The Outsider as insider

Abstract

The architects Louis Kahn (1901-1974) and Chloethiel Woodard Smith (1910-1992) were near contemporaries whose networks overlapped in multiple ways. Kahn’s best buildings offer transcendent experiences of community; Smith’s remain cherished, if far more ordinary, places to live and work. Although the level of fame the profession bestowed upon him eluded her, in the 1960s and early 1970s her singularity as a female architect working on a national scale led her to be frequently profiled in the popular press. Kahn began as an outsider because of his working-class Jewish background; Smith remained one because she was a woman, although she was highly ambivalent about, and -- when well enough established -- outrightly dismissive of being labeled a woman or – worse yet – lady architect. Each also benefited from their status as relatively privileged white Americans, while building for African Americans and in the Global South. Tracing the arc of their careers captures the opportunities for upward mobility that the postwar boom created in the United States, as well as ones that the Cold War bestowed upon its best-connected architects, even as it illuminates the obstacles that continued to hinder the progression of women in the profession.