The Top Six Architects of All Time (Part One)
We are going to be heading back to our roots, in no particular order, and celebrating some of the most famous architects throughout history!
Hello again and welcome back to the blog! We hope you took our last blog to heart, and have started to prepare your home for the last few weeks of hurricane season and the upcoming fall and winter months. As much as we hate to see the summer leave the Lowcountry, it's hard to miss the fact that it is getting darker sooner and that humidity is starting to leave! So please be prepared and stay on top of what could be headed our way, because we just don't know what it could be!
Over the next three blogs, we are going to be headed back into the textbooks to our roots and celebrating six of the most famous architects of all time. Some of them you might have heard of, and some you might not. We are going to celebrate three male architects and three female architects to see how their journies have paralleled and how they have influenced their world of architecture together and apart. So we invite you to sit back and enjoy the next few blogs, and we hope you learn all kinds of exciting and new tidbits about the one thing we all love; architecture.
1. Sophia Hayden Bennett (1868 - 1953)
Hayden was born in Chile on October 17th, 1868 and from the age of 6 on she lived with her grandparents in the United States where she was the very first woman in history to be admitted into MIT's bachelor's degree program in architecture. Her career was spent trying to fight against the idea that architecture was a male-driven industry and for her equality and the equality of other female architects in her unique way. At the time, only 24 women were accepted into MIT the year she enrolled. Hayden excelled in all of her subjects and graduated with honors. Her thesis, according to the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, was published in the Technology Architectural Review of 1890. Even though she graduated with such high honors, it was difficult to find a job in her field, competing in a very male-dominated world.
She began teaching mechanical drafting at a grammar school in Boston until 1891 when the Construction Department of the Worlds Colombian Exposition announced a competition for formally trained female architects. Competitors would submit their designs for the Women's Building, which was to be built for the exposition, and the winner would receive $1000 to make their building become a reality as one of the incredible exhibition halls that would be featured in the 1893 Worlds Fair. There was an all-male competition for the same event and winning prize, although they would be awarded much more money to build the winning design. Although the prize money awarded to the female architect winner was drastically smaller than the male competition, Hayden still entered along with 12 other women. The Board of Lady Managers, a board of influential women that had recently been created to help promote and protect women in the working world and lead by Bertha Palmer, were the judges. They chose Hayden's submission as the winner, and she was flown to Chicago to begin building her design.
According to the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, against all kinds of difficulties and outside factors, Hayden masterfully led the project to completion with ease and incredible professionalism. The building was complete and ready for the Fair right on time for opening and came in under budget. The building itself received mixed reviews but was incredibly important for bringing attention to women in the professional field of architecture at the time. After the dedication of Hayden's Women's Building, it is rumored that she had a nervous breakdown after the stress the two years of difficult construction put on her. This was poorly received by the media and her male counterparts. They stated that this was a prime example that women were not strong or fit enough for the industry, but how wrong they were. She had still proven them wrong time and time again through the building process and with the beautiful building that had come to fruition. The Women's Building was demolished after the completion of the Worlds Fair and was the only actualized design of Hayden's. After the fair, she went back to Boston and married William Blackstone Bennett, a portrait painter, and interior designer. Her accomplishments, although short-lived, brought attention to the female capability and power in the world of architecture. She died on February 3, 1953.
2. Frank Lloyd Wright (1867 - 1959)
Touted as one of the most influential designers of all time, he had a career that spanned over sixty years. He worked his way up through the world as a self-made man, through tragedy, and worked his way across the globe. He is, according to Britannica, the "creative master of American Architecture" and his Prairie Style of design became the heart and soul of residential design in the United States in the 20th Century. He was born on June 8th, 1867 in Richland Center, Wisconsin to a 24-year-old school teacher, Anna Lloyd-Jones, and a 41-year-old musician and preacher named William Wright. He attended university for barley a year at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. There were no classes in architecture, so he focused on engineering. in 1887, with just a few terms of school under his belt, he moved to Chicago. There he became the chief assistant to Louis Sullivan, one of the most influential architects of this time. In 1889 he married Catherine Tobin, whom he had six children with, and in 1893 he opened his own thriving architectural practice. By the time Wright was 33, he had built the W.H Winslow House that established and defined his "Prairie School" architecture, which by the early 1900s became the radically new approach for building homes.
According to Britannica, he had built 50 of these new prairie style homes that boasted spacious rooms, comfort, and convenience between the years of 1900 and 1910. By 1905 he was building and designing more than just homes. He was building apartment buildings, recreation centers, churches, and places to hold public gatherings. With the dawning of 1910, he and his wife were estranged and he had begun a new relationship with the wife of a former client, Mamah Cheney. His clients and following were unimpressed by his infidelity and relationship with Cheney and it hurt his professional standing. Through the next few years, he began to travel globally to work and write some of his very first books. This was also when he built his famous home, Taliesin, in Spring Green, Wisconsin. During this time and through his travels, he came to Japan. The Japanese people were so impressed with his work, they were considering him to build what would later become the Imperial Hotel. However, things continued to be very difficult for him during this time.
When he returned to the United States, he was working on creating and finishing the Midway Gardens in Chicago when Mamah and her children were murdered at Taliesin and the home was badly damaged by fire in 1914. He returned to rebuild the home and moved to Japan for the next five years with his new mistress, Miriam Noel. During this period, he did indeed build the Imperial Hotel, which was dismantled in 1967. Thanks to his ingenious revolutionary design that used floating cantilever construction, it was one of the only large structures that survived the devastating Tokyo earthquake of 1923.
He returned to the United States still struggling to find work, his finances were in ruin, and Taliesin burned down again. In 1929, Wright Incorporated was created to protect all of his work and his finances. When the stock market crashed, he toured and gave speeches about his work, wrote even more books, and opened the Taliesin Fellowship. There he created a training program for budding architects who lived and worked out of his original home. After years of promiscuous relationships, many years spent struggling to find work, and working abroad, everything changed in 1936 with the completion of Fallingwater in the Allegheny Mountains. Fallingwater remains one of his most famous homes and designs to this day. Once again, he was at the top of his game building and designing all kinds of structures across the United States from universities, to government buildings, to the Guggenheim Museum of Modern Art, which was finished and opened after his death in 1959.
According to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, he designs over 800 buildings and 380 were built, and many are still standing today. He gave birth to organic architecture that connected the home and its dwellers to both their indoor and outdoor elements. He also created a totally new style and dynamic sense and expression of space, changing the shape of the American home and work space forever.
Who have been some of your favorite architects of all time? Were our first two on your list? Did you learn new and exciting things from this blog? We'd love to hear from you! It is so exciting to travel back into the world of those who came before us and to see what of their legacy remains in our own work today. While visiting Hayden's work is not possible, you can still see some of her sketches and design on display. Wright's homes, papers, sketches, and more are available to visit and see across the country. Have you visited any of his homes that are still standing? Fallingwater perhaps? We look forward to our next two blogs where we are going to be talking about more incredible architects who shaped our world forever. Until next time, stay excited and inspired for whatever wonderful projects might be heading your way!