Women’s absence from accounts of American architectural history has been a longstanding problem. In 2017, Pioneering Women of American Architecture was launched with the goal of documenting and publicizing women’s contributions to the built environment in the United States. Project co-editors Mary McLeod and Victoria Rosner, together with contributor Michael Kubo speak about their work on this timely project and the challenges of writing women back into American architectural history.

Co-presented by the New Canaan Museum & Historical Society and October4design

Mary McLeod is a professor of architecture at Columbia University, where she teaches architecture history and theory. Her research and publications have focused on the history of the modern movement and on contemporary architecture theory, examining issues concerning the connections between architecture and politics. She has written extensively on Le Corbusier’s architecture and urban planning, and is the editor of and contributor to the book Charlotte Perriand: An Art of Living. She is also the co-editor of Architecture, Criticism, Ideology and Architecture Reproduction, as well as the new website Pioneering Women of American Architecture (with Victoria Rosner). Her essays have appeared in journals such as AA Files, Journal of Architecture, Assemblage, JSAH, Casabella, and Oppositions, as well as in books such as Architecture School, Modern Women, Feminism and Architecture, Building Systems, Architectural Theory since 1968, and Complexity and Contradiction at Fifty.

Victoria Rosner is Dean of Academic Affairs at Columbia University School of General Studies and teaches in the Columbia University Department of English and Comparative Literature. Rosner is the author, most recently, of Machines for Living: Modernism and Domestic Life (Oxford University Press, 2020), as well as Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life (Columbia University Press, 2005), winner of the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize. She is editor of the web-based archive Pioneering Women of American Architecture (with Mary McLeod) and two books, The Cambridge Companion to the Bloomsbury Group (Cambridge UP, 2014) and The Global and the Intimate: Feminism in Our Time (Columbia UP, 2012; with Geraldine Pratt). With Nancy K. Miller, she edits the long-running Gender and Culture book series for Columbia University Press. She is also the founder and co-director of the Columbia faculty working group, “On the Frontlines: Nursing Leadership in Pandemics.”

Michael Kubo is assistant professor of architectural history and theory at the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design, University of Houston. Kubo was previously the Wyeth Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art. He was associate curator for OfficeUS, the US Pavilion at the 2014 International Architecture Biennale in Venice, and is co-editor of OfficeUS: Atlas (Lars Müller Publishers, 2015). He is coauthor of Heroic: Concrete Architecture and the New Boston, along with Mark Pasnik and Chris Grimley. His writing has appeared in publications including the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Journal of Architectural Education, Harvard Design Magazine, Bauhaus Magazine, Architect, Arquine, MAS Context, CLOG, and Volume. He holds a PhD in the history, theory, and criticism of architecture from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an MArch from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Glass House Presents is an ongoing series of talks, performances, and other live events that extend the site’s historic role as a gathering place for artists, architects, and other creative minds. This talk is supported in part by Connecticut Humanities and the New Canaan Community Foundation.