architecture

Marion Manley: Miami's First Woman Architect

priyanka — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 12:00:00 +0000

Marion Manley was not merely Miami’s first female architect, she also played a crucial role in the area’s planning. Responsible for much of the design of the University of Miami—dubbed “the first modern university”—Manley was also a pioneer in what we now call “green building” and ecological preservation.

Authors Catherine Lynn and Carie Penabad, both professors of architecture at the University of Miami—where Manley spent much of the 1940s designing a wide variety of buildings, from housing for veterans to student worship centers—have done much to bring Manley’s legacy back into the spotlight. This beautiful book, complete with photos and artist renderings of the buildings Manley designed, also includes technical details that architects and design-buffs will appreciate. Above all, however, it’s an overdue tribute to a woman who accomplished so much so far ahead of her time.

Throughout most of her career, though she was a groundbreaking professional, Manley’s work was largely eclipsed by lower-ranking men in her field. She got little credit for the work she did—which was impressive not just because it was a first for her gender, but for their architectural and technical merit—and what credit she got, she had to fight for. Working into her eighties (Manley died in 1984 at age ninety), Manley also served on numerous state and national boards and commissions, donated her design work for charitable causes, and did professional work to support the war efforts in WWI and WWII.

Though I enjoyed the book, I would have loved to have read more about Manley’s personal life. The authors throw out teasers now and then (her “cussing out” of incompetent contractors, and telling interviewers that she was “a hedonist” in her eighties both come to mind), but for the most part stick to the straightforward—and at times, dry—account of her work. Nevertheless, it is a step toward restoring Manley’s contributions to their rightful place in design history.

There is precious little to be found about Manley on the internet; most of what does exist is related to this book. Let us hope, then, that this tome on her body of professional work spurs a renewed interest in Manley and her accomplishments.

Written by: M.L. Madison, December 10th 2010

Unbounded Practice: Women and Landscape Architecture in the Early Twentieth Century

admin — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 16:02:00 +0000

By Thaisa Way

University of Virginia Press

Female hands are all over America's landscape; you just need to know where to look for them. In Unbounded Practice, author Thaisa Way can direct your eye.

Look to the Memorial Quadrangle at Yale, the grounds of Princeton, or a number of botanical gardens and astronomical observatories to see the legacy of Beatrix Jones Farrand (1872-1959). Recall a youthful American pilgrimage to Disneyland—if you are among the number who has made one—to know the work of Ruth Shellhorn (1909-2005). Stroll past any working or middle-class apartment complex designed with a central, neatly-gardened courtyard to see the lasting influence of Marjorie Sewell Cautley (1891-1954), who designed such courtyards with the needs of family members—particularly mothers—in mind; not only can natural beauty be observed from every dwelling, but so can children at play.

Way's concern in Unbounded Practice is not just that significant contributions to landscape architecture have been made by women, but that these contributions have been largely forgotten by current practitioners and require a restorative historical account. An irony that emerges in Way's recounting of women's contribution to the formation of the discipline—critical in its early stages—is that the public conceptions of womanhood were both an inlet for women to practice the discipline and an impetus for them to be disassociated from it. At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, pursuits associated with horticulture, such as gardening and botany, were considered appropriate for the sex viewed as intrinsically closer to the earth than its masculine counterpart. This allowed women to enter the discipline with minimal, or no public rebuke, pursuing architectural approaches to design as well as employing acquired botanical knowledge often superior to that of their male peers. As landscape architecture moved towards an alignment with architecture at the expense of being associated with the "craft" of gardening, women were marginalized in the discipline.

Way's history is both a history of women and a history of the formation of a discipline—the key of the book's strength—and her passion as a scholar is evident in the pains she takes in detailing both. A lay reader, or perhaps even a beginning student, may benefit from reading Way's conclusion before embarking on the book proper. There, Way's passion is evident in tone as well as content, and the relatively brief reflection on a hefty scholarly endeavor reads as an accessible orientation to the modern challenges the discipline has faced.

Ten color plates are featured in the book, as well as a wealth of illuminating photographs of work by women pioneering practitioners, slides from lectures delivered by women, period advertisements, and—thrillingly—meticulous plans and client sketches drafted by the women Way profiles. While Unbounded Practice could easily be sourced for perspective on American history, women's history, class structure, ecology, urban studies, fine arts, architecture, and education, one can't help but imagine Way writing this book thinking of the reader who would crack the spine at one such architectural-botanical plan, magnifying glass in hand, connecting back to one of the women who would draft herself a practice.

Written by: Kaja Katamay, July 9th 2010

Woman as Design: Before, Behind, Between, Above, Below

admin — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 18:34:00 +0000

By Stephen Bayley

Conran

Stephen Bayley’s Woman as Design is a large, and fairly heavy, coffee table book that examines how a woman’s body has inspired and changed the world. A woman’s body has been used as the inspiration (whether conscious or unconscious) for a myriad of products including cars, soda bottles, and buildings.

Divided into two parts, part one focuses on the sexualized and eroticized parts of a woman’s body and dress in a more historical context. Part two moves to the outside world and the changes and trends that advertising, fashion, movies, cosmetics have undergone through time in relationship to women’s bodies. The general lesson is that those in power have shaped and changed women’s bodies, sometimes literally in terms of corsets and bras. Women are, in turn, seen as sex objects to be desired and claimed or virgin Madonnas who are sacred and untouchable.

The organization seems a bit convoluted, and it could have been made more concise. With the seemingly non-linear direction of the book, it’s one you can pick up and flip to a page at random, but it isn’t one you sit down and read through. Woman as Design is also not a book that you pick up as a scholar looking to further your knowledge on the topic, but it does provide some great illustrations that really help prove Bayley’s points.

Woman as Design is filled with large color photographs, some of which are reproductions of famous paintings and sculptures, like the Venus de Milo. Quotes from historical figures, actresses, designers and architects accompany many of the photos. There is a stunning set of images of a woman using her breasts as a type of performance art, and I have never seen breasts move like that before. Since many of the images involve nudity and close-ups of various parts of the female form, the book is not recommended for young people without accompanying text and context.

Bayley’s text does not necessarily present any new or radical ideas on how women’s lives and bodies have been shaped by culture, but it does make the idea easily accessible.

Written by: Kristin Conard, January 2nd 2010

The Decoration of Houses (The Original 1897 Edition)

admin — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 19:34:00 +0000

By Edith Wharton, Ogden Codman

Rizzoli Press

Amidst today’s seemingly endless supply of domestic guides and treatises on interior decoration, Edith Wharton might be surprised that her The Decoration of Houses (co-authored with architect Ogden Codman, Jr.) would still be as relevant and necessary as it is a century after its first publication. Long before “simplicity” and “classic” became catchwords for branding, Wharton took a public stand against the bland, trite excesses of Victorian décor in America. Favoring the considered, informed and complex processes of design rooted in architectural principles, her graceful humility was matched only by her assertive plea against the contemporary dominance of thoughtless, conspicuous consumption visible in New York society. As she determinately decreed: “According to the creed of the modern manufacturer, you have only to combine certain ‘good’ to obtain a certain style.”

Often associated with the frivolity connected to historical descriptions of femininity, this volume might be a surprise for those who prefer to view Wharton as a New York literary powerhouse. While her 40 books in 40 years (many of which were devoted to travels through European residences and gardens) are a testament to the force of her pen, it’s the themes of beauty, pleasure, societal indulgence, cultural education and cosmopolitanism in America’s modernity that make her analysis, and eventual ruling on the importance of design and space, a necessary extension of her literary thought. As she aptly begins her historical and aesthetic analysis, “Rooms may be decorated in two ways: by a superficial application of ornament totally dependent of structure, or by means of those architectural features which are part of the organism of every house, inside as well as out.” And it’s through these sixteen chapters that reflect on everything from the front door to the dining room to bric-a-brac that she offers readers a glimpse at the historic function of furnishings, as well as her claims about taste, beauty and the impact of residential design.

The Italian, French and British capacity for decorating in accord with the Grecian edict of “wise moderation,” so admired by Wharton, is illustrated by black and white plates. The illustrations also reveal that the author’s penchant for “classic” beauty wasn’t about recreating kitschy historic facades or stoic sparseness. Rather, a considered pleasure seems to be her goal as she concludes, “There is no absolute perfection, there is no communicable ideal; but much that is empiric, much that is confused and extravagant, will give way before the application of principles based on common sense and regulated by the laws of harmony and proportion.” True to her appreciation for sincerity in the application of decorative principles, readers can see the realization of her rules if they visit the Mount, a 113-acre Lenox estate designed by Wharton in 1902.

Recreated by Rizzoli using photographs of the original 1897 pressing, the only change made by the publishers in this edition is the use of the original interior dust jacket as the model for the printed design that now covers the book. But I don’t think Wharton would mind, as she truly believed that design was about the external reflection and illumination of what’s on the inside.

Written by: Joanne Molina, July 11th 2007