A Year in the Life of Julia Morgan, Architect

Southern California Architectural History, 2018

The purpose of this post is to shed light on the brief, but significant, architectural photography career of Willard D. Morgan, a much overlooked persona in the formative Los Angeles and Southern California modern architectural photography circles of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Morgan had the foresight to marry UCLA art student and faculty member Barbara Johnson in the fall of 1925 and to become involved in coteries surrounding architects R. M. Schindler, Richard Neutra and Lloyd Wright, artist Annita Delano and dancer Bertha Wardell of the the UCLA Art and Physical Education Departments and photographer Edward Weston. As part of this group Morgan was exposed to the architecture of besides Schindler, Neutra, and the Wrights, Schindler circle friends Irving Gill, Kem Weber, John Weber and J. R. Davidson, as well as befriending Schindler-Neutra apprentices Harwell Hamilton Harris and Gregory Ain. (For much more detail on the Schindler-Neutra circle influence on the Morgans see my "Foundations of Los Angeles Modernism: Richard Neutra's Mod Squad" and "Bertha Wardell: Dances in Silence: Kings Road, Olive Hill and Carmel")

JSAH (Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians), 2024

Review of Kelly Hayes McAlonie. Louise Blanchard Bethune: Every Woman Her Own Architect. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2023, 330 pp., 88 illus. $99 (cloth), ISBN 9781438492872; $34.95 (paper), ISBN 9781438492889; open access, https://soar.suny.edu/handle/20.500.12648/8382 In 1963, Madeleine B. Stern published the first posthumous profile of Louise Blanchard Bethune, widely considered to be America’s first professional woman architect.1 The profile articulated a conundrum that has shaped Bethune’s legacy ever since: a self-described conservative who adapted to the status quo and seemed to disdain “professional agitators” such as suffragists, Bethune was steadfast in her belief that women were as capable as men at potentially anything and should settle for nothing less than equal pay for equal work. Was she a feminist? See the published version here: https://online.ucpress.edu/jsah/article-abstract/83/3/380/203021/Review-Louise-Blanchard-Bethune-Every-Woman-Her?redirectedFrom=fulltext

Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 2007

2010

To the architect who knows of Phyllis Lambert but knows very little about her, two facts are likely to serve as outlines of a character sketch: first, that she was instrumental in commissioning Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to design the Seagram Building, the enormously influential icon of modern architecture; second, that she was the driving force behind the Canadian Centre for Architecture, one of architecture's most important institutions. This outline is not inaccurate but falls very short of describing either her achievements or her contributions to culture. They are but convenient landmarks in a life and love of architecture. That life has been complex: her activities have included advocacy, practice, activism, patronage, intervention and collaboration. She is an entrepreneur, a collector, a scholar, a connoisseur and a steward of buildings and urban districts. She is furthermore, and foremost, an architect. This essay will turn to this simple fact-one that tends to be obscured by the cumulative perceptions of her myriad activities-to demonstrate that her efforts are fuelled by an understanding of the architect as a responsible, moral citizen. Landmarks: from the Seagram Building to the Canadian Centre for Architecture Phyllis Lambert was born Phyllis Barbara Bronfman, the second of four children to Samuel Bronfman and Saidye Rosner in Montreal in 1927. She studied at Vassar, moved to Paris, married, divorced, and moved to New York in 1954, when her life in architecture and her impact upon it began. Her father, the president of Joseph E. Seagram and Sons, was planning to build an office building in New York, acquiring a site at 375 Park Avenue in 1951. Upon being shown a rendering of the preliminary scheme prepared for the building by Pereira & Luckman architects by her father, she prevailed upon him to embark on another path, 1 encouraging him to regard the commissioning of the architect as a matter of cultural and civic responsibility. Her letter dated 28 June 1954 perfectly represents the germ of her idea of architecture's importance to the life of the city and its citizens: The philosophy that a building expresses seeps into a society and helps to mold [sic] it at the same time as it expresses it. Now in putting up a building in NY you have two choices-first, you are erecting a building which is just 1 Phyllis Lambert, Farnsworth on Mars? or, On the Commissioning and Stewardship of Buildings, in

2016

Architecture and Design History have long ignored the achievements of women professionals in architecture and design fields with the consequences that women have been denied their own place in History. Considering that, since the end of the nineteenth century, specialised magazines have covered works by creative women, it is surprising that their contribution has still not been completely acknowledged by mainstream histories or ‘seminal histories'. It is a fact, that the History of Contemporary Architecture and Design has too frequently favoured men professionals' works simply omitting to mention works by their women colleagues. Despina Stratigakos's book entitled "Where Are the Women Architects?" proves yet again that in 2016 this subject is far from being completed and it is still worthy of close attention. This essay considers gender studies in the fields of History of contemporary Architecture and Design critically tracing an international bibliography on t...

2020

The Plan Journal, 2022

Good News. Women in Architecture is an exhibition curated by Pippo Ciorra, Elena Motisi, and Elena Tinacci, and designed by Matilde Cassani, which was inaugurated on December 16, 2021, at MAXXI Rome -the museum designed by Zaha Hadid which opened to the public in 2010. The intent of the exhibition (sited in Gallery 2 on the second floor of the museum) is to assess the anthropological and professional changes now happening in the world of architecture with a neutral and omnivorous approach, without stating a specific thesis -if not a tautological onethat there is a "tide" of women architects. Although the exhibition "limits" its scope to the presentation of the results of a massive, two-year-long archival, historiographic, and bibliographic research, displaying this material raises an issue that concerns architecture rather than gender. Architecture is -increasingly -a choral, hybrid, variable practice, in which a supposed single leadership reflects a fallacious narration rather than the truth. Good News -in Italian Buone Nuove -is a feminine, entirely adjectival title, a message of hope that incorporates a certain lexical ambiguity. While the fact that globally women architects have increased in numbers and prestige in recent years is in itself good "news," the presence of women in architectural disciplines is by no means "new.

Jan 25-27 2024, Palazzo Taverna, University of Arkansas Rome Center

The first draft of BECOMING JANE JACOBS, University of Pennsylvania, 2009. This document is provided to scholars and close readers who might be interested in comparing this work with trade press publications by other authors.