Posted by vrcvanderbilt on Wednesday, April 25, 2018 in Conferences, Events, HART, Lectures, News, Student/Alumni, VRC.

Kevin Murphy, department chair and professor of history of art, and Mary Anne Hunting, Vanderbilt alumna (BA’80) and independent scholar, jointly presented a paper at the annual international conference of the Society of Architectural Historians held April 18-22 in Saint Paul, MN. Their talk, “The Professional Couples in Histories of American Modernism,” was presented in the session entitled “Life to Architecture: Uncovering Women’s Narratives.”

Married architect couples have failed to attract scholarly treatment recognizing their individual contributions and evaluating the effectiveness of the partnership, especially for women. Their paper examines the professional partnerships of modernist architect couples from the interwar and postwar periods to demonstrate that while the model of collaboration was central to modernism, its results were mixed.  Professional collaboration for women was often too socially and politically unfamiliar in the United States to lead to their widespread career success, nor could the work produced by a couple—as opposed to a singular (male) architect—be understood within modernist paradigms.

Many of the modern “masters” had wives who supported the work of their husbands and fostered their legacies, but working partnerships of married women and men architects were less common. The partnership of Aino Marsio-Aalto and Alvar Aalto has been considered an anomaly in the modernist movement and has attracted recent scholarly attention.  However, there were others just as significant, including Matthew and Stanislawa (Siasia) Sandecka Nowicki, whose collaboration critic Lewis Mumford described as “the closest of partnerships,” and the firm of Victorine and Samuel Homsey whose partnership produced well-published modernist as well as traditional buildings made all the more remarkable by their marriage and family.

Victorine Homsey was a graduate of the all-women Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, which produced many graduates who worked collaboratively with spouses. The Architects Collaborative was composed of Walter Gropius and seven other architects, including two married couples, Norman and Jean Fletcher and John and Sarah Harkness, who lived close to one another to facilitate their support of  each others’ professional and family responsibilities. Such personal innovations often produced formal experimentation as Murphy and Hunting demonstrate through an examination of several key works produced by each of the couples whose partnerships we will also evaluate.

Murphy and Hunting have previously worked together as scholars and architectural historians. Hunting received her doctorate from the City University of New York’s Graduate Center where Murphy was her advisor. Author of Edward Durell Stone: Modernism’s Populist Architect (W. W. Norton & Company, 2012), Hunting presented a lecture entitled “Edward Durell Stone, Modernist Architect: From Vanderbilt to Kennedy Center” as part of Vanderbilt’s Fall 2013 Homecoming events.

*Herbert Matter (1907-1984). Aino Marsio‐Aalto and Alvar Aalto in the Artek‐Pascoe showroom, New York, 1940. Photograph courtesy of Bard Graduate Center Gallery, New York.