Building Recognition : An exhibit in Santa Monica shows the progress women have made in architecture and design

When Julia Morgan, California’s first licensed woman architect, began her practice during the early years of this century, the prevailing notion was that a woman couldn’t be an architect because she couldn’t climb scaffolding.

It didn’t matter that Morgan (1872-1957) had been the first woman accepted to the Ecole des Beaux Arts’ architecture program in Paris. Or even that she got her diploma there, which was unusual, because most of the American men who attended--including Bernard Maybeck and Charles McKim--didn’t bother to get diplomas. It was enough for them just to say they went there. It didn’t matter that most architects don’t climb anything.

Morgan knew she would have to go to great heights to be taken seriously in her chosen profession. Wearing pants under her dress, she made a point of always climbing the scaffolding everywhere.

Best-known as the architect of William Randolph Hearst’s San Simeon, she designed more than 500 projects, including campuses, hospitals, hotels, churches, YWCAs and a number of homes for actress Marion Davies. As a student at UC Berkeley, where she graduated with a degree in engineering in 1894, she met Phoebe Hearst, who got her some big commissions. In the early years of her career, half of her clients were women.

Like Morgan, many women have broken through or simply ignored artificial barriers designed to keep them from becoming architects, especially here in California, which has the highest percentage of women architects in the country.

Today Lian Hurst Mann, a second-generation architect, is not only president of the Assn. for Women in Architecture (AWA) but the editor of Architecture California, the journal of the California Council of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). It circulates to about 11,000 people in the field.

Kate Diamond, who owns her own firm with partner Margot Siegel, is vice president and president-elect of the Los Angeles chapter of AIA, the first woman to head the chapter. Her mother, a silversmith who had studied with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in Chicago, thought architecture was a good profession for her daughter, who was good in math and interested in aesthetics.

Diamond became active in the AIA about eight years ago. “There is the perception of an old boys’ network, but it takes only a few people to change an organization,” she said. Next year, Susan Maxman, from Pennsylvania, will become the first woman president of the national AIA.

The progress women have made in the architectural profession, as well as in several design disciplines related to it, is evident in “Broadening the Discourse”--a juried show of models and photographs representing about 40 design projects by professionals and students in the fields of planning, architecture, engineering, interior design, graphic design and other related fields--at the UCLA Extension Design Center in Santa Monica.

The exhibit is sponsored by AWA, California Women in Environmental Design (CWED) and the UCLA Extension Interior and Environmental Design Program.

“The show demonstrates the enormous technical competence of women in design fields, and the elegance that women are contributing to the built environment in California and beyond,” said Marcie Homer, an architectural photographer who co-chaired the exhibit committee.

“We wanted to look at how to be more socially and ecologically responsive and still meet high aesthetic ideals, where you don’t compromise one for the other,” said Anne Zimmerman, an architect with Siegel Diamond Architects. Zimmerman served on the exhibit committee and co-chaired a three-day weekend conference last month on “Broadening the Discourse,” sponsored by CWED and AWA. She is Siegel Diamond’s project manager on the UC Santa Barbara Student Affairs and Administrative Services building.

“The assumption has been if it’s socially responsible, it’s got to be bad design, and that’s obviously not the case,” Homer said. “Coming up with new ways to do things was part of our responsibility in building this exhibit.”

There was enormous debate about the theme, “Broadening the Discourse.” “One woman walked out of the exhibit committee saying she could not be part of an exhibit for women’s work that has the word ‘broad’ in it,” Zimmerman said.

“Most of us have a sense of humor and actually thought it was fine. I think, more than anything, there were debates about design criteria. Many of us felt what we really wanted to come out of this was an acceptance of different points of view.”

Among the projects in the exhibition are commercial and residential buildings, and institutional structures such as a new traffic control tower at Los Angeles International Airport, for which Siegel Diamond architects served as design consultants.

Alison Wright designed studio/workstations, offices and a conference room for BSK Offices in Culver City, in what was previously the Helms Bakery boiler room. Gina Muzingo’s interior design for Caffe Neo in Studio City recalls the ambience of a neighborhood bar, albeit ‘90s style.

Jackie Leavitt and her associates, faculty and students at UCLA’s Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning, developed options for laundry facilities for the Nickerson Gardens housing project. Laura Rocroi Riggs made doing the wash more fun by combining a laundry with a cafe in the Brain Wash Cafe and Laundromat in San Francisco.

Other projects included renovation of a bookstore; research on the use of recycled products and molded fiber production techniques--an example of this technology is the common egg carton--for architectural materials and products; and Christine Killory’s project, Courtyard Housing for Low Income Families, which received an architectural design award from Progressive Architecture magazine.

“Women are moving into the design professions in large numbers, and we want to support their accomplishments,” Zimmerman said. “The work that women do still seems to get lost in the shuffle. The exhibit is primed to counteract that tendency.”

Unbeknown to almost everyone, women have been contributing to the built environment of California since the late 1800s. Diane Favro, an architectural historian at UCLA’s Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning, has about 150 names of women in Southern California who were active before 1950. In the case of some, she is aware of 200 projects they’ve done.

“California was always more open to women in non-traditional roles, just because it was a frontier environment,” Favro said. “It was more what you could do, than your gender. Before there were architecture schools, anybody who wanted to build a house just built a house. They didn’t worry about education. Women did have their own incomes, and they didn’t think it inappropriate to build their own residences. So they were both patrons and architects early on in this state.

“But in the profession, the design of houses was looked down upon. The professional press of the 1880s said designing a house is not architecture, therefore it’s all right for women to do it. And of course women are associated with the home, so it’s appropriate that they do residential design. And in California there was always a tremendous boom in housing.”

Additionally, the movie and aerospace industries either trained women or made it possible for them to get into design fields. Women who served as set designers on a film might be asked to do interior design for actors’ studio bungalows or homes. During both World War I and World War II, women were trained in technical drafting and design at aeronautics firms.

“After the men came back, they were of course booted out,” Favro said, “but they had this skill. Almost all of the women I’ve been doing research on who have had substantial careers have been connected with war industries and/or movies.”

Favro believes women were lost or invisible to architectural history because history itself is so oriented around the “genius form-giver, held at the highest point,” she said.

“When women did create buildings, they often viewed themselves as working jointly with clients, contractors and users. The collaboration placed the emphasis on the process over the individual creator. And few women architects documented their ideas. Julia Morgan avoided self-promotion in an attempt to minimize her uniqueness in a male profession.”

Favro added that the focus on the genius designer comes in part from the way the profession was established. “Architects had always been seen as craftspeople. Then, to make the transition to a profession, they had to establish licensing, an elitism that proved they were more than just craftspeople. So the emphasis was placed more on the idea than the realization.

“It doesn’t matter if your building leaks if you have a great idea. And while a great idea is valuable, there are other valuable aspects of architecture that aren’t looked at. One reason they’re not looked at is they don’t photograph. Client satisfaction isn’t recorded very often. That doesn’t translate into a beautiful glossy photograph.

“A lot of designers now design consciously thinking about the angle of the picture for Progressive Architecture magazine. When they bring the photographer out, they say, ‘This is where you stand.’ ”

“I’ve worked for people before who have said, ‘I only care about the photograph. Get this part of the thing out of the photograph,’ ” Zimmerman concurred.

“There is a project in Irvine that got full coverage in all the professional magazines,” Favro said. “Beautiful photographs of the shapes. Of course you don’t have people in the photographs because they just muck it up.

“And when you go there, you’ll see it has long skylights. The secretaries sit down below. They bring in an umbrella, like a patio umbrella, because the light is so bad. One of them keeps it in the morning, and then she gives it to the woman at the other end, because it’s unusable space otherwise. But nobody ever talks about that.”

Favro said college architecture programs--where 40% of the students are women, but tenured women professors make up less than 2% of the faculty--generally operate on the same genius form-giver idea. “In the hierarchy, the top is the design instructor,” she said. “In most schools he has been teaching architecture for 20 years, and has built one project, his house.

“Yet, if you ask what his profession is, he would say, ‘I’m an architect.’ He’s probably not licensed, but he won’t say he’s a professor because the highest status in school is to be the designer, the mad, artistic eccentric in the studio situation who can say anything about anything,” she said.

“What I find inappropriate is that students have this idea that they’re going to go out and be Frank Lloyd Wright and design a house the way they want to design it,” Favro said. “In reality, the client’s not going to pay you to do that. So their visions of being an architect are thwarted because they have to do consensus work, and they’re not prepared for that. In fact, for the most part, consensus work is treated as not good because it detracts from the genius.”

“There’s rarely one person dictating, even in the superstar capacity,” Zimmerman said. “Frank Gehry has a vision, but it’s still a collaboration between the people that figure out how to make somebody’s crazy ideas actually buildable.

“Sometimes it’s easier for one person to get recognition,” she said. “But the reality is, any building probably has anywhere from five to 50 designers or technical staff working on it and making it happen. And that gets lost.”

Kathy Dowdell, an architect with Gensler and Associates who co-chaired the “Broadening the Discourse” conference, is one of many architects working on the renovation of the Beverly Hills Hotel. “The job is so big that we split it up into different zones. Each zone has a core team working on it. There’s a team working on the rooms, one on the bungalows, and I’m on the team that’s working on the main building,” she said.

Another team is working on an addition to the hotel that will be carved into the hillside underneath the existing building. Additionally, a bevy of consultants are involved with the interior design, landscaping, structure, mechanical work, and kitchen and laundry facilities.

At UC San Diego, a new architecture school is being built from scratch. Its dean is Adele Santos, the first female dean of an architecture school. “She does very beautiful, sort of genius kinds of projects when the client is that type,” Favro said. “She did a corporate villa outside of Tokyo that is stunning. But she’s also done low-cost housing, a completely different aesthetic.

“She is very interested in integrating everything. Instead of having a single design studio class, there might be the technology person as well as the designer and historian all together, all equal in this course. And there will be more hands-on projects. They are going to do housing projects in Tijuana, where they meet the people and see their living conditions and what their needs are. The school’s plans are exciting.”

“Out of four tenured positions, Santos gave two of them to women,” Hurst Mann said.

Homer said that when she arrived at the Design Center for this interview, a class was being led through the exhibit. “Now that class goes back into its classroom and out into the real world knowing that women don’t have to justify themselves,” she said.

“To have an exhibit like ‘Broadening the Discourse’ makes people incorporate into their everyday life the possibility of change. Once people are talking about the great show that they saw of women’s work, all the assumptions are out the window about whether women can do it in the first place. One of the thrilling things about having this kind of exhibit is, you begin to put the work into history where it belongs. It’s groundbreaking. The work is now there, and it can’t be denied.”