Date of Graduation

5-2013

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Architecture

Degree Level

Undergraduate

Department

Architecture

Advisor/Mentor

Goodstein-Murphree, Ethel

Committee Member

Herman, Greg

Second Committee Member

Coon, Lynda L.

Abstract

This thesis aims to determine the influence of women clients on residential architectural design in the United States throughout the twentieth century. In the late nineteenth and twentieth century, waves of feminism and women’s rights movements pushed traditional views of men, women, family and relationships in America to change. At the same time, modernity brought about a shift in architectural thinking. Therefore, if architectural ideas about housing and the home and cultural ideas regarding gender roles and domesticity are directly related, these cultural changes would be present in housing designs of the period. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright was known to have progressive and controversial views on women gender roles. Because Fay Jones was a student and disciple of Wright, some of Wright’s views would be passed on to him. To illustrate these changes, I examined four houses designed and built for women clients in America in the twentieth century: The Susan Lawrence Dana House (Frank Lloyd Wright, 1902), the Goetsch-Winckler House (Frank Lloyd Wright, 1940), the Goetsch-Winckler House III (E. Fay Jones, 1965), and the Alice Walton House (E. Fay Jones, 1982). These houses were constructed at fairly regular intervals throughout the nineteen-hundreds, and illustrate the interaction between social changes and design changes. The placement of these houses on a timeline of the twentieth century yields the conclusion that each woman was pushing the envelope and working to break down traditional boundaries of separate spheres, but they were doing so within the restrictions of each time period.

Keywords

residential architecture design; US history; women in architecture

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