The new website "50 Pioneering Women of American Architecture” has been launched by the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, a group that seeks to elevate women in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) professions.
The website https://pioneeringwomen.bwaf.org presents historically significant women practitioners as selected by a jury of prominent architectural historians and based on criteria of the highest standards, according to Cynthia Phifer Kracauer, AIA, executive director of the foundation.
The inspiring and educational website, ideal for practitioners and students alike, has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the developer Forest City and dozens of architects and design firms. (See the full list below.) It started in 2012 with two women, Wanda Bubriski and Beverly Willis, who wanted to uncover the work that American women architects had done during the early decades of the twentieth century.
As stated by BWAF, "Within the context of broad social changes from 1848 to the adoption of the Nineteenth Constitutional Amendment, women have risen from the status of chattel to almost full participation in contemporary politics and society. This online collection will benefit architectural scholars, historians, educators, students, practitioners, and the general public."
The Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation's website "Pioneering Women of American Architecture” has been edited by by co-directors Mary McLeod and Victoria Rosner, and it serves as a special collection within the Dynamic National Archive of Women in Architecture. "The Collection of Women of 20th-Century American Architecture is a special, peer reviewed, juried collection to be housed in the Dynamic National Archive, preserving the legacies of approximately 50 historically significant women—architects, designers, critics, curators and policymakers, born before 1940—who contributed to creating the American built environment between 1880 and 1980,” say McLeod and Rosner.
Donations to this long-term project can be made here: http://www.bwaf.org/portfolio/pioneering-women-of-american-architecture/.
