*NEW*  BWAF offers two new Fellowships:

• The Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation Library of Congress Fellowship~~ an award of $10,000 to support part-time research at the Library that will contribute toward the creation of a guide to the work of women architects in the collections of the Library of Congress; deadline is March 15. For guidelines, please see the Applications page.
  
  
• The Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation Dissertation Fellowship of the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH)~~ applicants must be nominated by the academic department from which their degree will be granted; applications are administered by SAH; annual deadline is in January. For guidelines, please see Fellowships at http://www.sah.org/.
  
  

BWAF Grant Information

The Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation (BWAF) offers funding to individuals and institutions to support innovative projects that advance the study and expand the recognition of women in architecture and related professions, and that lead to the dissemination of this knowledge to professional and public audiences alike. BWAF gives support in particular to research or activities that focus on the contributions of women architects, designers, urban planners, as well as architectural historians and critics, active in the United States during the period 1950-1980.

Grant funding is divided into two categories: Fellowships of up to $10,000 for Scholarly Research, Publication, Exhibition, or Documentary in film or other media; and, Grants of up to $3000 for Honoraria to Plenary Session Speakers at professional meetings, conferences, or symposia whose focus matches the mission of the BWAF; and, Travel Grants of up to $1500 for research trips or professional conferences at which the recipient will be making a presentation related to the purpose of the BWAF.

Applications are considered once a year. The postmark deadline is March 15, and the awards are usually announced 90 days thereafter. The number of awards each year varies at the discretion of the Fellowship Committee. Successful candidates receive their Fellowship awards in two equal installments: the first is disbursed upon receipt of the recipient’s written consent to the terms of the award; the second payment is awarded upon receipt of a short progress report (400-600 words) usually completed around the midpoint of the funded project.

Applicants are strongly encouraged to send a preliminary inquiry to the Director of BWAF regarding their proposal and its eligibility for funding. Inquiries may be made by telephone (212) 577-1200, or by e-mail: director@bwaf.org

Although support is offered to projects undertaken by foreign nationals, the BWAF generally expects that the results of its support will be disseminated in English and will include distribution or participation in the United States.

2007 Fellowships Recipients

Kelly Comras, Landscape Architect and Historian, introduces the life and work of Ruth Shellhorn, one of the leading practitioners who shaped the modernist landscape of southern California, in the forthcoming monograph The Landscape Legacy of Ruth Patricia Shellhorn, scheduled for publication in 2008.

Barbara Mobarak, AAIA, Principal, Planning & Design Research Group, and Lecturer, Institute for Architecture and Planning at Morgan State University, will produce an annotated bibliography and research source guide on Norma Sklarek, the first African American woman member and fellow of the American Institute of Architects.

The Notre Dame Student Association for Women in Architecture (SAWA) at the School of Architecture, Notre Dame University, will establish the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation Lectures, to highlight the careers and contributions of eminent women practitioners active during the mid-twentieth century.

Ellen Shoshkes, Architect and Planner, and Adjunct Assistant Professor, Portland State University, will undertake archival research and conduct oral histories regarding Jacqueline Tyrwhitt (1905-1983), the town planner, editor, and educator, as the beginning phase of Hidden Voice: the Contribution of Jacqueline Tyrwhitt to the Origins and Evolution of Urban Design in America, 1945-1976.

Thaisa Way, Assistant Professor, Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Washington Seattle, underscores in a forthcoming monograph how women’s engagement in the American landscape profession—from its origins through modernism—has greatly shaped both landscape and profession, and now the historical narrative too, as described in Unbounded Practices: Women, Landscape Architecture, and Early Twentieth Century Design, to be published by the University Press of Virginia.

Catherine Zipf, Assistant Professor, Department of Cultural and Historic Preservation, Salve Regina University, will implement the planning phases for the first retrospective on Chloethiel Woodard Smith, the prolific Washington-based architect active from the 1950s to the 1980s.

2007 Institutional Partners

Society of Architectural Historians: Inaugural Dissertation Fellowship to Avigail Sachs, PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley for her thesis, Research for Architecture: Building a Discipline and Modernizing the Profession, 1946-1959.

Society of Architectural Historians: Travel Fellowship to Juliette Peers, RMIT University, Melbourne, to deliver her paper Tool Fantasy and Document? Playing with Architectural Images and Identities Through Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Dollhouses at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians in Pittsburgh.

Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture: Inaugural Travel Fellowship to Johanna Hays, PhD candidate at Auburn University, to deliver her paper The First American Woman Architect—Louise Blanchard Bethune: An American Dream at the Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture in Philadelphia.

National Building Museum: Grant for the public symposium on Women in Architecture, Histories, Herstories, Reappraising the Legacy of American Architecture, in honor of Women’s History Month.

American Institute of Architects: Grant to Linda Ingram for “Identification of Women in the AIA Historical Directory of American Architects,” a project under the direction of Nancy Hadley, Archivist and Records Manager of the Library & Archives at the AIA National headquarters in Washington, D.C.

2006 Fellowships Recipients

The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) will produce Redressing the Balance: Rediscovering the Work of Two Landscape Architecture Pioneers—Ruth Shellhorn and Carol Johnson, both practitioners noted for the civic and public spaces they created in post-war America. The two histories will be added to TCLF's online resource, Legends in Landscape Oral History Series: www.tclf.org/pioneers/oral_history.htm

Jason Cohn, Producer and Writer, Quest Productions, will research the life and work of Ray (Kaiser) Eames, partner in the legendary design team, focusing on issues of artistic collaboration. The results of the research will be incorporated into The Creative Lives of Charles & Ray, a 90-minute documentary intended for national primetime broadcast on American public television, theatrical and international distribution.

Gabrielle Esperdy, Assistant Professor, School of Architecture at New Jersey Institute of Technology, and a 2005 BWAF recipient, will continue her investigation of "The Architectress" in the United States: Perceptions and Realities of Women in Practice since World War II, a study of the cultural attitudes towards women in practice alongside statistical data on women in practice during the second half of the twentieth century.

Alexis Denise Gregory, Architect, with Martin A. Davis, AIA, Clemson, South Carolina, will be investigating the Obstacles to Professional Achievement Affecting Women in Architecture in South Carolina through a survey and focus group interview designed to identify the causes for the high attrition rates of women in architecture in South Carolina.

Peter Laurence, Doctoral Candidate, Ph.D. Program in Architecture, University of Pennsylvania, examines in A Vital Science: Jane Jacobs' Ecology of Cities, a history and intellectual biography of the author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), how Jacobs' seminal writings dramatically and irrevocably changed the ways architects, planners, and urban designers look at cities.

Christopher Macdonald, Professor, School of Architecture, the University of British Columbia, with Kevin Alter, Associate Professor, School of Architecture, the University of Texas at Austin, will prepare Judith Chafee: Unreconstructed Modern, a monograph on the Tucson architect, Judith Chafee (1933-1998). The monograph focuses on the eloquent form of regional modernism as embodied in the residences designed by Chafee from 1975 to 1984, and will be published by the Center for American Architecture and Design at the University of Texas at Austin.

2006 Travel Grants

Kristin M. Maki, Doctoral Candidate, College of Architecture and Urban Studies, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, examines in Apprentice to Architect: launching the careers of Eleanore Pettersen and Lois Davidson Gottlieb at Taliesin, 1941-1949, the role of architectural apprenticeship with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin, in shaping architectural careers for women.

Bobbye Tigerman, Assistant Curator of Decorative Arts, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, was awarded a travel grant for the paper, ‘I am Not a Decorator’: Florence Knolls Construction of Professional Identity, which she delivered at the Dorich House Annual Conference sponsored by the Modern Interiors Research Centre at Kingston University, UK.

2006 Institutional Partners

Society of Architectural Historians: Travel Fellowship to Despina Statigakos, Harvard University, for the paper The Architect and the Bluestocking: Feminist Networks in Fin-de-Siècle Berlin.

National Building Museum: Grant for the public program on Women in Architecture, Three Tracks to Success.

University of California, Berkeley: Grant to the Regional Oral History Office for a video-oral history series on the life and work of the Beverly Willis, Architect.

2005 Fellowship Recipients

Alison Isenberg, Associate Professor, Department of History at Rutgers University, will explore in "Urbanism Unclothed: Women and Urban Design in the Mid-20th Century," the often hidden impact of women in the design professions, and on urban form. Besides architecture, she will consider the interior/exterior furnishings industries; public art; historic preservation; design theory; architectural criticism; public commissions; and commercial leasing. Expanding the conception of what constituted urban design during the 1950s-1970s, "Urbanism Unclothed" will revise our understanding of what made American cities magnetic, creative places during years of supposed decline.

Mary Anne Alabanza Akers, Associate Professor, College of Environmental Design at the University of Georgia, will address issues of both gender and race in Remembering Our Sisters: A Story of African American Women Who Shaped our Environments (1950-1980), a study documenting the professional lives and built contributions of an overlooked and underrepresented group within the profession of architecture.

Gabrielle Esperdy, Assistant Professor, School of Architecture at New Jersey Institute of Technology, will investigate "The Architectress" in the United States: Perceptions and Realities of Women in Practice since World War II, a study of the cultural attitudes towards women in practice alongside statistical data on women in practice during the second half of the twentieth century.

Monica Penick, Doctoral Candidate, School of Architecture, University of Texas at Austin, examines in Modernism and the Postwar House: Elizabeth Gordon, House Beautiful and the Pace Setter House Program (1947-1965), the development of "livable" modernism as influenced by architectural critic, arbiter of taste, and magazine editor, Elizabeth Gordon.

Alexandra Griffith Winton, Design Historian, New York, NY, reintroduces the life, work and influence of mid-century textile designer, Dorothy Liebes, in what will be the monograph, Design, Color, Texture: Dorothy Liebes and the Textiles of American Modernism, to be published in 2006 by Princeton Architectural Press; and,

Gwendolyn Wright, Professor, School of Architecture, Columbia University, will explore in "Modern Man," Modern Women, and Modern Architectures in the United States, how women architects, reformers, journalists, and political activists have offered significant alternative visions that justly belong to the modernist legacy, supporting a strain of argument in her forthcoming Modern Architectures in History: The United States, part of a series to be published in 2006 by Reaktion Press.

2005 Travel Grants

Cynthia Hammond, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Architecture, McGill University, who will investigate in Catherine Bauer: The Interior of Modernism (1905-1964), how Bauer's broad themes of pedagogical concern relate to her views on the architectural interior, in preparation for an essay to be included in the anthology, Crafting Space: Architecture, Interiors and Decoration, (Alfoldy and Helland, eds.) to be published in 2006 by Ashgate Press.

Dorothée Imbert, Associate Professor and Director, Master in Landscape Architecture Programs, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, who is preparing a monograph on Geraldine Knight Scott (1909-1989), landscape architect, founding member of the Telesis group, housing and planning advocate, and educator at the University of California, Berkeley, to be published within the series Berkeley/Design/Books dedicated to the dissemination of designers featured in the Environmental Design Archives at Berkeley.

2005 Institutional Partners

Society of Architectural Historians: Travel Fellowship to Ines Zalduendo, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, for a paper on "Jacqueline Tyrwhitt's Correspondence Courses: Town Planning in the Trenches."

Columbia University: "Gender and Modern Architecture" open seminar series.

Virginia Tech Libraries: Curatorial support for the International Archive of Women Architects.


return to top of page