ARCHITECTURE WAS FIRST recognized as a profession in the United States in 1857. At first, students learned through apprenticeship or study in Europe. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Architecture and Planning offered the first formal architectural curriculum in the United States, followed by the University of Pennsylvania in 1868, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1870. In 1871, Cornell University began offering the first four-year program in architecture, and Margaret Hicks became its first woman graduate in 1878. The US census listed only one woman architect in 1870. Twenty years later, in 1890, there were 22 women architects declared. By the 1900 census, there were 100 women listed. The first women architects, such as Louise Bethune, were trained in architectural offices. Many others worked with their husbands, but the women’s work was not always recognized because their husbands alone signed the architectural drawings.
In January 1898, 12 architects took the first licensing exam in Chicago’s city hall, in response to the world’s first licensing law passed by the Illinois General Assembly in June 1897. Marion Mahony was one of those 12 architects, and she passed.
In 1913, Lois Lilley Howe and Eleanor Manning established one of the few architectural firms of its time run solely by women. Howe did not mince words when it came to the prospect of making a living as an architect: “As a means of livelihood for a woman, architecture is precarious and unadvisable, unless she has wonderful natural capacity combined with great tenacity of purpose, to which may be added exceptional opportunities.” She went on to describe the prejudice against women as “so great as to make it almost impossible for a woman to learn her trade.” Nonetheless, she worked to support younger women entering the profession by offering apprenticeships in her firm.
Today, about 40 percent of architecture students are women. The Bureau of Labor Statistics and a 2009 American Institute of Architects (AIA) Survey state that in 2008, there were 141,200 women architects employed in the United States, and 16 percent growth is expected by 2018. According to studies conducted in 2012 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, more than 21 percent of architects are self-employed, which is three times higher than the self-employment seen in other fields.
In the last decade or so, there has been increasingly more discussion about the role of the woman architect. Created in 2002, the nonprofit Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation has been instrumental in promoting women architects in the industry. When Mattel introduced Architect Barbie in 2011, everyone looked around and asked, “Where are the women architects?” This book furthers the conversation about women in architecture; it brings to light women’s contributions to the field and will hopefully enlighten and ignite the aspirations of a new generation of designers, dreamers, and creators who will build our world to never-before-seen heights.
Based on responses to a 2013 survey sent to 282 American architectural and architectural/engineering offices employing more than 40,000 professionals, Architectural Record magazine compiled the following list of America’s top architecture schools. Bear in mind that the ranking of these schools is rather subjective; the schools vary greatly in terms of their academic and technical strengths. Currently, there are 125 schools in the United States offering professional graduate and undergraduate architectural degree programs.
Top 10 Architecture Undergraduate Programs
Top 10 Architecture Graduate Programs