C O N T E X T 1 7 3 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 2 31 DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION Road, Belsize Park was rejected. Disappointing as this was for a young practice, it was a great fortune for architectural history because the commission, in time, became the Lawn Road (Isokon) Flats (1934). It was Molly Pritchard who drew up the design concept and brief for this landmark modernist building (designed by Wells Coates); a reminder that as clients and thinkers, women continued as powerful determinants of architectural form throughout the 20th century. Cooke also worked hard to embed women’s presence in the profession. She was a very early if not the first woman ARIBA and FRIBA and, with UCL graduate Gertrude Leverkus, was instrumental in the formation of a Women’s Committee of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1932. To work with an architect husband became a typical modus operandi in 20th-century architecture but equally important at this early stage was for women to practice together. Among the most significant of such partnerships was that between Norah Aiton (1903–1988) and Betty Scott (1904–1983). Also AA graduates, they made their name with a striking design for Aiton and Co, in Derby (1930–31). This two-storey, steel-framed office block has brick and rendered cladding and a particularly well-composed entrance. Inside, a cantilevered staircase had a tubular chrome balustrade, while the interior colour scheme was inspired by the red, blue and yellow of the De Stijl projects the women had seen on European architectural tours. The early 1930s saw the emergence of a particularly remarkable generation of women architects. Characterised by their determination to use their skills as architects for the public good, they often joined with social reformers in other disciplines (health, housing, welfare) to develop prototypical solutions to the pressing social problems of their day. Architects Mary Crowley (1907–2005) (later Medd), (Margarent) Justin Blanco White (1911–2001) and Judith Ledeboer (1901–1990) joined housing consultant Elizabeth Denby (1894–1965), to work on a series of housing exhibitions called ‘New Homes for Old’, which formed part of the biennial Building Trades Exhibition at Olympia. These offered progressive models of housing and planning as an alternative to the somewhat prosaic designs produced under contemporary slum clearance legislation. Blanco White drew on her project for a private house in Cambridge to design a prefabricated timber house for the 1938 show, intended as a prototype affordable rural dwelling. These exhibitions led to the foundation of the Housing Centre, a process in which Ledeboer and Denby played a key role. In the same decade, the latter collaborated with Maxwell Fry on the two most influential works of modernist social housing of the 1930s, RE Sassoon House, Peckham, (1934) and Kensal House, Ladbroke Grove, (1937). Crucially, these women were able to link prewar campaigning to shaping post-war architecture. In wartime, Mary Crowley worked on schemes for prefabricated nursery schools with Ernö Goldfinger, experience that enabled her to become a leading authority on school design in the new landscape opened up by the 1944 Education Act. With her husband, David Medd, she spent much of her career in the development section of the Ministry of Education and produced the Building Bulletins that shaped design practice. Judith Ledeboer served as secretary to the Dudley committee (1942-44) and wrote the main policy document – Design of Dwellings (1944) – on which much post-war housing design was based. She went on to play a key role at the Festival of Britain, especially in the Live Architecture exhibition at Lansbury in Poplar. BlancoWhite was one of the team that produced the Middlesbrough Plan (published 1946), an early example of research-led planning that combined both spatial and sociological investigation (led by Ruth Glass). After the war, BlancoWhite moved to Edinburgh, where she played a key role in first state housing and then hospital design. The commitment to public architecture that came with the inauguration of the post-war welfare state, and which placed this in the hands of local authority architect’s or government departments, created a significant context for women professionals to flourish. The career of Ann McEwen (1928–2008), who left the AA just before the outbreak of war, is typical of this generation. She worked first for the architectplanner Judith Ledeboer, assisting her work on neighbourhood planning. Between 1946–47, she then took on a similar role with Geoffrey Jellicoe, assisting on the master plan for the New Town at Hemel Hempstead and then moved on to the LCC where she joined Percy Johnson Marshall’s team in 1949, and worked for the head of planning Arthur Ling on the reconstruction of Stepney and Poplar. From there she went to the Ministry of Transport in 1961, to form part of the team working under Colin Buchanan on what became the Traffic in Towns report (1963). MacEwen became a partner in Colin Buchanan and partners from 1964 to 1973, where she produced planning and transport studies of Bath, Edinburgh, Canterbury as well as Bergamo, Italy, succeeding in Edinburgh in getting plans to build a motorway-scale bridge between Old and NewTown abandoned. Rosemary Stjernstedt (1912–1998), a graduate of Birmingham School of Art, became the first woman to be appointed at Grade One in the LCC architect’s department when she joined in Further reading Elizabeth Darling and LynneWalker (2017) AAWomen in Architecture, 1917– 2017, London: AA Publications Elizabeth Darling and LesleyWhitworth (2007) Women and the Making of Built Space in England, 1870–1940, London: Ashgate Kate Jordan (2018) ‘Unfair Dismissal,’ Architectural Review, March Ellen Shoskes (2013) Jaqueline Tyrwhitt: a transnational life in urban planning and design, Farnham: Ashgate LynneWalker (1984) Women Architects: their work, London: Sorella Press LynneWalker (1997) Drawing on Diversity: women, architecture and practice, London: RIBA Heinz Gallery SAHGB podcast, Architecture and Absence www.sahgb. org.uk/podcast/ architecture-andabsence C20 Society and SAHGB EDI Networks Building of the Month series for 2022 https:// c20society.org.uk/ building-of-the-month ‘PioneerWomen Architects and their Work’, talk at the RIBA (1986) https:// soundcloud.com/ the-riba/sets/pioneerswomen-architects-and [sic] Opposite: Alton East Estate, London, 1951–55, designed by a group led by Rosemary Stjernstedt in the LCC Architect’s Department (Photo: John East)
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