Natalie de Blois, 1980s.
Courtesy of Natalie de Blois
Nathaniel Owings, founder of the renowned architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), praised Natalie de Blois in his autobiography, writing:
Long, lean, quizzical, [Natalie] seemed fit to handle all comers. Handsome, her dark, straight eyes invited no nonsense. Her mind and hands worked marvels in design—and only she and God would ever know just how many great solutions, with the imprimatur of one of the male heroes of SOM, owed much more to her than was attributed either by SOM or the client.
Natalie Griffin was born on April 2, 1921, in Paterson, New Jersey. Her father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all engineers. The Griffins were inventors of the Griffin Mill, machinery that aided in the development of Portland cement. Her mother was a schoolteacher. Money was tight during the Depression, but Natalie’s mother and father encouraged all their five children to go to college. Her brother got a scholarship to a business school and her older sister got a scholarship to Vassar College. Of her four sisters and one brother, her parents thought that Natalie would be the child that would go into an artistic field. Natalie’s father had hoped that one of his children would want to go into engineering. So when Natalie, at 10 years old, told her father that she wanted to be an architect, he was very encouraging.
“My father, being an engineer, had engineering tools, pencils, and scales, and proportional dividers, and different kinds of equipment around that I was familiar with. Drawing was something that I liked to do.”
In her 2004 interview for The Oral History of Natalie de Blois, Natalie said, “My father, being an engineer, had engineering tools, pencils, and scales, and proportional dividers, and different kinds of equipment around that I was familiar with. Drawing was something that I liked to do and so I’m sure it had a great deal to do with him possibly putting it in my head. But also I liked buildings, and houses, and plans.”
The norm at the time was that girls took sewing and cooking classes in junior high school. Natalie’s father went to the principal’s office and insisted that Natalie be allowed to take mechanical drawing. She took the class with all boys.
When Natalie was 14, her interest in architecture was broadened on a field trip to New York City. She explained, “One of the first times that I really saw and appreciated architecture and what it did was when I saw a tenement exhibit that was in New York in 1937…. I went and saw this exhibit and was impressed by the whole field of housing.”
At the 1939 New York World’s Fair, Natalie’s father was the civil engineer on the construction of the French pavilion and the Venezuelan building. He would come home every night and tell the family about the fair, throwing in a little of the French that he was trying to learn. When Natalie finally saw all the modern buildings at the fair, she was awestruck. Growing up in suburban Ridgewood, New Jersey, the kids would play in under-construction housing around the neighborhood, but Natalie had never been around so many large buildings and large construction projects.
Natalie wanted to go to college and study architecture, but architecture schools required that students attend an undergraduate program for two years before applying. Natalie’s father wanted her to go to MIT, where he had graduated. But when she received a full scholarship to Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio (now part of Miami University), she started there. The small school specialized in liberal arts, and Natalie enjoyed her classes in art, modern dance, and Latin.
Still, her father wanted her to go to architecture school, so he kept a watchful eye on the colleges. He discovered that Columbia University had just changed its rules and that students could apply to the architectural program with only one year of undergraduate study. When Natalie came home from college for the summer, she learned that her father had enrolled her at Columbia for the fall semester. It was 1940 and many male students were drafted into the military under the Selective Service and Training Act signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to prepare the country for the impending Second World War. The college wanted more women to apply. There were 18 students in the class; five of them were women.
A family friend contributed to Natalie’s tuition, and she also worked several jobs to help pay for college. Between 1940 and 1941, she taught drafting at Columbia to men who could then use the skill to work for the airplane factories. She worked on drawings of boilers for Babcock and Wilcox, who had contracts with the Russian navy. She worked during the school year making drawings for Frederick Kiesler, an architect, theater set designer, and professor. Kiesler took Natalie to the Guggenheim Museum’s “Art of This Century” gallery and showed her his universal chair design that was on exhibit. He couldn’t draw and wanted Natalie to create drawings for him.
In a 2004 interview for SOM magazine, Natalie explained how she felt at Columbia: “I liked it. But already after my first year I thought, Well, I want to get out of school and start working…. You’re a woman and you’re in a man’s profession. You better get a degree.”
Her classes were math, descriptive geometry, statistics, introduction to design, and history. Every year she took classes in materials and methods of construction, which were held in the engineering building so they could actually test concrete and steel. She took painting and sculpture too. She was so exhausted from her heavy workload that when the professor would turn off the lights to show slides for Natalie’s history of architecture classes, Natalie would fall asleep. Luckily, she had the history book that the teacher was following, so she could study on her own what she had missed.
Architecture students had required projects with limited time to complete them, and every Saturday they had sketch problems. Like at the French Beaux-Arts, design problems were presented in each drawing, and the students had to come up with an outline and develop a solution in one day. Drawing quickly was very important because students only had between 9:00 AM and 6:00 PM to finish the color and presentation.
In 1944, Natalie received her degree from the Columbia School of Architecture. Her thesis project was a design for a new community center for Ridgewood, New Jersey, her hometown. At graduation, she won two awards: one for excellence in building construction called the New York State Exam Award, and the other for general excellence and progress.
When Natalie graduated, her father cut out an article from the New York Times that gave statistics on women in architecture and showed it to Natalie. He wanted to make it clear to her that architecture was a profession in which there were very few women, it would be difficult for her to find work, and it would be a challenge to work in a profession where she was a minority. But that did not deter Natalie; she was hired right out of Columbia. Architect Morris Ketchum, who was also a Columbia graduate, went to the school and asked at the office for somebody to work for him, and the school sent Natalie. Ketchum’s was one of the first firms in New York City doing modern architecture, and Natalie was thrilled.
However, Natalie’s work environment was not always pleasant, and a male coworker named Joe Boaz made unwelcome sexual advances toward her that she rebuffed. After nine months, Natalie suffered her first life setback. She explained what happened that day:
After working my butt off for nine months, I got fired. Mr. Ketchum asked me to come over to his office and he told me I would have to leave. That just came right out of the blue and I couldn’t understand it. He said that Joe Boaz was very disturbed with having me work in the office. I didn’t respond to his advances, so he had gone to Mr. Ketchum and told him to ask me to leave.”
At 23 years old, Natalie overcame this blatantly unfair and sexist treatment and began working for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), where she remained for the following 20 years. Still, things weren’t always easy there. As one of the few women in the design office, she took the discrimination she faced personally, on occasion even escaping to the restroom to cry in private.
One of her first major projects was the design of the Terrace Plaza Hotel, the first modernist building in Cincinnati. A new concept at the time, the building had mixed uses. Bond and JC Penney were on the first seven floors. The hotel occupied the remaining floors, along with a restaurant and outdoor plaza with skating rink. The top floor was the round Gourmet Room. About the Terrace Plaza, Natalie said, “The first publicity for the hotel design was in the December 1946 Architectural Forum. That issue includes sketches, done by me, and of course, all the consultants were listed and Mr. Skidmore and Bill Brown. The Terrace Plaza was widely published, that’s true, but I don’t think my name was ever mentioned.”
Natalie married in 1945 and had her first of four children in 1948. In September 1951, she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and moved to France with her husband and three-year-old son. On the Fulbright, she did studio work at Beaux-Arts. While overseas, she was asked to design several US consulate buildings in Germany, which led to Natalie and her family moving to Germany. In March 1953, they moved back to the United States, where Natalie returned to the SOM office, and in June she had another son. In describing the expectation at work at that time in a 2004 SOM article, Natalie said, “I had four children between 1948 and 1957, which was when all these buildings were done. I went to the hospital from the office and then I came back to the office a week after that. No maternity leave.”
At SOM, Natalie was the project designer on many buildings for the architect Gordon Bunshaft: Lever House and corporate offices for Pepsi-Cola, Connecticut General Life Insurance, and Union Carbide. In a 2010 interview with Steffan Schmidt, when Natalie was asked about the climate in this male-dominated field, she had a very matter-of-fact yet sometimes contradictory view of things, saying, “It wasn’t tough. I accept it. There’s no doubt about it. I was discriminated [against] and I was told I couldn’t go to meetings. I couldn’t go to lunch with them. I was told I couldn’t go to the clubs with them. That was just it.”
In 2010, Jeanne Gang designed and built the 82-story Aqua Tower in Chicago, breaking Natalie de Blois’s record for the tallest building in Chicago designed by a woman, which had been Equitable Life Assurance. Aqua Tower also breaks the record for the tallest building in the world designed by a woman-owned company. As a child growing up in Belvidere, Illinois, Jeanne would take road trips with her father, a civil engineer, to bridges and architectural landmarks. After graduating from the University of Illinois and Harvard Graduate School of Design, she finally settled in Chicago and started her own firm, Studio Gang Architects, in 1997. About her design theory, Jeanne says, “I see architecture as part of a bigger system. Every building is not just an object—it’s connected to an environment about it. The way I work is kind of like a detective, to find all of the factors that could form the building. My philosophy of design is really about making some kind of poetry out of all those factual and scientific criteria.”
About her work for Gordon Bunshaft, Natalie said, “He didn’t seem to discriminate. He in no way treated me differently than he did anybody else. When he introduced me to the clients he would say, ‘This is my best designer and … she’s going to work on the project.’ So that was fine. He wrote a book, Gordon Bunshaft. He didn’t say a damn thing about me. I mean I didn’t exist.”
After working on the Union Carbide building in Manhattan, Natalie was asked to appear on the television program To Tell the Truth. A “jury” was told that one of three contestants had just designed a 52-story building, the Union Carbide building. They had to try to figure out which person was actually the designer. Natalie was finally getting some fame for her accomplishments.
Natalie and her husband divorced in 1960. Four years later, now with four sons, she moved to Chicago and became an associate partner at the Chicago SOM office. Ten years later, after 30 years of working in others’ shadows, Natalie left SOM. She became an active member of the American Institute of Architects’ Task Force on Women. Her presentation “Role Conflict: Professional, Mother, and Wife” received a lot of attention. In her oral history, Natalie explained that her presentation was so popular because everybody always wanted to know how she did it. She said, “How do I bring up four children and work full time as well? Well, I had no alternative. I had divorced my husband in 1960…. I had to work. My husband didn’t support me or the children. I liked my work and I liked my children. It wasn’t a matter of how I would do that.”
Juggling her kids and work was not always easy, though. One Saturday when she was still working at SOM, she had to pack her children in the backseat of her car and drive to Connecticut to discuss with Gordon Bunshaft an architectural model for the Connecticut General building. Because his dog was running around in the yard, Bunshaft had Natalie leave the children out in the car while they discussed work. When it was time for the building’s opening, Natalie, pregnant with her third son, was told not to attend the opening if she hadn’t had the baby yet because she was an embarrassment to them. At the time, it was not socially acceptable to be working, especially working on a large office-building design, while pregnant.
Mario Salvadori, Natalie de Blois, and Philip Johnson in 1948.
Courtesy of Natalie De Blois and SOM
After leaving SOM in Chicago, Natalie joined the Houston, Texas, firm of Neuhaus & Taylor. From 1980 to 1993, she also taught at the University of Texas at Austin. Natalie was the founding member of Chicago Women in Architecture and started groups in Houston and Austin.
Natalie de Blois retired in 1994 after a 50-year career in architecture. Though she had worked at SOM for 30 years, she did not receive a pension (payments made after retirement) like her male associates simply because she was a woman.
Natalie felt that her biggest contributions were that she was an architect who actually worked on large-scale building projects, as opposed to private residences, and that she had been a mentor for other women. In 2005, Natalie returned to Chicago and moved into the Mies van der Rohe-designed Promontory Apartments one block away from Lake Michigan. She frequently attended cultural events and functions put on by the Chicago Women in Architecture, the group she helped found in the mid-1970s. Natalie often ran into former students and occasionally met strangers who told her about a young woman they knew who she inspired. Natalie died on July 22, 2013 in Chicago, at age 92.
LEARN MQRE
Oral history of Natalie de Blois by Natalie de Blois and Betty J. Blum (Art Institute of Chicago, 2004)