Female Architects

Julie Eizenberg

Julie Eizenberg is another example of a successful husband and wife team. Forming Koning Eizenberg Architects (KEA) in 1981 with Hank Koning, Eizenberg and her partner have refocused architects’ attention on the value and design potential of socially responsible projects by demonstrating architectural excellence in the design of many tight budget, affordable housing projects and community buildings. In their buildings, one is encouraged to discover space and architecture for oneself guided by compositional cues, landscape strategies, spatial sequence and scale change. The result is innovative architecture with a rare kind of humanism. For me, I have always been drawn to their work because unlike the work of many others, the solutions always seem to be expeditiously solved using common materials in a clever way instead of relying on bleeding edge technology and big budgets. I am a big fan of this firm.

Victoria Meyers

Victoria Meyers is a founding partner of hanrahanMeyers architects (hMa). Ms. Meyers has been the principal designer on a number of award winning projects in the firm whose projects include public institutional buildings, urban master plans, and award-winning residential projects. To make things even better, hanrahanMeyers architects maintains a blog – which was actually the very first architectural blog I started reading (and it’s a good one full of real architectural information – unlike this one).

Other Resources

National Center for Education Statistics:

Progress and Notable Achievements of Women in Architecture

1900 – There are thus far 39 formal 4-year architectural program woman graduates in the US.

1958 – Currently there are a total of 320 registered women architects, which equals to 1% of the total number of registered architects in the US.

1980 – M. Rosaria Piomelli heads the City College of New York College of Architecture, becoming the first woman dean of a US architecture school

1983 – The AIA begins collecting data on the gender and race of its members

1985 – Norma Merrick Sklarek is the first African-American woman in the US to form her own firm, Siegel-Sklarek-Diamond. She is also the first African-American woman to license in the US and to be inducted as a fellow of the AIA

1988 – The number of female licensed architects is approximately 2100 (about 4%).

1999 – The number of female licensed architects is approximately 30, 000 (about 15.5%), and the proportion of principals or partners who are women is 11.2%.

2001 – Of the 1, 038 tenured architecture school faculty members, 16% are female and 8% are ethnic minorities. For architecture undergraduates, 37% are female, 15% are ethnic minorities. For graduates, 34% are female and 20% are ethnic minorities

2002 – The proportion of female licensed architects is about 19.9%, and the proportion of principals or partners who are women is 20.7%.

2003 – From the 2003 AIA Firm Survey, 20% of registered architects are female

Collected from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with additional statistics courtesy of the Almanac of Architecture and Design 2004. Washington, D.C.: Greenway Communications, 2004.