BWAF Dynamic National Archive

Wright Chapman, Josephine

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 14:42:48 +0000

Early life and education

Josephine Wright Chapman was amongst the first generation of women in architecture who significantly shaped the foundations for successive female architects to start and head their own firms and make a name for themselves in the building industry. Born as the only daughter out of four children to James Levi Chapman, President of the Fitchburg Machine Works, and Mary E. Wright, a dedicated member to the Fitchburg Women’s Club, on August 20, 1867, Chapman was raised in a traditional New England household. Despite her conservative upbringing, Chapman expressed a suprising desire to study and pursue a career in architecture. At the age of 24 she pawned jewelry and clothes to support herself as she left home without concern for the family’s blessings, to realize her career aspirations in Boston.

Career in Architecture

Chapman’s career began in 1892 as an apprentice under the tutelage of Clarence H. Blackall, co-founder of the firm Blackall, Clapp, & Whittemore. Blackall was a profound source of inspiration for Chapman, as his impressive career in architecture spanned from the Rotch Travelling Scholarship for the study of European architecture (of which he was the first recipient) to the presidency of the Boston Architectural Club (of which he was the first president). Under his supervision, Chapman spent five years drafting and studying the firm’s most prestigious designs, including that for Boston’s first steel-frame structure, the Carter Building.

Prior to the conclusion of her apprenticeship, Chapman moved into Grundmann Studios on Clarendon Street. The tenants at Grundmann Studios, as a woman’s artist collective, helped support Chapman during a time of intense confrontation with the obstacles of gender bias as she sought to secure independent commissions. In 1897, she received the first of a series of prestigious commissions: the Craigie Arms private dormitory at Harvard. After the success from the design of the dormitory, she was able to open her own firm in which she hired several draftsman in addition to a draftswoman. With the exception of Jennie Louise Blanchard Bethune (who added her husband Robert Bethune as a partner to her firm in 1881, only a few months after she found it), Chapman was the first woman in the history of American architecture to start and head her very own firm. The firm went on to take a number of commercial projects in the area of Leominster, Massachusetts; one of their biggest projects was the Episcopal Church of St. Mark, financed by wealthy patron Minerva C. Crocker of Fitchburg.

Perhaps the highlight of Chapman’s career was the commission she won for the design and construction of the New England States Building in Buffalo, New York for the Pan-American Exposition in 1901. Armed with picture, plans, and passion to win, Chapman appealed to the six governors the evening before the competition was to begin and subsequently earned the commission. This moment marked the start of the mature phase of her career, during which time she took on the responsibility of designing churches, clubs, libraries, and apartments, as well as the Women’s Clubs in Lynn and Worchester, Massachusetts. After 1907, she dedicated herself solely to the design of residential buildings. Chapman believed, echoing the collective sentiment of the public at the dawn of the twentieth century, that female architects had a grace and sensitivity about them which made them perfect designers of home spaces.

Following the favourable reception of her New England Building and other works, Chapman felt confident enough to apply for membership to the American Institute of Architects and the Boston Architectural Club but was denied; in the case of the latter, Chapman was rejected based on the upholding of a male-only policy which was not so unusual of the times. Also during this time, the city of Boston experienced an economic recession which necessitated a move on Chapman’s part to New York City to find work. Her career flourished in New York City, as confirmed by The Ladies’ Home Journal which stated “You can find her [Chapman's] work everywhere in the environs of New York…” She was also admitted into the New York Society of Architects. The achievements of her New York office culminated in the years between 1907-1921, when Chapman took on the design for artists’ residences in the Queens’ waterfront suburb of Douglas Manor as well as a sixteen storey apartment building on Park Avenue. By 1921, Chapman finally had the financial resources to travel abroad and study European architecture like her early mentor, Blackall.

Chapman’s career in architecture concluded with the design of Hillandale in Washington, D.C. in 1923 for Anne Archbold, heir to the Standard Oil fortune. Both architect and patron were particularly influenced in the design of the estate by the writings of Bostonian architect Guy Lowell, Smaller Italian Villas and Farmhouses (1916) and More Small Italian Villas and Farmhouses (1920). The architectural and historical importance of Hillandale was corroborated in 1995 when it was elected to the National Register of Historic Places in 1995. After she completed the design for Hillandale, Chapman retired to Paris. She passed away in Bath, England in 1943.

Major Buildings and Projects

Craigie Arms (Harvard University dormitory), currently known as Chapman Arms apartments, Cambridge, MA (1897) - “Design arranged five masonry and timber structures containing 36 apartments under a single flat expanse of roof. Turrets punctuate the corners of this building and its red brick cladding is offset by limestone trim… It is a simply detailed Georgian Revival style building which has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places.”[Nancy Byrtus, Candace Jenkins and Paul Levenson, "Josephine Wright Chapman and Tuckerman Hall" Central Massachusetts Symphony Orchestra (2002) ... For more, visit http://www.tuckermanhall.org]
St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Fitchburg, MA (ca. 1897)
New England States Building, Buffalo, NY (Pan-American Exposition, 1901)
Tuckerman Hall, Worchester, MA (1901-02) - “… A multi-purpose assembly facility located at 10
Tuckerman Street in Worcester, Massachusetts. It is advantageously situated at the junction of Salisbury and Tuckerman Streets in the heart of Worcester’s historic Institutional District. This district features a high concentration of Revival-styled public buildings, many of which have been listed on the National Historic Register. Tuckerman Hall contributes a graceful Neo-Classical façade to this streetscape and serves as a cultural memorial not only to the history of women in Worcester, but to the advancement of women nationally, as Tuckerman Hall was one of the earliest facilities in this country conceived, financed and designed solely by women. Serving as the headquarters of the Worcester Woman’s Club from the time of its construction through the mid-20th century, it is currently home to the Central Massachusetts Symphony Orchestra, a regional symphony orchestra based in Worcester, Massachusetts.” [Nancy Byrtus, Candace Jenkins and Paul Levenson, "Josephine Wright Chapman and Tuckerman Hall" Central Massachusetts Symphony Orchestra (2002) ... For more, visit http://www.tuckermanhall.org]
Hayes-Saul House, Arlington, MA (1903)
Alice Foster House [Douglas Manor], Douglaston, Queens, NY (1908)
Women’s Club, Lynn, MA (1909)
A.B. Holmes House [Douglas Manor], Douglaston, Queens, NY (1912)
Daniel Combs House [Douglas Manor], Douglaston, Queens, NY (1917)
Anne Archbold House “Hillandale,” Washington, DC (1922-25) - “The main residence has an irregular T-shape footprint and includes numerous projections and several porches. The wings of the villa have two stories and several covered and open-to-the-sky balconies. The rambling plan and a-symmetrical elevations were employed to give the impression that the residence had expanded over time. The front entrance is located at the intersection of the two principal wings and faces northeast. The exterior of Hillandale is typical of Italian Renaissance rural villas with its smooth stucco walls and a limited amount of ornament. Hillandale’s exterior ornament includes: the use of the Tuscan Order for a loggia and porch; simple scroll-like ends on the rafter, and; terra cotta hip- and gable-covers for the chimneytops a typical detail of farmhouses in Tuscany. The walls at Hillandale are comprised of hollow terra cotta tiles with a stucco finish. The gable- and hip-roofs are covered with terra cotta tiles and have deep eaves with large wood rafters.” [United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service - National Register of Historic Places Registration Form "Hillandale" (1995) ... For more, visit http://pdfhost.focus.nps.gov/docs/NRHP/Text/94001595.pdf]

Publications

Sarah Allaback, The First American Women Architects, (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008).

United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service - National Register of Historic Places Registration Form “Hillandale” (1995).

Nancy Byrtus, Candace Jenkins and Paul Levenson, “Josephine Wright Chapman and Tuckerman Hall” Central Massachusetts Symphony Orchestra (2002).

Institutional Affiliations

Member of the New York Society of Architects (1907)

Smyrl, Elmira (Myra)

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 16:17:38 +0000

Elmira (Myra) Smyrl’s name appears in documents from the late 1950’s as the only female professor participating in a faculty workshop run by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture. Born Elmira Susannah Sauberan in Detroit in 1919, she received her Bachelor of Science in Architectural Engineering in 1941 from the University of Texas, Austin. There she met her first husband, John Linn Scott. Together they practiced throughout Texas from their base in Austin, designing state buildings, churches, schools, and residences. While her husband served in the Navy during World War II she kept the practice going on her own.¹ After their 1949 divorce, she supported herself and her daughter, Donna, with drafting jobs and part-time teaching at UT.

Remarried to Sam Smyrl, in 1955 Myra Smyrl received a masters degree in Agricultural Engineering from Oklahoma State University. Her thesis design was a state home for disadvantaged children, a “School for Family Living.” That same year she moved to Bozeman, Montana to teach in the Montana State University architecture program while practicing part time, notably contributing to the design of the Montana State Field House, which at its opening in 1957 was said to be the largest clear-span wooden structure in the world. She picked up another masters degree in Applied Sciences from Montana State and became an expert on civil defense, including the design of fallout shelters.² Alongside these pursuits, she studied Native American cultures of the Northwest.

Myra Smyrl was among a group of female Montana State professors who sued for equal pay in 1972, winning the case in1976.³ Also during the 70’s she commuted during breaks in her teaching schedule to Washington, DC to pursue studies toward a PhD in Philosophy at Georgetown, where she completed her coursework but not her dissertation (the topic was to be “Kant’s model of the mind.”) Aside from her academic work, she was a proponent of humane treatment of animals, and was, with her husband, a founder of Bozeman’s dog club. Students and colleagues remember her as a tough, exacting professor who subjected her students to spelling tests and demanded that they know the composition of concrete. She taught at MSU until 1986 and died in Bozeman in 2008.

Biographical Information contributed by Rebecca Williamson

Footnotes

¹A building of this period attributed to John Linn Scott is the State Health Building in Austin. See “Hill Country Deco” accessed on March 17, 2012 http://www.hillcountrydeco.com/institutional/health/

² Office of Civil Defense, Highlights of the Architecture and Engineer Activities in Shelter Development, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1964) 4-5.

³Mecklenburg v. Bd. of Regents, 13 Fair Empl.Prac.Cas. (BNA) 462, 468-69 (D.Mont.1976). Although she was a close friend of two of the four named plaintiffs, Smyrl was a class member, not a named plaintiff.

Page, Mary Louisa

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 15:23:22 +0000

Mary Louisa Page seems to have been the first woman to graduate with a degree in architecture in North America.¹ Born in Metamora, IL, in 1849, she attended Illinois Industrial University (later University of Illinois) beginning in 1874, receiving a Certificate in Architecture in 1878 and a B.S. in Architecture in 1879.² At the university she served as a senator in student government, in the all-female Alethenai Literary Society and another group called “Mystery of the Seven Sisters.” Two of her siblings, Emma and Martha, attended Illinois at the same time. Mary Page forged bonds with fellow students, including Dr. Avis Elida Smith, an obstetrician who, with other female physicians, would go on to found the Women’s and Children’s Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri.

Upon graduation Mary Page worked as a teacher for two years before finding employment in architecture, first in Illinois, then in Kansas City in the mid 1880’s, and finally in Olympia, Washington, where in 1887 she joined her former Illinois classmate (and her older sister Martha’s husband) Robert Farwell Whitham to offer engineering, drafting, blueprint, and (land title) abstracting services under the company name Whitham & Page, with Whitham serving as civil engineer and city surveyor and Mary Page as draftsman.³ A rare hand-colored map of Olympia and surroundings dated 1890, one of the earliest cadastral maps of the area, testifies to the precise draftsmanship that Whitham and Page produced during this period.⁴

Around 1895 Mary Page appears to have shifted away from architectural work, returning to teaching and taking leadership roles in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. She served as president of the Western Washington chapter and Vice President at Large of the national organization. By then the multi-racial chapter was involved in women’s rights and suffrage, a hard-fought battle in the Pacific Northwest at the time. Emma Page had already been a prominent member of the group for some years.⁵ In her work with WCTU, Mary Page embraced humane causes: the treatment of people with disabilities and of animals. She published WCTU documents and her own essays, including a prescient one entitled “The Relationship of Cruelty to Food Supply.”

The 1910 Federal Census identifies Mary Page at age 60, employed as a teacher, and living with an adopted daghter, O. Davida, age 3, in rented accommodations on Harstine Island, in the southern part of Puget Sound, to the north of Olympia. Wooded and sparsely populated, the island had no regular connection to the mainland at the time. That same year Emma Page died, followed five years later by Martha. By 1920, Mary and Davida Page were living with Mary’s youngest sister, Belle Page Whetstone, in Pomona, Kansas. Mary Page died in 1921 in Kansas City, where she had taken Davida for her education. Among those at her funeral was Dr. Avis Smith.

Biographical Information contributed by Rebecca Williamson

Footnotes

¹ Sarah Allaback, The First American Women Architects, (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 24.

² Frank William Scott, ed. The Alumni Record of the University of Illinois at Urbana (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1906), 32-3, 35, and 40-41. See also Catalogue and Circular of the University of Illinois, 1885-6 (Champaign, IL 1886) 94 (degree nomenclature), and 102-4 (list of graduates 1877-8).

³ R.L. Polk, publisher, Directory of Olympia, Port Townsend, Fairhaven, New Whatcom and Whatcom 1890, Volume 1. [Olympia, Washington?] 68.

⁴ Whitham & Page’s map of Olympia and surroundings: Thurston Co., Washington, 1890 by Paul Page Whitham; G B Scammell; G F Conger; L.H. Everts & Co. [Olympia, Washington?] : Scammell & Conger, [1890]. (The map appears to be attributed to Mary Page’s nephew, Paul Page Whitham).

⁵ Emma Page, who was blind since childhood, received a Master of Letters (M.L.) degree from Illinois in 1878. She supported herself as a music teacher at Eureka College, St. Louis from 1879 to 1881 and later taught music in Ottowa, Kansas, and Kansas City Missouri before moving to Manvilled, Wyoming with her parents in 1888. (See Elmira Jane Dickinson, ed. A History of Eurkea College (St. Louis: Christian Publishing Company, 1894) 206-7.) After a period homesteading in Wyoming, Emma Page was actively lecturing for the WCTU by 1894. Some time after this Emma Page, along with her parents, moved to the Olympia area and joined the WCTU of Western Washington.

De Maeseneer, Martine

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 09:02:59 +0000

Early life and education

Unspecified

Career in Architecture

Martine De Maeseneer Architects [MDMA] has been around for two decades of practicing, theorizing and teaching within an international forum of schools, colloquia and competitions. Two books appeared in conjunction with individual exhibitions: ‘The In_divisible Space’, Antwerp (1993) and ‘Ideality-3-Lost’, Brussels (1997).

Essays published (with such titles as ‘Aperitif Time’, ‘What Matters’ and ‘Parsing Traps’) have been adding up as chapters in a more substantial yet unpublished book. From 2001 to 2003 De Maeseneer took up a teaching job at the AA in London. Within the practice there is a continuous search for an expanded field of patterns, motives, logos, plots, timbres - trying to give architecture a countenance that draws upon ‘writing’. Ironically so, the choice made from the onset to theorize in a tradition of Venturi-Scott Brown, Aldo Rossi and Rem Koolhaas has refrained MDMA from building a lot. In 2011 the Bronks Theatre in Brussels was one of the six finalists in the European Mies van der Rohe Prize.

Major Buildings and Projects

MAIN PROJECTS SINCE 2000

- AS Watson’s Headquarters : Extension of an existing skyscraper with two extra levels, Hong Kong. Feasability study plus design (Jan 2006), realisation : on hold

- 12.000 m2 housing and office scheme in the city of Lommel, Belgium (July 2004). Building permission : in progress.

- ‘Banlieu-Beaulieu’, tunnel wall cladding design, Brussels, Belgium (2004), project

- ‘Canopé’ house, 600m2 house plus garden flat in a rural landscape, Belgium (2002). Realisation: 2005-2009

Separatrix building, Housing scheme on a canal for Haarlemmermeer, the Netherlands (Oct 2000), project design & feasibility study & tender.

New Dutch Police Museum, first prize limited competion organized by the Dutch Government Architect.

- project 1 at Apeldoorn (August 1999)

- project 2, feasibility study plus design for 3 different sites (Feb 2003) : the former military domain Hembrug site (Zaandam, Amsterdam); an old construction hall on the ship wharf at Heyplaat, Rotterdam; Sports and recreation site, Apeldoorn. Realisation: on hold

Logos/Glossy/Glottis. Reconversion of Olympus Headquarters Belgium in the IT-firm ‘Erudict’ at Brussels (Aug 1998), realisation: Feb 1999 – Feb 2000

Furman was active in the Richmond community; she received the Walter Manning Citizenship Award and was named to the Richmond Afro-American’s Community Honor Roll in 1954 and 1959. She was recognized for her extensive civic work by the Richmond Afro-American in 1958. In 1985, a small city park was dedicated to her memory in Richmond.

Stencel, Jen

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:09:35 +0000

Major Buildings and Projects

Arcadia University Commons, Glenside, PA

Johns Hopkins University Gilman Hall Renovation, Baltimore, MD

St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York, NY

Orlando International Airport Rehabilitation & Restoration, Orlando, FL

Valencia College & University of Central Florida University Center, Orlando, FL