6 Female Revolutionaries of 20th-Century Architecture You Need to Know

One of the women who began pioneering the architectural field before being able to cast a vote was Marion Mahony Griffin. Griffin was likely the first female licensed architect in the U.S. and spent much of her early career working for Frank Lloyd Wright, who was on his way to becoming one of the most famous architects of all time.

“Marion was essential to his practice, his illustrations, and the way he presented them, which became one of his defining characteristics.” Lavender says. “I learned that Marion developed that iconic style of drawing, inspired by Japanese art. It hit me that there are probably all kinds of women in the background that you don’t or didn’t hear about.”

Griffin didn’t get recognized for what is now known as her greatest work at Wright’s firm, known as the Wasmuth Portfolio, until much later. Architecture critic Vincent Scully referred to this portfolio as “one of the three most influential architectural treatises of the twentieth century” in his 1986 book, Studies and Executed Buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright, where she produced half of the portfolio’s content.

Griffin met her husband, Walter Burley Griffin, when they were both working together for Wright, and the pair went on to start a firm together that took them to three continents, most notably Australia. The couple designed communities, cafes, and theaters (shown here), and had big plans for the entire town of Canberra, the latter getting derailed due to bureaucratic red tape. Even so, the city was laid out very similarly to her original plans. It is believed that Griffin’s impressive talent and body of work aren’t well known in the States due to her shifting focus to projects in Australia and India in the second half of her career.

“Julia Morgan is one of most successful female architects,” Lavender says. “She started practicing architecture as a young woman, 48 years before she could even vote. She’s amazing because she was one of the few women of her day I can think of who had her own practice without a husband as a partner. Most other women, like Marion Mohony Griffin, married an architect. They would get absorbed into their husband's work, and he would get the credit for her work, whether the husband wanted it that way or not.

”After multiple attempts, Morgan was the first woman to attend architecture school at École des Beaux-Arts, and she built nearly 800 buildings throughout her 40-year career. The majority of her work was throughout California, and the most famous is Hearst Castle (its indoor pool is shown here). Morgan had been working on a few projects here or there for William Randolph Hearst’s mother, Phoebe, before her son became one of the architect’s long-term patrons. She spent 28 years carrying out Hearst’s visions of grandeur and worked on several additional residences for the businessman.

Her other works spanned from private homes to public recreational spaces, like the Berkeley City Club’s indoor pool and multiple YMCA locations.

“She did Oakland’s Chapel of the Chimes columbarium, which is such a transportive, amazing space with its Moorish influence and winding walkways,” Lavender says. “Every room is a little different, and it's a really ethereal space.”

Considered “the Rosa Parks of architecture,” Sklarek was one of the first black female architects in the U.S. and the first to be licensed in New York and California. Though Sklarek was born in Harlem and a graduate of Columbia’s architecture school, her career has humble beginnings.

Her first job out of college was at the New York City Department of Public Works, where she spent much of her time designing bathroom layouts—something she was overqualified for. Sklarek previously said she faced discrimination from her boss, likely because she was a young, black female architect who was licensed, all things he was not.

Despite a bad reference from her boss, Sklarek was able to get her foot in the door at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill before moving to California, where she became the first black female architect in a second state. Some of her most prominent works include the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, Terminal 1 at LAX, Fox Plaza (shown here), Pacific Design Center, and parts of the Mall of America. She also co-founded the largest woman-owned architecture firm in the U.S. at the time, Siegel Sklarek Diamond.

Lavender discovered Bo Bardi’s unique talent and works while on a trip to Brazil earlier this winter. The Italian-born architect was a contemporary of one of the fathers of modern architecture, Oscar Niemeyer. She and her husband, a renowned art critic, moved to Brazil after WWII, because they both found it hard to get work after the war.

The couple had been an active part of the Italian Resistance and hoped for a new beginning. Lavender says Bo Bardi struggled to develop her career in Brazil likely due to the time period she was living in and because she was a foreigner, but that didn’t stop her from creating some amazing things in her lifetime, like the Museum of Art Sao Paulo (shown here).

“It’s interesting because she completely breezed off the way you typically display art: She removed all the partitions of the inside of a space and created this open area where pieces of art are seemingly floating,” Lavender says. “She takes away the forced control of how you experience a museum and removes the order and context. You go in, painting to painting, standing in a long room, and it’s very unusual and an interesting way to see art. You can be walking along and pass a Goya and there's space and then a Van Gogh.”

Bo Bardi also built a glass house for her and her husband to live in at what was the edge of a rainforest at the time, now a neighborhood. Lavender says the building was rooted in her Italian Modernist upbringing, wrapped in the context of her new surroundings in Brazil. “She always strived to do that in her work—with an element of inventiveness and playfulness,” Lavender says.

After a rocky childhood during the Great Depression, during which she spent several years in an orphanage until her mother could afford to take care of her and her siblings again, Willis fought hard to pursue her dreams as a watercolor artist. She was introduced to Asian art and architecture by Gustav Ecke and European art and frescoes by Jean Charlot.

Though she had no formal architectural training, it became a natural next step after forays into interior, industrial, and product design. Some of Willis’s greatest achievements include pioneering adaptive reuse construction of preexisting historic buildings in order to revitalize urban areas, as shown in San Francisco’s Vine Terrace Apartments; founding CARLA, a computerized program to help with large-scale planning and design; building one of the first disability-friendly residences, which came long before the Americans with Disabilities Act; and her crowning achievement, the San Francisco Ballet Association Building.

Willis is still alive today, and most recently was the first female recipient of the AIA Gold Medal, its highest honor. She also became a filmmaker at 80 years old with A Girl is a Fellow Here: 100 Women in the Studio of Frank Lloyd Wright in 2008 and has produced four more films since.

Denise Scott Brown is a modernist icon for the ages, eschewing the movement's minimalist roots and incorporating multiculturalism for truly one-of-a-kind designs. The architect, author, urban planner, and educator spent most of her years sharing a firm, Venturi Scott Brown with her husband, Robert Venturi.

The formidable architect has done everything from making plans for cities, like Miami Beach and Memphis, to designing buildings for world-famous universities and museums like the Seattle Art Museum shown here. Her research in urban planning and architecture has forever impacted the industry, helping to define the postmodern movement.

Scott Brown was most recently in the news when two Harvard students started a petition to get her honored for the Pritzker Prize she was excluded from when her husband and partner, Robert Venturi was its recipient in 1991. It received signatures from multiple prize laureates, including Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaus. While she was denied the prize a second time, she notably said the petition was the better prize than the Pritzker anyway.