This free event will be held at New Canaan Library. Register here. 

“Women, Modernism, and Philip Johnson” brings new attention to the overlooked subject of architect Philip Johnson’s associations with some of the women who embraced and promoted modernism from the 1930s through the 1950s. The early generations of women modernists—especially those who studied at the Cambridge [MA] School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (1916–42) or Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (beginning in 1942 when women were first allowed to enroll)—had ample opportunities for connections with Johnson as he formulated his own concepts of modernism. 

His varied roles—co-curator of the “International Style” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932 and director of their Architecture Department from 1932-34; graduate student at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, 1940–43; and modernist architect—led to memorable and inspirational meetings. For example, meetings at his “thesis” house of 1942 at 9 Ash Street in Cambridge were considered the “chief attraction” on Friday afternoons for students. 

Not only did women modernists promote his work (as Ethel Brown Power did in 1931 as editor of House Beautiful) or profit from his insights (as Eleanor Agnes Raymond may have done in 1933 when he moderated a session on modern architecture at Radcliffe College); they carried out his vision at MoMA as acting curators, designers, and organizers of exhibitions. 

Mary Anne Hunting is an architectural historian and the author of Edward Durell Stone: Modernism’s Populist Architect. Kevin D. Murphy is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Humanities and professor and chair in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Vanderbilt University. His books include Jonathan Fisher of Blue Hill, Maine: Commerce, Culture, and Community on the Eastern Frontier. Together, they are the authors of Women Architects at Work: Making American Modernism (Princeton University Press, 2025).