Educating Women at the University of Pennsylvania (1950-1977): The ‘Other’ Philadelphia School

BY FRANCA TRUBIANO, PhD., OAQ.

MIMI LOBELL, STANISLAVA NOWICKI, AND BLANCHE LEMCO

Some stories are well-known because they are often repeated.

One such local story reminds us of the passing of architect Louis Kahn who on March 17th, 1974, in transit between India and Philadelphia, suffered a fatal heart attack at Penn Station in New York City. One can only imagine how arduous his travel must have been from Ahmedabad to Mumbai to London, and to New York. Sadly, his body was identified by police using his passport, and the news of his passing made the front page of the New York Times. Obituaries written by Paul Goldberger and Ada Louise Huxtable memorialized his work and influence on an entire generation of architects. As Goldberger noted, Kahn had been on his way home “to meet his Monday morning class in architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.”

•• Mimi Lobell in 1962.

•• Architecture students in studio class of G. Holmes Perkins discussing a model for women’s campus, 1952.

That same year in the fall of 1974, a visiting adjunct professor at the School of Architecture of the Pratt Institute published a brief text in the journal Oppositions 4 titled, “Kahn, Penn, and the Philadelphia School.” The “Postscript” authored by Mimi Lobell (1942-2001) referenced the growing call by some to recognize an educational axis forming between Yale’s School of Architecture and the School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. On many fronts, it was undeniable that a unique culture was permeating the halls of the School of Fine Arts. As early as 1961, when Progressive Architecture published the lengthy thirty-five-page article “Wanting to be… The Philadelphia School,” Kahn’s reputation as a progenitor of ideas about design, form, and spirit in architecture was cemented. Kahn’s reputation was not what Lobell had issue with in publishing her short piece. What she did disagree with was the idea that in 1974 architectural education at Penn had much in common with Yale’s. For Lobell, the two schools had far too many differences to be aligned along an axis of mutuality. As a 1963 and 1966 graduate of Penn, she would have known this to be the case. She attended the school receiving both a Bachelor of Art with a Major in Architecture and a Master of Architecture degree during the heady days of Edmund Bacon, Robert Geddes, Romaldo Giurgola, Ian McHarg, and Robert Venturi—national celebrities in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, and city planning. Lobell recalled how contrary to the culture at Yale, at PENN “people aren’t good at promoting themselves… Penn was educating anonymous architects.” Yale, with its focus on “visual or formal gyrations, was “grooming virtuoso formalists and highly visible “stars” like Paul Rudolph, Charles Moore, Jacquelin Robertson, Bob Stern, Jonathan Barnett, and Vincent Scully.” According to Lobell, at Penn a “building was evaluated for the quality of its contribution to human experience and for its sensitivity to the surrounding contextual fabric.”

I reference Lobell’s 1974 text not only to remind us of how quickly things can change, but to recognize how influential the architecture and city planning curriculum had been at Penn during the 1960s. According to Jan C. Rowan who authored the piece in Progressive Architecture, the group of educators who had gathered in Philadelphia offered “a powerful new movement with a powerful gospel.” Their work was highly local yet universal: it “herald[ed] a new renaissance that might prove to be at least as important to the course of architectural history as the emergence of the Chicago School in the late 19th century.” Beyond the traumas of postindustrial neglect which had befallen the city at mid-century, according to Rowan, in the 1960s Philadelphia offered a fertile ground for the renewal of architecture amidst

•• Siasia Nowicki desk crit and teaching (below).

•• Nowicki studio, student

work compilation.

a culture of city building. This was undoubtedly facilitated by enlightened mayors and an informed planning policy. It was no coincidence that the city’s Planning Commission Chairman (1958-1968) and the Dean of the School of Fine Arts was one and the same person, Holmes G. Perkins (1951-1971); and it was also no accident that Edmund Bacon was the Executive Director of the Planning Commission (19491970) and a faculty member in City Planning (1948-1980). According to Inga Saffron, “together, they pushed an often-reluctant Philadelphia to change from a smoky red-brick industrial city, sectioned by railroad lines, into a metropolis dotted with glassy modernist skyscrapers and greenways.” This too is a narrative we know well.

Less well known, however, is the fact that during the zenith of ‘the Philadelphia School’ a small handful of women had, for the first time, become a vital part of

the teaching culture at Penn. In Lobell’s professional Resumé from the year 2000, written a year before her death, she listed Denise Scott-Brown amongst the larger cadre of male teachers who had been influential in her education. Scott-Brown had been both an instructor and assistant professor of City Planning between 1960 and 1965, clearly coinciding with the years of Lobell spent at Penn. Yet she was not the only woman to who had been charged with educating the new generation of architects. In 1951, nearly a decade before the arrival of Scott-Brown, it was a Polish émigré—Stanislava Nowicki-Sandecka (1912-2018)—who arrived at the Graduate School of Fine Arts (GSFA) to teach architectural design. To an entire generation of students, she was known as Siasia. When she retired in 1977, she had been the first woman full professor at the GSFA. A committed modernist, Nowicki arrived in Philadelphia at the invitation of Dean Perkins, who himself having just arrived from Harvard, set out to build his vision of a school in the true spirit of a collaborative practice. Nowicki would prove to be central to his mission. A decade later, in the 1961 GSFA catalogue of faculty and student work exhibited as part of the AIA Convention held that year in Philadelphia, it was Nowicki’s work that was prominently featured. As communicated in the opening spread, her presence in the school was unmistakable. Her design philosophy was clearly legible in the student projects used to illustrate the ‘Basic Design’ curriculum of the undergraduate major in architecture and of the professional program in architecture.

Nowicky had been educated in Poland where she received a Master of Architecture from the Polytechnic of Warsaw. In 1937 she was co-recipient of the Gold Medal and Grand Prix award in Graphic Arts for the Polish contribution to the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts. In 1946, alongside her husband Maciej (Matthew) Nowicki (1910-1950), she secured passage to the United States. In 1948, both husband and wife began their teaching careers in Raleigh at North Carolina State University where, until his untimely death in 1950, Matthew was the acting Head of the Department of Architecture. An accomplished architect, Matthew was tragically killed in a plane crash over Egypt on his way back from Chandīgarh, India. He was returning home from having consulted on the design of the new capital, a project subsequently completed by Le Corbusier. Another project which had been left on the drawing boards due to his passing was the Dorton Arena at North Carolina State. Matthew left sketches of the project, but as engineer and historian Henry Petroski noted, “The office of William Deitrick took over the supervision of the detailed work of design and construction, with Stanislava Nowicki apparently providing considerable insight into the creative intentions that her late husband had shared with her.” When Nowicki arrived at Penn in 1951as an associate professor, she was caring for a ten-year old child

•• Siasia Nowicki with teaching colleagues

and student work (left).

and a newborn. In 1958 she was promoted to full professor of architecture as the first woman in the country to achieve this recognition.

In 1976, a year before her retirement, Charles Kahn, the then Dean of the School of Architecture and Urban Design at Kansas State travelled to Philadelphia to interview Nowicki. The conversation was fascinating, if at times, awkward. Repeatedly, during the hour-long interview, Nowicki insisted on staking out her intellectual independence. She discounted on more than one occasion the influence which the Bauhaus had had on her Polish education, as well as the impact which abstraction had had on her teaching method. When the interviewer finally asked Nowicki about her own work (as opposed to her husband’s), she offers the listener a wonderful first glimpse into her architectural imagination. In matters of design, Nowicki preferred to think of figures, symbols, and other forms of abstraction as representing ‘things’ themselves. A window, for example, was not a stand-in for positive or negative space, it was quite simply a window, or “a hole in the wall.” Abstraction certainly freed the mind of pre-conceptions and it allowed beginning design students to think of things more creatively. However, as Nowicki herself stated: “I couldn’t possibly work with just squares on a white paper chasing each other. To me it’s a building right away.” And speaking at the cusp of the movement that was to become Postmodernism, Nowicki was highly impatient with students who treated structure “as a decorative element.” This was her design philosophy which, sadly, she never communicated in text or print.

At the close of her career, she was fittingly rewarded and celebrated. In 1978 she received an AIA Medal at the annual convention; in 1987 she was honored as a distinguished professor by the ACSA (Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture); and in 2017 she received the Gloria Artis gold medal conferred by the Polish government for her role in design education. Her career had been exemplary with so many important firsts and when she passed away in 2018, she was an incredible 105-years young. Her story, unfortunately, is one that is less well known for being far too infrequently repeated. The evidence of which is that as a member of the Penn community, it took me twenty-five years to learn of her important work.

In fact, Nowicki was joined by another inspired woman who taught architecture in the early 1950s at Penn. Blanche Lemco (b.1923), another émigré, this time from London, England and Canada, also shaped the course of architectural education at the GSFA. She was the second woman hired by Perkins during the first year of his deanship, arriving in Philadelphia by way of Harvard where she had just completed her Master’s in City Planning. By 1951, she had two degrees and was very well-travelled. She had been one of the first women to receive a professional bachelor’s degree from McGill University in 1945, and she had worked for William Crabtree in London in 1947 and Le Corbusier’s Atelier in 1948. She remembers having participated in the design of the ventilation stacks at the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, by far one of the most celebrated projects of the post-war period. At Penn, she was appointed assistant professor in the newly formed City Planning department and remained on the faculty until 1957. She left Philadelphia, returning to Montréal to establish a professional office with her husband Harmen Peter Daniel (Sandy) van Ginkel.

Her years at Penn were highly productive having taught design studios in urban planning and building structures. In the spring of 1953, she chaired a committee charged with organizing the exhibit

•• Blanche Lemco receiving film award in 1956.

•• Lemco studio, student work compilation.

“The Row House in Philadelphia” which highlighted the city’s vibrant history and character, for the most part predicated on the ubiquitous presence of the rowhome. It also spoke to the city’s over densification and at times disfunction. In response, the photographic essay explored possible solutions for redesigning the typical Philadelphia rowhome by accommodating the arrival of the car and by acknowledging a new culture of child rearing. In the same year, Lemco and Nowicki collaborated on a studio focused on the rowhome. In fact, it was alongside Nowicki and Robert Geddes that Lemko established the Philadelphia chapter of CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne), where she attended the 1953 (Aix-en-Provence), 1957 (Dubrovnik), and 1959 (Otterlo) meetings. In 1956, Lemco was awarded the Grand Prix for Film at the 1956 International Federation of Housing and Planning (IFHP), an event she attended with Dean Perkins. That same year, she was named Mademoiselle Magazine Woman of the Year. It goes without saying that Lemco’s years at Penn were prolific and accomplished. They were also a font of cherished memories. In email correspondence from 2011 with architectural historian Mary McLeod, Lemco remembered with much acuity the exemplary teaching abilities of her colleague Nowicki who was ten years her senior when they both started at the GSFA. Once again, in 2016, she recalled with fondness how Nowicki had befriended her while they were both at Penn.

Lemco’s professional career in Canada was equally successful. In partnership with her husband, she was central to the planning of Expo’67—the World’s fair held in Montréal which featured Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome, housing the American Pavilion—and the campaign to save le Vieux Montréal from the fate of a high-speed expressway. Her professional accolades include an Order of Canada received in 2000 and a Queen’s Golden Jubilee Medal awarded in 2002. Lemco was the author of several papers and publications, and while she may have left Philadelphia to pursue a professional career in Canada, she was never too far from the halls of a university. She continued to teach at Harvard, l’Université de Montréal, McGill, and Rensselaer Polytechnic before becoming a professor of architecture in 1977 at the University of Toronto. She served as Chair of the Architecture Program from 1977-1982 and Dean of the Faculty of Architecture and Landscape Architecture from 1980-1982. This too is a story I was not told when I attended McGill University and when I graduated from Penn.

Lemco was long gone from Philadelphia when Lobell arrived as a student, and while I have yet to find evidence of an intellectual connection between Lobell and Nowicki, I can only hope that Lobell was partly inspired by these and other women who were teaching at Penn during the mid-twentieth century. After all, Lobell chose a career in teaching as well. Having served as a visiting adjunct professor from 1972 to 1976, by 1986 Lobell was only the second woman, after Sybil Moholy-Nagy, to achieve tenure at Pratt. While there, she established the ‘Myth & Symbol in Architecture Study Center’ and authored numerous texts including “The Buried Treasure: Women’s Ancient Architectural Heritage,” and “The Philadelphia School: An Architectural Philosophy.”

These are but three of the women who in the 1950s and 60s forever altered the gender, character, and values of architecture at Penn. They too gave rise to a ‘Philadelphia School’ even if we have yet to retell their story as often and as proudly as others. Let this brief narrative inspire us all to continue the work of remembering their life and contributions to the history of architectural education in Philadelphia. n

Dr. Franca Trubiano is an Architect (Ordre des Architectes du Québec) and associate professor at the Weitzman School of Design of the University of Pennsylvania. Her manuscript Building Theories, Architecture as the Art of Building will be published by Routledge later this year.

Acknowledgments: The author wishes to thank the Penn University Archives and Records Center, the Architectural Archives of the Weitzman School of Design, and the Fisher Fine Arts Library for their kind use of images. Special thanks to William Whitaker of the Architectural Archives whose extraordinary attention to the history of mid-century architecture in Philadelphia and to that of the Weitzman School of Design never ceases to amaze. Lastly, initial findings were made possible by a research grant sponsored by MGA Partners in Philadelphia which facilitated the work of 2020 graduate Susan Kolber who has been studying the history of Penn alumnae from 1950 to 2020.

•• Mimi Lobel in New York City,

October 1968.

Citations:

1. Paul Goldberger, “Louis I. Kahn Dies; Architect Was 73,” New York

Times, (March 20, 1974): 1,64; Ada Louise Huxtable, “Kahn’s

Building’s Blended Logic, Power and Grace,” New York Times, (March 20, 1974): 64. 2. Goldberger, “Louis I. Kahn Dies,” 64. 3. Mimi Lobell, “Kahn, Penn, and the Philadelphia School,”

Oppositions 4, (1974): 63-64. 4. Jan C. Rowan, “WANTING TO BE ... THE PHILADELPHIA SCHOOL,”

Progressive Architecture, 42, n. 4 (1961): 131-63. This article was written coincident with the AIA National convention held in

Philadelphia in 1961. See the later, Thomas Hine, “Reflections on the ‘Philadelphia school’ and the architects who made the grade,”

The Philadelphia Inquirer (September 29th, 1991): 1C, 6C. 5. Lobell, “Kahn, Penn, and the Philadelphia School.” 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Rowan. “WANTING TO BE ... THE PHILADELPHIA SCHOOL,” 131. 9. Ibid. 10. Inga Saffron, “G. Holmes Perkins, 99, chief of Phila. Planning

Commission, Obituaries,” The Philadelphia Inquirer (August 29th, 2004): B07. 11. Ibid. 12. Mimi Lobell Resumé, Archive for Mimi Lobell, The Architectural

Archives of the University of Pennsylvania. 13. Her bio entry in the 1961 GSFA publication claims the date of her master’s degree was 1932; her obituary published in the University of Pennsylvania Almanac identifies this date to be 1938. University of Pennsylvania Almanac 64, n. 27 (March 20, 2018). 14. University of Pennsylvania Almanac 64, n. 27 (March 20, 2018) accessed at https://almanac.upenn.edu/articles/stanislawanowicki-architecture 15. Henry Petroski, “DORTON ARENA, On the occasion of its 50th anniversary and its dedication as a National Historic Civil

Engineering Landmark,” American Scientist, the magazine of

Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society (November-December 2002): 503-07. 16. The Nowicki connection to Penn had been forged in the years prior to Siasia’s arrival. Matthew had been in correspondence with Lewis Mumford between 1947-1950; the latter, a visiting professor at Penn between 1951 and 1961. Lewis Mumford papers at the

University of Pennsylvania, Ms. Coll. 2. Finding Aid (2020); 208, 335. 17. Charles Kahn Interview of Stanislava Nowicki (1976), Audio

Recording accessed at https://ncmodernist.org/kahn.htm. 18. Ibid. At 24 minutes in the conversation 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. At 38 minutes in the conversation. 21. University of Pennsylvania Almanac 64, n. 27 (March 20, 2018) accessed at https://almanac.upenn.edu/articles/stanislawanowicki-architecture 22. Annmarie Adams and Tanya Southcott, “Blanche Lemco van

Ginkel” Pioneering Women of American Architecture, accessed at https://pioneeringwomen.bwaf.org/blanche-lemco-van-ginkel/ 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Evidence of which can be found at the Architectural Archives,

“Architecture Lemco and Nowicki Studio. Spring 1953 Row

House Exhibit No. 1”, http://hdl.library.upenn.edu/1017/d/fisher/ n2015100226. 26. Evidence of which can be found at the Architectural Archives,

“Architecture Lemco and Nowicki Studio. Spring 1953 Row House

Exhibit No. 13”, accessed via http://hdl.library.upenn.edu/1017/d/ fisher/n2015100238 27. Adams and Southcott, “Blanche Lemco van Ginkel” Pioneering

Women of American Architecture. \ 28. BLANCHE LEMCO VAN GINKEL CM, FRAIC, RPP, RCA, Hon.FAIA,

FCIP, Resumé, https://raic.org/sites/raic.org/files/blanche_lemco_ van_ginkel_statement_of_achievements_1.pdf 29. This sentiment was noted in an email Lemco wrote to Mary

McLeod (Professor of Architecture at GSAPP, Columbia

University), on February 2nd, 2016, and which Prof. McLeod shared during a presentation she made during “For her

Record: Notes on the work of Blanche Lemco van Ginkel,” (Thursday November 12, 2020), University of Toronto, John H.

Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. 30. Ibid. 31. BLANCHE LEMCO VAN GINKEL CM, FRAIC, RPP, RCA, Hon.FAIA,

FCIP, Resumé 32. Adams and Southcott, “Blanche Lemco van Ginkel.” 33. Mimi Lobell, “The Buried Treasure: Women’s Ancient

Architectural Heritage,” Architecture: A Place for Women, eds.

Berkeley and McQuaid (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian

Institution Press, 1989): 139–57. Mimi Lobell, “The Philadelphia

School: An Architectural Philosophy.” Louis I. Kahn, l’uomo, il maestro, ed. Latour (Rome: Edizioni Kappa, 1986): 381–397.