If you live in South Minneapolis, there’s a chance your house was designed by one of Minnesota’s first women architects. And if you didn’t know that, well it’s by design.

“Women have been in this field for over 100 years. It’s not a new thing,” said Cheryll Fong, curator of the Northwest Architectural Archives (NAA). “But what is new is their prominence and more of a level playing field. It’s more accepted that a woman can be an architect.”

For decades women weren’t allowed in architectural firms or professional associations, their accomplishments overshadowed by glass skyscrapers. So without a welcoming home for women in architecture, they built their own.

“Making Room: Women’s Histories from the Northwest Architectural Archives,” a new exhibit at the University of Minnesota Libraries, recognizes the women who trained and worked as architects throughout the state.

“Exhibits should, in their purpose, tell a story that’s largely unknown, to widen our understanding of what came before, and this exhibit certainly did that for me,” Fong said. “I hope that it gives people courage to pursue what they love, whether it’s in architecture or any other field. The best work you can do is the work that you love to do.”

The exhibit is currently on display at Elmer L. Andersen Library in the first floor gallery, and the NAA will hold an exhibit reception on March 24 from 5:30 to 8 p.m., featuring a panel discussion with four local architects: Su Blumentals, Sarah Nettleton, Jennifer Yoos, and Katie Leaf.

“Making Room” was designed by Darren Terpstra and curated by Fong, alongside Jane King Hession, a Minneapolis-based architectural writer and historian, and Kimberly Long Loken, an associate professor at University of Wisconsin-Stout’s School of Art and Design.

Minnesota’s first women architects

On Arlington Avenue in St. Paul, you’ll find two picturesque Tudor cottages, each with a white stucco exterior, steep gabled roofs, and an arched front door. The homes, built nearly a century ago, are just a few of the houses designed by Emma Brunson, who in 1921 became the first woman registered as an architect in Minnesota.

At age 18, Brunson began working as a draftsman for Augustus Gauger, one of Minnesota’s leading architects. After registering as an architect, she opened her own firm that designed over 20 homes in St. Paul.

But Brunson wasn’t the only woman architect at the time. Ethel Clare Bartholomew, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, moved to Minneapolis in 1893 and worked for the firm Long and Kees, and later as a writer and editor for Construction Details, a St. Paul-based architecture magazine, and as a managing editor for Keith’s Magazine, a monthly home building publication.

One of her homes still stands on University Avenue, just past Fraternity Row and Dinkytown proper. Bartholomew and Marion Alice Parker designed the white prairie style home in 1916 for the Pi Beta Phi sorority.

Both of these women were working as architects before the University of Minnesota officially established the College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture in 1925. Most of the women featured in the exhibit studied architecture at the U of M. The exhibit showcases student drawings submitted to juried competitions from the 1920s and ‘30s, “and you see just how talented these women were,” Fong said.

In response to their exclusion from professional fraternities, clubs, and organizations, women studying architecture at the University created their own parallel communities. In 1920, they founded the Delta Phi sorority and later joined the national sorority, Alpha Alpha Gamma, becoming the second chapter in the country. These same sorority members would go on to found the Association of Women in Architecture in 1934.

“These women worked hard and used their degrees as best they could and found ways for their talent and skill to be put to use,” Fong said. “They certainly didn’t let it go to waste. They knew they were capable, and so they found ways to express their abilities.”

‘If you wanted to be an architect, marry an architect’

For steady work and a reliable income, many women designed stock plan books for publications. Future homeowners selected and ordered a plan from these stock plan books, and then brought them to a local lumberyard to order supplies, personalize the plan, and begin construction.

These stock plans were commonly published anonymously, without any architect’s name attached. But many homes in America came from the stock plans designed by these early women architects. And homes in South Minneapolis in particular were frequently based on these plans, especially if those plans were published by Page and Hill, Keith’s Magazine, or Carr-Cullen Company, Fong said.

Women often found work designing “nest buildings,” bungalows and cottage homes, because they were thought to have more expertise over aspects of domestic life. But in reality, they were filling the void left by male architects, who would rather design towering officescapes.

As architect Elizabeth “Lisl” Scheu Close said, “If you wanted to be an architect, marry an architect.” Husband and wife teams were often the only way women could be principal architects at a firm, as engagement and wedding announcements found in the sorority scrapbook show.

This included Close, Minnesota’ first modern architect and designer of over 250 buildings in the state. In 1938 Close, a Jewish immigrant from Austria, cofounded the first practice in Minnesota dedicated to modern architecture with her husband, Winston Close.

Close designed stock plan books for Page and Hill and over 10,000 homes were constructed from her plans, including one in Berlin behind the Iron Curtain. The US State Department used her “typical American house” as a form of soft power diplomacy to promote democracy, though Close was not credited as the architect.

By the 1980s, women were gaining more acceptance in the field. In 1983, Sarah Susanka and Dale Mulfinger cofounded a firm, which made Susanka the first principal architect in Minnesota who wasn’t married to the other principal architect. Four years later, Michaela Mahady became a partner at their firm, which they renamed Mulfinger, Susanka and Mahady Architects. Their firm still exists today as SALA Architects.

‘Find a home’

While “Making Room” primarily focuses on older architects who have retired and donated their papers to the archives, the exhibit also features some contemporary architects from the past 30 years.

Fong, Loken, and Hession spent around a year researching and curating materials for the exhibit. While it wasn’t unexpected, Fong was still surprised by how little was recorded about these pioneering architects.

“For most of them we have something, some papers, some objects, but it was very difficult,” she said. “Sometimes there’s simply a newspaper clipping when a somewhat clickbait-style headline, a little bit derogatory and condescending, and that’s all we know.”

Fong’s favorite item in the exhibit comes from a collection of sketches by Valeria Stupnitsky Batorewicz, a Ukrainian immigrant and U of M alumni. Batorewicz made these sketches in Spain where she studied architectural history as a Fulbright Scholar.

The sketches are “wild” and feature sci-fi designs of possible housing. In one sketch, shown in the exhibit, Batorewicz designed a flower vase shaped like a woman.

“To me, that’s the expression. The flowers are her energy, her creativity, her life giving form. It’s both entirely feminine and strong and creative. I just fell in love with that sketch,” Fong said.

In addition to recognizing the contributions women have made over the past 100 years, Fong, Loken, and Hession hope the exhibit will encourage emerging architects, especially students, to keep their records and papers, and to one day donate them to institutions like the Northwest Architectural Archives.

“Find a home for your papers because we need your voices in the history of our built environment, whether that’s landscape or architecture, or other fields of design,” Fong said.