Join SAH/SCC for an afternoon with the two authors of Women Architects at Work: Making American Modernism (Princeton University Press, 2025), Mary Anne Hunting and Kevin D. Murphy, who will share their research.
In the decades preceding World War II, professional architecture schools enrolled increasing numbers of women, but career success did not come easily. Women Architects at Work tells the stories of the resilient and resourceful women who surmounted barriers of sexism, racism, and classism to take on crucial roles in the establishment and growth of Modernism across the United States.
The authors will describe how the Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture in Massachusetts evolved for the professional education of women between 1916 and 1942. While alumnae such as Eleanor Agnes Raymond, FAIA (1887-1989), Victorine du Pont Homsey, FAIA (1900-1998), and Sarah Pillsbury Harkness, FAIA (1914-2013), achieved some notoriety, others, like Elizabeth-Ann Campbell Knapp (c. 1924-2000) and Louisa Vaughan Conrad (1913-2003), have been largely absent from histories of Modernism. Examples from California also dot the landscape. Some SAH/SCC members will remember the work of Raymond and Harkness from the SAH/SCC Beyond the Bauhaus tour from the early 2000s.
Hunting is an architectural historian and the author of Edward Durell Stone: Modernism’s Populist Architect (W. W. Norton & Company, 2012). Murphy is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Humanities and professor and chair in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Vanderbilt University (Nashville). He is the author of several books, most recently Public Space/Contested Space: Imagination and Occupation (Routledge, 2021) with co-author Sally O’Driscoll.
Authors on Architecture: Hunting & Murphy on Women Architects—Sunday, October 11, 2026; 1-2:30 PM Pacific. Tickets required, $5. Pay via PayPal.
