustainability in mind.
Unfortunately, many of her residential projects have been torn down, as the fashion for larger and larger homes have drastically transformed America’s neighborhoods. But several of her churches still stand, including Richmond’s Fair Oaks Baptist Church and New Kent’s Mount Nebo Baptist Church, as well the educational wing she built for her own home parish, the Fourth Baptist Church in Richmond.
Mount Nebo Baptist Church, Pleasant Green, Cooper County, MO
Achieving this in the South between 1930 and 1970 was not easy for Ethel, an African American woman in a racist and sexist environment. Sometimes city bureaucrats would hunt for any flaw, any excuse to deny her permits or her plans. Sometimes potential clients would refuse to consider her at all. At times she resorted to submitting her plans under male colleagues’ names, including her father’s, which has complicated efforts to generate a full registry of her designs. But she persisted, continuing to design until her death 1976. She is buried in Oakwood Cemetery, in Richmond’s East End. Her son donated her papers to the Library of Virginia, and she was inducted into Virginia’s “Women in History” in 2010.
Mary E. J. Colter – Designing the Old West?
Mary Colter might be the most controversial character in the whole history of Southwestern United States architecture. Not only are there multiple valid interpretations of her relationship with Indigenous art and designs – were her works recalling native Pueblo architecture a tribute or an appropriation? Were her tourism-based buildings that featured Native artists and performers respectful or exploitative? – but a recent work has challenged her very claim to most if not all of her attributed works, claiming, essentially, that she was an interior designer with illusions of grandeur.
Portrait, inside Bright Angel Lodge, of Mary Colter, a renowned architect who designed several buildings at Grand Canyon National Park, which protects a steep-sided and winding gorge carved by the Colorado River across northern in Arizona. Colter’s work had enormous influence, helping to create a style, blending Spanish Colonial Revival and Mission Revival architecture with Native American motifs and Rustic elements, that became popular throughout the Southwest, Carol Highsmith, photographer
The orthodox story of Colter goes as follows: born in 1869, she first worked as an art instructor in Wisconsin but, seeking summer employment, she began to work for the Fred Harvey Company in 1902. Soon she was the chief architect for the Company, designing and overseeing the building of more than twenty buildings along three railroad routes (Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe).
The Fred Harvey Company catered to middle-class white travelers across the Southwest. Originally operating luxurious restaurant-hotels along railroad stops (hosted by the prettiest and most gentile of young ladies, of course, the eponymous “Harvey Girls”), Harvey branched out into the growing tourism trade around the turn of the century. Americans from California, the Midwest, even the East Coast could now vacation in the Southwest and take in the breathtaking views and the Indigenous culture. The Fred Harvey Company began offering tours of various sites, with guides dressed in a mix of “wild west” and “Indian” fashion. One such site was the Grand Canyon, where Colter made her most enduring mark.
Multiple structures in today’s Grand Canyon National Park are attributed to Colter, but she is perhaps best well-known for the Hopi House and the Desert View Watchtower (featured as cover image on this blog). Both were designed to look “natural” to the landscape, using stone and techniques similar to the ancient Pueblo ruins in the area. Colter herself called them “re-creations” of the Indigenous buildings, rejecting terms such as “copy” or “reproduction”. She spent months studying and researching Native American architecture, and employed Indigenous workmen to help complete both buildings, to help achieve a high degree of authenticity. Indeed, to this author’s emphatically non-expert eye, they both look like structures which could have been standing for centuries before any white men arrived, for better or for worse.
Both structures also featured Native American art and culture. The Hopi artist and educator Fred Kabotie created fantastic murals inside the Watchtower, and the Hopi House was built as a marketplace for Native artisans to sell their wares to tourists. Hopi House’s second floor is a kiva, or shrine, decorated with Hopi religious artifacts. Native performers would conduct dances or ceremonies for the tourists in this space or outside.
Herein lies one facet of the modern tension with Colter’s legacy – though she lived and worked almost a hundred years before the term “cultural tourism”, that is essentially what Colter was facilitating with her work with the Fred Harvey Company. Cultural Tourism in and of itself is not a negative thing, but it can have negative results, and is fundamentally uneven exchange – the tourist’s dollars dictate what culture is shared and spread, and can lead to dramatic changes in the actual authentic Indigenous practices and traditions to match the audience’s taste (for an example of this, see the history of hula in the Hawaiian Islands). Colter herself seems to have respected and even revered Indigenous artwork and craftworks, but her designs facilitated – were even created in order to allow – the commercialization of Southwest Native American culture.
If they were her designs at all. In 2018, independent researcher Fred Shaw published False Architect: the Mary Colter Hoax. Born out of his research into the talented but far more obscure railroad architect Louis Curtiss, Shaw became convinced that many if not all of Colter’s claimed designs actually belong to Curtiss or other railroad architects active in the Southwest at the time. His claims have some foundation – Colter, for example, claimed to designed Albuquerque’s Avarado Hotel and Indian Building, but newspapers of the time name Santa Fe Railroad architect Charles Whittlesey as the designer. The Avarado also opened in May of 1902, and Shaw asserts that Colter didn’t join the Harvey Company until June. Other discrepancies in the timeline, such as constructions Colter claimed to have overseen taking place during the school semester, while she was still employed in Wisconsin as an art teacher, bolster Shaw’s case.
But others have pushed back hard against Shaw’s work, which does have an uncomfortable degree of animus towards Colter (he spends one chapter arguing she suffered from Narcissistic Personality Disorder) and out of his admiration for Louis Curtiss, one of the architects he claimed Colter stole credit from. And his claim that these architects were simply “too much of a southern gentleman” to complain that another professional was stealing their credit is hard to credit overmuch. The debate rages on and shan’t be settled by this humble blog. But the fact remains that rightly or wrongly Colter’s name is affixed to some of the most iconic buildings of the American Southwest, and that she has achieved a legacy many are ready to rigorously defend to the (academic only, hopefully) death.
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Want to learn more about innovative women in history? Check out Marielle’s other blogs here.
For more information on women architects in the United States, please see:
https://pioneeringwomen.bwaf.org/