Why Don't African American Women Make the Architectural Cannon?

I would love to write a comparable piece on Georgia “Louise” Brown or a similar article on Alma Fairfax Murray Carlisle to the one I just wrote on Le Corbusier. In fact, the previous two blogs I wrote were on these two spectacular women who took me off course of my trajectory because I am so inspired by what they did with their lives in the time that they had to shine on this earth.

The truth of the matter is that white men such as Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies Van Der Rohe and the like, make it into the cannon for Architecture because they are privileged white men. Those that do not make it into the cannon are Ibara women and men (from outside the United States); you will not find much of any research online on any of these heroes who have been the first to cross the Architecture finish line in their countries or ours. African American men and women are rarely cited either for their achievements, but if they are, don’t expect to find many sources.

While working on an assignment, I was researching African American female Architects, I could not find a single source online that listed any of the Architects on my specific list. I spent hours one day and even more another day looking. I could hardly complete the assignment. I could have found an African American male Architect listed, Wallace Rayfield (1871-1941), and for good reason. He built between 300 and 400 churches and houses. I wish I had time to talk about his amazing life and story. He is worthy of recognition and his documentation is indeed warranted. But the point was that looking up scholarly resources let me down.

I could not get access to University systems that held the resources and at SCAD we do not have access to those specific journals. I tried loopholes. Eventually, I tried looking under the google books resource, a less scholarly resource than most and found one author devoted to the subject, Wilson, Dreck Spurlock (ed). The book was entitled African American Architects: A Biographical Dictionary 1865-1945. This was a treasure trove for my assignment. I could even purchase the book online. While it contains information about many African American heroes in architecture, scarce information exists about each individual.

This is why if I wanted to write a biography about Frank Lloyd Wright or Frank Gehry or any architect that you could find on Instagram today, I could do so with ease. That is not the goal of this future architectural historian. The challenge is doing real research and finding out about the lives of African men and Women in history and even white women in history who have been left out of the cannon, the suffragettes for example, who were never paid the same as men and were never considered equal to men. The women who fought to support and raise families as single mothers in a man’s world knowing that the only way, they could do this successfully would be to do this as a professional Architect.

Let's give a shout of praise for all those unsung heroes who are not given much more than a paragraph or two or even a footnote such as the many Latinas I have tried to research on Architectural archives, such as Guadalupe Ibara. Let's praise the women who are retiring among us today, women like Ivenue Love Stanley who was the first African American Woman to attend and graduate from Georgia Institute of Technology in 1977 and has received much praise and recognition for her achievements in Architecture. She now designs solely for her ministry and is approaching retirement. I hope someday to be able to interview her for my Graduate Thesis and to hear and tell her story. Amazing.

Neoclassical Building designed by Wallace Rayfield