The Women Who Shaped Mid-Century Modern Architecture and Industrial Design

Architecture and industrial design have historically been male-dominated fields. But today, more and more women are joining those fields; in fact, 43% of new architects are women. Following are brief profiles of some of the women who’ve opened doors for the female architects and designers of today!

Women have almost always faced roadblocks in joining professions that have been historically male-dominated – and the architecture and design world is no exception. Groundbreaking female pioneers in the business have helped open doors for the female architects and designers of today.

Louise Blanchard Bethune was the first woman to work as a professional architect in the United States, opening her own practice in 1881, which by the turn of the century had become one of the most prominent and busiest architectural firms in Buffalo, New York. Famously, Julia Morgan, a rare female architect in the early 20th century, designed William Randolph Hearst’s sprawling San Simeon Castle in California.

Other women established themselves and became influential in the design movements that coalesced and evolved into what we know today as mid-century modern. In Europe and America, these intrepid, talented, and visionary artists established careers that defied the expectations that society and their male colleagues had of women at that time.

Eileen Gray

Eileen Gray was born in Ireland in 1878 and studied art at the Slade School, now known as the SLC Slade School of Fine Art, in London, graduating in 1902. The school was somewhat notorious for its “bohemian” approach to education, especially for women, who made up more than half of Gray’s class, which was extremely rare at the time. Gray graduated with a finely honed, avant-garde aesthetic, which she immediately brought to bear with her work in interior and furniture design, and then architecture.

After graduation, Gray moved to Paris where she quickly made a name for herself as a practitioner of revolutionary new theories of design and construction, working with titans of the modern movement, including Le Corbusier. She created chrome, steel, and glass furniture which she used in her interiors, styles which remain popular to this day.

Her Bibendum chair was influenced by the Michelin Man, the tire company’s famous logo. With a fully upholstered seat, back, and armrests, it is supported by a polished chrome-plated tubular steel base.

Though a talented architect, she only designed three houses, one of which has remained influential since the day it was built. The modernist Villa, E1027, in Côte d’Azur, France, became the home of Le Corbusier, who infuriated Gray by painting erotic murals on the large white walls, and Gray never forgave him for “defacing” her work.

Examples of her furniture and decorative arts, including screens and lamps, are included in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Marion Mahony Griffin

While Eileen Gray was breaking new ground in Europe, an American contemporary, Marion Mahony Griffin, was struggling to assert herself in America.

Born in 1871, Griffin found work with a male cousin, an architect in Chicago, before joining the office of a rising young architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. In fact, she was his only employee for a fair amount of time.

Even though she obtained her own architectural license in 1898, her work with Wright primarily consisted of distinctive, beautifully rendered architectural illustrations, the images through which most people are familiar with his work. However, as was his lifelong practice, Wright took full credit.

An infamous cad, Wright abandoned his wife and family for a married woman in 1909, moving with her to Europe and closing his Chicago studio. In a gesture more of irresponsibility than generosity – as Wright was publicly dismissive of Griffin’s work throughout her career – he handed his unfinished projects over to her, and Griffin established a practice of her own.

Though not prolific, she designed public buildings, churches, and houses that expanded upon the Prairie style that Wright himself celebrated. Her projects included a housing development, as well as several large homes that still exist today.

After her marriage to another architect in 1911, Griffin worked mostly in India and Australia for almost 50 years and obtained some international prominence, though she remained little known in America. However, as a working architect, she was a woman ahead of her time. Fortunately, a fair amount of her work remains today – a testament to her vision and talent, and her place in the trajectory of what we now know as mid-century modern.

Florence Knoll

Florence Knoll, born in Michigan in 1917 and co-founder of the influential furniture company that still bears her name, was introduced to the concepts of streamlined modernism early on. A close school friend was the father of industrial design, Eero Saarinen. After earning a degree in architecture, she worked with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in Chicago and began moonlighting for a furniture company founded by Hans Knoll, whom she later married.

The couple were prescient, assuming that the modern architecture taking root in America after the war would require similarly modern furnishings. The newly reformed Knoll Associates was established in 1947, with Florence as head of the interior design department.

Knoll replaced traditional interior and furniture designs with glass or marble walls, recessed lights, and low-slung, streamlined, and understated furniture, all within an aesthetic that stressed functionality, simplicity, and elegance. She was more than a design force, though, becoming a dynamic and innovative business leader as well. After Hans was killed in a car accident in 1955, Florence took over the company, running it until 1960, when she retired as president and became director of design.

Under her direction, Knoll produced iconic office and residential furniture that remains popular today. Vintage originals are much sought after, but the company still produces iconic pieces such as the Womb chair and ottoman, the Saarinen Tulip table, and the Barcelona chair.

Charlotte Perriand

French-born Charlotte Perriand began a career as an interior designer after graduating from the École de l’Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs in 1925. Like Gray, she worked in Le Corbusier’s studio, and in the late ’20s, her own sleek, futuristic furnishings began attracting attention.

She created a sensation with her Tokyo Chaise Lounge. It sits on a four-legged base, and when it is removed and set on a flat surface, it smoothly rocks. It was ergonomic before that word even became widely known, and it was initially unpopular because of its formal simplicity, but as modernism rose, so did the chair’s profile – and sales!

Stylistically, the chair presupposed the six years that she spent in Japan in the late 1940s, which heavily influenced her aesthetic afterward. Her work then demonstrated a Zen-like simplicity and embrace of exclusively natural materials.

Her “masterpiece” as a public work is the Arcs Ski Resort in the French Alps, with units stacked like a polychromatic bookcase tumbling up the side of the mountain. Much more privately, the small chalet she designed and built for herself in 1961 demonstrates the impact that her Asian sojourn had on her work.

Nestled into the side of a mountain, the building is deeply connected to nature, and the almost exclusive use of natural materials, including stone, wood, and bamboo, creates an environment that is exquisitely simple yet warm, nurturing, and safe. Demand for Perriand’s work remained high until her death at age 96 in 1999. Her self-confidence and surety about her own work remained high, too, often refusing to design the interiors or provide furniture for buildings designed by anyone other than herself.

Ray Eames

Ray Eames is one of the most influential names in postwar industrial and furniture design, though largely as a working partner with her husband, Charles. Even though the collaboration was highly public, and Charles always acknowledged his wife as his creative and intellectual equal, the social norms of the time – and Ray’s own quiet personality and reticence – kept her somewhat in the background.

Born in 1912 in California, she studied art and, after graduating from a progressive liberal arts college, was a working artist until the late 1930s. When she married Charles in 1941, they began a partnership that lasted until his death in 1978. Together they designed a wide range of furniture and other products, including toys.

Their best-known pieces are probably the Eames chair, which they developed with another name that frequently comes up from that period, Eero Saarinen, in 1940, and the all but ubiquitous Eames lounge chair and ottoman in 1956.

The Eames chair is made of molded plywood, with a seat and back subtly curved to cradle the human body. Their lounge chair and ottoman are elegant and wildly popular still, with a plywood shell, typically of rosewood, walnut, or other dark veneers, and three separate, cushioned sections for the back rest, seek, and headrest, usually upholstered in black or brown leather, though other colors – including pony skin and cowhide – are frequently used, too.

One of their lesser-known contributions to architecture and design, though, is their own home, built between 1945 and 1949 in another collaboration with Saarinen, in Pacific Palisades, California.

It is essentially two rectangular boxes separated by a studio, but unlike other glass and steel frame homes of the period it does not feature large unbroken expanses of clear glass. It was intentionally economical, using standardized prefabricated parts – it was assembled by five men in 16 hours! – but with considerable hand finishing and customizing.

Ray’s background in art inspired Mondrianesqe panels on the front façade, and the interior was filled with their own furniture, as well as handicrafts from around the world. The Eameses believed that a home’s inhabitants were the most appropriate decorators of their spaces and given that the “look” was easily and inexpensively embraced, it became quite influential.

Until Charles’s death, and her own 10 years later to the day in 1988, the Eames house was a mecca for designers, architects, and students of the decorative arts from all over the world. Their calendars record hosting as many as 50 or 60 students at a time. In fact, only a few days before she died Ray had planned to host 100 members of the AIA to view the house and picnic in the meadow.

Work that built a foundation upon which other women could build.

Women have become major figures in architectural and industrial design. Their long history of resilience in the face of social and professional obstruction has led to changes in how people, both creators and inhabitants, conceive, approach, and create buildings, spaces, and their contents. Now, with more women entering those professions than ever, the legacy of Gray, Griffin, Knoll, Perriand, and Eames has not only endured but evolved, creating fertile ground for the development of new forms of creativity and expression. Doors may have been closed and barriers erected in those pioneers’ lifetimes, but now the path is open wide.

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