Sunday, October 3, 2010
For
more than twenty years, Inge Schaefer Horton has been researching
early women architects who lived and practiced at the same time
as Julia Morgan, the eminent California architect. Her passion
for discovering the careers and work of these lesser-known professionals
began when she and her friends mounted an exhibition on European
women architects at the San Francisco AIA (American Institute
of Architects.)
An architect Emily Williams (1869-1942). Please read more
about Emily William's life and work at
One of her friends remarked that the Europeans are lucky because
they have so many role models while we in the United States have
only Julia Morgan. Inge thought that it was highly unlikely that
Julia Morgan was the only female pursuing architecture and started
her search for her cohorts. Her research was full of surprises
and eventually led to her decision to write a book about these
amazing women.
From a data base with 300 names, she chose fifty women about whom
she had found sufficient information about their careers and work.
The book includes two chapters discussing a generalized account
about the education, careers and practice and respectively the
work of these women in architecture. The third part consists of
fifty biographies with listings of their work and sources of information
for each of them. Appendices present the names of architecture
graduates from the University of Berkeley, women who were licensed
by the State of California to practice architecture, women who
belonged to the Association of Women in Architecture and the AIA.
Inge Horton will talk about a few of the women she unearthed,
how they decided to become architects, which training was available
to them, how they found their first jobs and how they practiced,
how they combined marriage and motherhood with their career, and
how they spent their retirement years, and also show slides of
their work.
is a retired city
planner with a strong background in architecture who now devotes
her time to the research of women architects and preservation
issues in San Francisco. As a board member of SPEAK (Sunset Parkside
Education and Action Committee), Inge is the chairperson of a
committee focused on surveying potential historic resources in
a former neighborhood, the Oceanside, in the Outer Sunset. Funded
by a generous grant, the survey of about 510 houses built before
1925 is now under review by the San Francisco Planning Department.
Inge is a contributing author to Design on the Edge: A Century
of Teaching Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley,
1903-2003 (2010), two previous books on the architecture of
Berlin and Paris/Brussels, which were published in German in Switzerland,
and several articles. Her book will be published this fall
by McFarland and Company and might be available at the time of
the presentation.
