Date:
Location: Chicago , United States Illinois Institute of Technology College of Architecture, S.R. Crown Hall Lower LevelContact: SAH Women in Architecture Affiliate Group Council
Email: sokolina@sbcglobal.net
Website: https://sahwomeninarchitectureaffiliategroup.sah.hcommons.org/?p=1856
The SAH Women in Architecture Affiliate Group (SAH WiA AG) is pleased to announce our upcoming event, Women’s Agency in Architecture as a Professional Powerhouse, sponsored by SAH | SAH WiA AG, as part of 1x1 CHICAGO 2025: Celebrating Women in Architecture. Please visit SAH WiA AG website: https://sahwomeninarchitectureaffiliategroup.sah.hcommons.org/?p=1856 and the 1x1 CHICAGO event website: https://arch.iit.edu/events/1x1-chicago-celebrating-women-in-architecture.
IIT S.R. Crown Hall Lower Level
August 13, 2025 | 11:00 AM.
Goals & Objectives
SAH WiA AG Program Highlights
The SAH Women in Architecture Affiliate Group is thankful for support of this event to Society of Architectural Historians and to Anne Hill Bird, SAH Director of Engagement and Outreach, to Illinois Institute of Technology College of Architecture, to Kristin Jones, PhD, Curator of 1X1 Chicago, IIT Alumna and Adjunct Assistant Professor and founder of Studio Integra, Ltd, and IIT Professor Hon. FRAIC Michelangelo Sabatino, to Dr. Cynthia Vranas Olsen, Director of the Mies van der Rohe Society, and to Kimberly Soss, Director of the Graham Resource Center and Architecture Librarian.
August 13, Wednesday
1. SAH WiA AG Panel: Women's Agency in Architecture as a Professional Powerhouse. S.R. Crown Hall Lower Level, from 11:00 AM
Description
Today written architectural histories lack consistency in scholarship and readings on the contribution of women to the built environment. Yet the discipline is transforming, broadening interest in illuminating historical truth of women’s achievements challenge previous assumptions created through incomplete records. Building upon the groundwork and celebrating five years of the Women in Architecture Affiliate Group of the Society of Architectural Historians, this conversation aims to explore women’s agency in architecture as a professional powerhouse beyond geographic or chronological boundaries, to illuminate what is of essence for the discipline today, argue about current evolution of gender studies on relevant subjects, uncover inspiring or curious settings, common and uncommon careers and discuss how women’s storytelling will enrich critical architectural histories. By emphasizing settings for women in architecture across borders, professional networks and practices that provide women with opportunities to prosper, compete with others, and to make architecture, this conversation is critical to bridging professional readings and creating a foundation for growth of women’s organizations and architectural practices.
Chairs:
Anna Sokolina is an architect, historian, and curator, Founder and Chair of SAH Women in Architecture Affiliate Group, Advisory Board member of H-SHERA Network, IAWA Honorary Advisor, and principal of IARTFORUM. Dr. Sokolina served as session chair and speaker at 90 conferences and meetings, received 18 grants and recognitions, authored over 100 publications, her 105 artworks are held in 23 public and private collections. Research focus: Warfare footprint as the origin of utopian constructs; women’s agency and holistic trajectories of global transitions in architecture. Recent publications include The Routledge Companion to Women in Architecture (editor, 2021, 2024), “Women in Architecture: Contested Legacies” (2025), “Global Networks” (2025), “Modernist Topologies: The Goetheanum in-Building” (2024), “Breaking the Silence” (2021, 2024), Milka Bliznakov Scholar Report (2019), “Biology in Architecture: The Goetheanum Case Study” (2016, 2019), Architecture and Anthroposophy (editor, 2001, 2010, e 2019).
Rebecca Siefert is an Associate Professor of Art History at Governors State University in University Park, Illinois, and the Associate Chair of the SAH Women in Architecture Affiliate Group. Rebecca earned her PhD in Art History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and taught for many years across the CUNY system. Her scholarship centers on women in architecture from the late 1960s through the 1980s, most recently the impact of women residents and activists on Chicago public housing. She has contributed to the Routledge Companion to Women in Architecture and wrote a monograph on the contemporary architect and artist Lauretta Vinciarelli, published in 2020.
Speakers
Anne Hill Bird, Society of Architectural Historians, Director of Engagement and Outreach, joined SAH in Fall of 2007, after many years in “architecture-adjacent” positions at the Art Institute of Chicago, The Chicago Architecture Foundation, The Kenilworth Assembly Hall, and the Automatic Meter Reading Association.
Michelangelo Sabatino trained as an architect, preservationist, and historian in Canada, Italy, and the USA. He has recently been elevated to Honorary Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada. He is Professor of Architectural History and Heritage at IIT’s College of Architecture where he directs the PhD program and is the inaugural John Vinci Distinguished Research Fellow. His publications and exhibitions examine the multifaceted contributions of architects and builders to modern architectures in the Americas and Europe. Sabatino’s first book, Pride in Modesty: Modernist Architecture and the Vernacular Tradition in Italy (2011), won multiple awards, including the Society of Architectural Historians’ Alice Davis Hitchcock Award. More recent co-authored books include Canada: Modern Architectures in History (2016), Avant-Garde in the Cornfields: Architecture, Landscape, and Preservation in New Harmony (2019), Making Houston Modern: The Life and Architecture of Howard Barnstone (2020), and Carlo Mollino: Architect and Storyteller (2021). Sabatino co-authored a number of books related to Chicago since arriving to live and work in the midwestern city: Modern in the Middle: Chicago Houses 1929–1975 (2020), Mies in His Own Words: Complete Writings, Speeches, and Interviews (2024), and The Edith Farnsworth House. Architecture, Preservation, Culture (2024). His forthcoming book is Building, Breaking, and Rebuilding: The Illinois Institute of Technology Campus, Mies, and Chicago’s South Side (2025).
Margaret Birney Vickery, BA Oberlin College 1985, MA Stanford University 1987, PhD Stanford University 1993. Meg is Senior Lecturer and Undergraduate Program Director at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the History of Art and Architecture Department. In addition to teaching surveys in Architectural and Art History, she has developed two new classes, ‘Women in Architecture’, and ‘Nature and the Built Environment: A history of Sustainable Architecture.’ She is the author of Buildings for Bluestockings: The Architecture and Social History of Women’s Colleges in Late Victorian England (University of Delaware Press. 1999) and Landscape and Infrastructure: Reimagining the Pastoral Paradigm for the Twenty-First Century (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020) as well as several book chapters. Her most recent research has centered on the work of the landscape architect, Lady Marjory Allen which appears in Women in Scandinavian Landscape Architecture: Building Collaborative and Transnational Feminist Histories, edited by Svava Riesto and Henriette Steiner and published by de Gruyter Press (2024).
Mary Anne Hunting, architectural historian received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center, M.A. from Parsons School of Design, and B.A. from Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Edward Durell Stone: Modernisms Populist Architect (W. W. Norton, 2013) and the co-author of Women Architects at Work: Making American Modernism (2025), published by Princeton University Press. She also is a contributor to The Routledge Companion to Women in Architecture (2021).
Shelley E. Roff is a Professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio. As author of publications such as “Did Women Design or Build Before the Industrial Age?” (Routledge, 2021) and “Appropriate to Her Sex? Women’s Participation on the Construction Site in Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” (Palgrave, 2010), her research is centered on Women and the Built Environment before 1800, the title of her forthcoming edited volume with Routledge. Dr. Roff’s research has been supported by an NEH Faculty Award, the Bogliasco Study Center for the Arts and Humanities, and the Fulbright Foundation.
Yan Wencheng. Dr. Yan received her PhD degree from the University of California Santa Barbara, where she was trained as a historian of art and architecture of modern China, with a broad interest in the history of 20th-century architecture and urbanism, Asian art and architecture, and cultural studies. Her doctoral dissertation, entitled Writing Modernity: Constructing a History of Chinese Architecture, 1920-1949, examines the historiography of Chinese architecture at its inception, when both discourse and practice were dictated by the quest for the modern. She focuses on the issue of modernizing Chinese architecture and the vernacular landscape of the city through the lens of a vibrant popular discourse that was later subsumed in the standard history of Chinese architecture. Dr. Yan’s inquiry is carried over to contemporary China’s transformation in the built environment, where she sees the wholesale demolition of historic urban centers as directly linked to the historian’s inability to articulate the vernacular. Aware of insufficient communication between scholars working mainly in western languages and those working primarily with Chinese materials, she also translates important texts from Chinese for English-speaking audiences to facilitate greater scholarly understanding and collaboration.
Presentations
How a hallway bathroom led to a lifetime of architectural engagement.Anne Hill Bird.
Every person here has a spark moment when they realized the built environment matters. As a completely shy first grader at an Evanston, IL local and very traditional elementary school, I was loath to draw attention to myself. One day early in first grade (just 6 years old), I was too shy to ask to visit the facilities outside of the regular twice-a-day visits down the hallway, and nature eventually had its way with me. Beyond the resulting teasing, I was completely mortified, traumatized, and wanted to be swallowed up into a hole in the floor. Several weeks later, my parents announced that we were moving to a larger home in Winnetka, IL. My new school, Crow Island School, I was told, had a bathroom in each classroom, and you did not have to ask permission—you could just get up out of your seat anytime you wanted. To my first-grade mind, that was sheer relief. Do you have any idea how much of a difference that classroom detail made to a small, shy child, fearful of any notice whatsoever? That was the beginning of my architectural awareness, as visceral as it was revelatory.
The Three Lives of The Edith Farnsworth House.Michelangelo Sabatino
Join us as IIT architectural historian and preservationist Professor Michelangelo Sabatino discusses his new book The Edith Farnsworth House: Architecture, Preservation, Culture (2024). Sabatino’s book reveals the three different “lives” of the Farnsworth’s history beginning with the commissioning of the house by client/patron Dr. Edith Farnsworth with Mies van der Rohe as architect followed by two additional “lives” centered around ownership/stewardship by Lord Peter and Hayat Palumbo and the National Trust for Historic Preservation/Landmarks Illinois.
The Business of Childhood: Play and Nature in the work of Marjory Allen. Margaret Birney Vickery
Lady Marjory Allen was a landscape architect and a founding member of the Institute of Landscape Architects in England. An overview of her life raises the question of what it means to be a landscape architect, when the bulk of her career consists of more ephemeral work on behalf of children. Running in the same circles as British landscape architects Sylvia Crowe and Brenda Colvin, Allen’s path followed a very different trajectory. Examining this closely, illuminates a series of paradoxical linkages exposing historical attitudes towards gender, nature, and marginalized communities that continue to reverberate in debates about nature, climate, public health, and access to the outdoors. As we uncover and recognize women’s contributions to the built environment and designed landscape, recent feminist scholarship has opened the door to new ways of understanding women’s participation in the workplace. Revealing the constraints of family and personal circumstances of an individual designer can help us contextualize the career and output of women like Marjory Allen.
Women Architects at Work.Mary Anne Hunting
In the decades preceding World War II, professional architecture schools enrolled increasing numbers of women, but career success did not come easily. The new book, 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 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, Victorine du Pont Homsey, and Sarah Pillsbury Harkness achieved some notoriety, others like Elizabeth-Ann Campbell Knapp and Louisa Vaughan Conrad have been largely absent from histories of Modernism. These innovative practitioners capitalized on social, educational, and professional ties to achieve success and used architecture to address social concerns, including how modernist ideas could engage with community and the environment. Some joined women-led architectural firms while others partnered with men or contributed to Modernism as retailers of household furnishings, writers and educators, photographers and designers, or fine artists.
The Silent Body in the History of Architecture.Shelley E. Roff
Once a silent body in history, women who designed and built architecture, interiors, and landscapes from the mid-nineteenth century to present times are now celebrated around the world in publications, digital media, and exhibitions such as this IAWA 1x1 Chicago. Yet, one should ask, why did we, as researchers, stop reaching back in history at the mid-nineteenth century? In this talk, I will query this point of resistance, if not outright blockade, to the investigation of women who designed and built for a millennium before the modern era. I will argue that, more so than the dictates of premodern male authors coloring and obscuring women’s agency in history, it was twentieth-century beliefs about women’s powerlessness that led to a form of cultural blindness – and to a modern-era silence – about the earlier creation of the human-made built environment. In homage to the 1x1 exhibition, I will build this argument through the story – and brief historiography – of one woman and one sketch of one villa built in late seventeenth-century Italy. Our protagonist, Plautilla Bricci, renowned in her time as painter and architect in Rome, and yet forgotten in modern historiography, serves as a bridge from the past to the current literature on women in architecture I will present Plautilla as an archetype of the new silent body unfurling within the history of architecture: a collective body of historical women around the world designing, building, and offering their criticism of the built environment through the ages.
Time and Tide: The Illusion of Architectural Innovation Yan Wencheng
“You think that old architecture is really good; pleasing to the eye, and comfortable and pleasant for living, but you cannot afford to say that lest others think you are going against the historical tide. So, you say it circuitously: old architecture really should be abolished, but the glazed tiles are worth preserving.” So wrote the Chinese architect and architectural historian Lin Huiyin in 1933. This informal talk will examine architectural innovation through examples of design in modern and contemporary China. By bringing attention to the issue of formal innovation, sometimes taken for granted at face value, the author invites the audience to reflect on the complex relationship between innovation and the larger historic forces at work. | Lin Huiyin, “On architecture,” Shenbao, ziyoutan October 12, 1933 (21).
2. SAH WiA AG Library Gifting Event: Books by SAH WiA AG Panelists
With Kimberly Soss, Director of the Graham Resource Center (GRC) and Architecture Librarian, and IIT Professor Kristin Jones, PhD, Curator of 1X1 Chicago, IIT Alumna and founder of Studio Integra, Ltd.
Description
In celebration of SAH WIA AG event: Panelists gifts and Introductions of books they authored/edited, to the Graham Resource Center at IIT College of Architecture. “Located in the heart of Crown Hall, the Graham Resource Center (GRC) offers space, collections, technology and services supporting the intellectual and cultural life of the College of Architecture.” https://arch.iit.edu/graham-resource-center.
Reference List
Mary Anne Hunting and Kevin D. Murphy. Women Architects at Work: Making American Modernism. Princeton University Press, 2025. Women Architects at Work | Princeton University Press.
Mary Anne Hunting. Edward Durell Stone: Modernism's Populist Architect. W. W. Norton & Company, 2012. Edward Durell Stone: Modernism's Populist Architect: Hunting, Mary Anne: 9780393733013: Amazon.com: Books
Michelangelo Sabatino. The Edith Farnsworth House: Architecture, Preservation, Culture. Monacelli, 2024. The Edith Farnsworth House | Architecture | Store | Phaidon
Rebecca Siefert.Into the Light: The Art and Architecture of Lauretta Vinciarelli. Lund Humphries, 2021. Into the Light – Lund Humphries
Anna Sokolina, ed. The Routledge Companion to Women in Architecture. Routledge, (2021,) 2024. The Routledge Companion to Women in Architecture - 1st Edition – Anna Sokolina
Anna Sokolina, ed. Architecture and Anthroposophy. KMK, 2001 (2010, 2019). www.iartforum.com
Anna Sokolina. Poems. Telex, 1998. Sokolina, Anna P. Architectural Collection A Guide to the Anna P. Sokolina Architectural Collection, 1924-2019 Ms.2002.051
Margaret Birney Vickery. Landscape and Infrastructure: Reimagining the Pastoral Paradigm for the Twenty-First Century. Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Landscape and Infrastructure: Reimagining the Pastoral Paradigm for the Twenty-First Century: Margaret Birney Vickery: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
3. The Campus Tour for SAH Women in Architecture AG in celebration of 1X1 Chicago
Hosted by Dr. Cynthia Vranas Olsen, Principal of Olsen | Vranas Design and Build, Director of the Mies van der Rohe Society, SAH member
August 14, Thursday, from 10:00 AM
Tour of the Charnley Persky House in celebration of 1X1 Chicago SAH Women in Architecture Affiliate Group Hosted by Anne Hill Bird, SAH Director of Engagement and Outreach
