 Welcome everyone, very, very excited about today's event and such a wonderful way to start the spring semester and really continue our strong commitment in sort of supporting BIPOC architects and in the past and in the future. And I'm particularly grateful for Mary McLeod to have organized this wonderful event, New Research in Black Women's History and Architecture. Also wanted to take a moment to welcome back to alumni from the school, who are just kind of wonderful to have you back with our Roberta Washington and Patricia Morton and just eager to learn more about Norma Merrick's Cleric and Beverly Greene and learn more about all the work Mary and Victoria have been doing on kind of exposing and pioneering women in architecture throughout history. So welcome everyone and Mary, thank you again. Thank you Amal and thank you Lila Cartilier for encouraging us to do this event. I'm so grateful to Amal. The moment I suggested that Norma Scalaric appeared on the website, she was said, let's do something. So it's great to have that kind of support. We also hope not only that you'll learn about these two fascinating women we'll be speaking had and Roberta will be speaking about, but that will inspire further research on Black women architects, on Black architects and women architects in general. I also wanna thank BWAF, Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation for sponsoring the website that Victoria Rosner and I have been co-editing and then on which Pat and Roberta have been fundamental which they've been fundamental and wrote not only the profiles that they'll be discussing today one is posted, one is coming up soon but they've also written each another profile on an early pioneering woman architect. Briefly outline the structure of the program after introducing the speakers. Victoria will provide an introduction to the website in some context about the research. Roberta Washington, you graduated from Columbia in 71 will speak about Beverly Lorraine Green and then Patricia Morton I think she finished in 83 will speak about Norma Merrick Scalaric and then we'll follow by questions and answers and hopefully a larger discussion which I'll try to launch off with some broad questions and then we really hope the audience will participate as well as the panelists and Victoria. I already mentioned one of the footnotes the link to Columbia, both of the two women and the speakers. I think I have to check this. Green finished her degree in 1945 and Scalaric 1950. So these really were pioneers. And I also wanna mention something very nice that's happening at GSAP that the research that we'll be discussing today coincides with the launch of the Norma Merrick Scalaric Scholarship Fund which we hope will increase diversity, equity at the school. And for those of you who have deep pockets I hope you'll contribute to it. Anyway, that's the sort of beginning structure. Start off with introducing the three speakers including my co-editor of the website Victoria Rosner and someone I'm actually fortunate to be co-teaching with this semester. Victoria is what you might call a Columbia lifer. She went to Columbia College. She got her doctorate in English and I was lucky to meet her first when she asked me to participate on her doctoral committee, a kind of shock. What am I doing on an English dissertation? But she's been one of those really innovative scholars doing interdisciplinary work and the intersections between literature and architecture and her dissertation led to her first prize winning book Modernism and Architecture of Private Life published in 2005. Currently Victoria is Dean of Academic Affairs at Columbia and teaches in the English and Comparative Literature Department. Besides co-editing pioneering women she's also co-edited and edited other volumes the Cambridge Companion to the Bloomsbury Group in 2015 and a book titled The Global and the Intimate Feminism in Our Time of the Year earlier. She just published a wonderful new book. I'm gonna show it to you, Machines for Living. Oh, I'm not very good at this with the web which came out this year, Oxford University Press and one other thing I'd like to mention she's the founder and co-director of a working group at Columbia for the Center for the Study of Social Difference on the frontline, Nursing in the Pandemic started in 2018, a response to Ebola and now all the more relevant with COVID. Okay, the next, I think that was my laundry machine telling me there's other parts of life. Okay, the next speaker is Patricia Morton. No, I got that in the wrong order, sorry. Our next speaker is Roberta Washington whom I'm delighted to introduce. I first got to know her through VWAF and working on the website with her on her profiles. I encourage you and I think Victoria will show it to look at one of her other profile Georgia Louise Harris Brown it's an amazing feat of scholarship and a few news of back stories of how she worked out the personal life of this fascinating figure. I think you'd be in awe of her as I am. She got her Bachelor of BA from Howard for MS in architecture in that old but very relevant program, Hospital in Health from Columbia, part of the architecture school at the time and was in that amazing group of 25 black students who came to the school after the events of 68. And I think it's kind of invitation for all of us to rethink that moment as she appears in Sharon Sutton's book when the IVs were black. She then worked in Mozambique from 77 to 81, started her own firm in 1983 and has been practicing in Harlem, right near us all. An amazing practice that does new and rehabilitation work in housing, education, medical facilities and also preservation. I encourage all of you to look at her Barnard Environment Magnet School and New Haven, which is actually represents with the title of one of the most environmentally friendly buildings of recent times and one award for that. She also mentioned a few other projects. I can't exhaust them. I did preservation on Aster Row in Harlem, Jazz and Negro Baseball Museum in Kansas City and built the African Burial Ground Center. She became a fellow in the AIA in 2006 and has had huge leadership roles as a past president of the National Organization of Minority Architects. Noma was on the New York Landscape Commission and Central Harlem Community Board. She's been working for years on black architects in New York State and contributed to Drex Burlox Biographical Dictionary of African American Architects, 1865 to 1945. Now to turn to Pat, whom I've known since she was a student. Am I allowed to admit that? She studied at Yale as an undergraduate, got her M. Arc at Columbia and then received her doctorate at Princeton. She's now teaching a tenured professor at the University of California Riverside, where she's in the Media and Cultural Studies Department, another interdisciplinary sort and also Chair of Urban Studies. She wrote a groundbreaking book on hybrid modernities on the 1931 World's Fair, which believe me was important to my own work on the 30s and I learned a lot from Pat. She's written extensively on race, gender and identity for the website. Besides writing about Scholaric, she wrote about an even earlier Columbia graduate was a long name, Verna Cook Salomonsky's Shipway. And again, I alert you to look at that work. She's currently working on a project called Paying for Public Life on Charles Moore. And I would like to alert you all to a forthcoming article on Moore's Church Street South Public Housing Project deals with issues of public life, race and urban renewal. She's an institutional leader. I am sort of struck by how both Roberta and Pat are so engaged in organizational leadership. She's the former editor of the Journal of Society of Architectural Historians. Now is the first VP of SAH where she's worked hard to diversify the organization. And she also mentions on her own CV that she's part of, I'm not gonna give the right title, the Tennis Union in LA, where she co-authored an article, Affordable Housing is a Scam. So thank you all for participating and I'll turn it over now to Victoria. Thank you, Mary. Thank you for that enormously generous introduction. I have to start by saying what I think is probably true for many of us here today, which is that Mary has been a beacon to me my entire career. And I'm so honored to have been had the chance to work on pioneering movement of American architecture with her and to be teaching with her this semester. Full disclosure, my current book is dedicated to her. So there you have it. And it's also a great pleasure for me to be speaking at least metaphorically at GSAP, since from the time that I was a graduate student in English and I wandered into Avery Library and hoped to make my way, it's just been a source of great delight and inspiration for me. So I'm just gonna talk quickly. The main attraction here obviously are hearing about these two fascinating architects. I'm just gonna set up a little bit of context by talking about the larger archival project that has produced the research that you'll hear about today. I also wanna quickly surface some of the methodological commitments of the project, which I hope perhaps we'll return to during the question period. So as Mary started to say, the research you'll hear about today was undertaken under the auspices of the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation born 20 years ago when its architect founder realized that work by women was barely mentioned in architectural history. This discovery likely will not come as a surprise to any of you, but it was a shock at the time to Beverly Willis. An important part of the foundation's work is this project that you'll be hearing about, pioneering women of American architecture, a web-based archive launched with the support of the National Endowment for the Arts. The project offers a way of, we hope of writing women back into US architectural history. Its initial ambition was to support the creation of in-depth profiles of 50 women architects born before 1940, all written by scholars and based on original primary research. The work we think we hope offers both a needed correction to the historical record and a way to redress the significant documented disparities between men and women in the architecture profession, disparities that have persisted even as women's enrollment in architecture degree programs has increased. These disparities are especially extreme for black women. If you don't know these numbers already, they will stun you according to the most recent figures from the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards in 2020, just 0.4% of registered architects in the US were black women. Just pausing on that for a second. So what can we know about the reasons that black women don't choose or end up leaving the architecture profession and how do we turn around this terrible trend? History has to be one of our best guides. Surely one important factor is the lack of role models in the historical record. And I often think about this question in relation to my own discipline of English. Virginia Woolf, as many of you know, famously told an audience of women undergraduates in 1928 that the only way that they could hope to become writers was to learn about women writers of the past. As Woolf put it, we think back through our mothers if we are women. There were vanishingly few canonical women writers Woolf could point to back in 1928 and none of them were black. The situation in literature may be slightly better now, but in architecture, we have to ask how able black women architects are to think back through their mothers. That is to say how often is the work of black women architects included in the curriculum? The erasure of women's and especially black women's contributions to architecture from the historical record has a range of pernicious effects. It renders black women's accomplishments in architecture invisible. It perpetuates the idea that important achievements in architecture are the exclusive preserve of white men and it hands down to the next generation an inaccurately all white male history. In the pioneering women of American architecture project, we hope to take a more inclusive approach. The archive which is open for viewing but still in progress documents the lives and careers as I've said of 50 women architects who made significant contributions to the built environment in the US. Each profile is assembled through primary research, digging through sources to trace the arcs of women architects careers in the first half of the 20th century. I should say right away that the names of those profiles were selected by a national jury like any list of 50. It's idiosyncratic of course, not meant to establish the top 50 but rather to offer, we hope the starting point and we are still collecting names if people today have more to offer. Before I give you a quick look at the site, I just wanna say a word about its biographical approach to architectural history. Now, if you'd asked me when I was a graduate student in philosophy hall if I thought that biography was a useful methodology for feminism, I probably would have laughed or maybe like scoffed is probably more accurate. Such an approach was explained to me was taught to me as recuperative, reparative history, going to the archives, uncovering the ignored or suppressed work, restoring it to the historical record. I was taught this work was done by our feminist foremothers, it was complete. And further, the methodology was criticized as like add women and stir for failing to destabilize the gendered assumptions that allowed men's works to predominate in the first place and relying on a kind of feminine supplement to correct that imbalance. So I don't dismiss that critique but I don't feel bound by it at this point. I think that telling stories of women's experiences in the professions does more than add women's names and stir. It also documents and bears witness to the uneven playing field that professional women have had to negotiate forever. Further in the aggregate, it shows how the history of architecture might look a little different when women's work and black women's work is included in the picture. Let me fill in a tiny bit of that story for you. In having the honor and privilege of working on the archives and the stories and the profiles and pioneering women, we've seen how these architects had to be fearless, resilient and relentless. Nothing like the solitary figureheads who cast their long shadows over the history of architecture. Ethel Furman, the first black woman architect to practice in Virginia, endured the humiliation of having her construction documents rejected by building officials when she presented them under her own name and having them accepted when submitted under the name of a male colleague. Norma Sklarich was rejected by 19 architecture firms and had to accept work as a draftsperson. Georgia Louise Harris Brown moved from the US to Brazil in search of a place where she could practice architecture without being limited by prejudice but throughout her career, rarely received credit for her own designs. If you spend some time on the pioneering women website, one thing you might observe is that a number of the women there are quoted saying something like, I wanna be known as an architect, not as a woman architect. There are exceptions, of course, and you'll hear I think today that Beverly-Lyrian Green was certainly one of them. I'm very much aware that we might be going against these women's intents by collecting their profiles on a site explicitly devoted to women of architecture. I'm also aware that we are doing this because the fact that gender, race, and ethnicity are central reasons why their names are not well known. Can we really leave these categories out of the historical picture when they continue to structure and determine professional outcomes today and to dictate the way that history is recorded? And I hope this is a topic we might come back to in our discussion. So before I close out, I wanna give you just a quick look at the site. So here is our homepage, which features, as you can see, above all the names of the women architects profiled on the site. The list currently includes just about 30 of the 50 and we're still engaged in writing, editing, and posting with more to come actually, I think as soon as next week. The main listing here is alphabetical. The site also offers chronological and pictorial axes. There's also a short introduction to the site, a section for acknowledgement on the list of the many sponsors who've underwritten the project. But of course, the main objective interest is the profiles. I'll just briefly open one, Roberta's amazing profile of Georgia Louise Harris Brown. You'll see first a picture of the subject when we could get one, which we almost always could, but sometimes they're not great quality. Some top line information, where they place a place of birth, major projects, education, and then a lengthy profile. Beginning with a summary, well illustrated with photographs. I love, love, love this picture, which is why I wanted to show this one. And so on and so forth. These profiles are intended not just as a corrective to the absence of women in the historical record, but we hope as a means to critique and reshape that record. In bringing together the almost 50 scholars who worked on this project, a few authors as you can see wrote more than one. We think we have also assembled one of the largest scholarly groups ever to focus exclusively on women's architecture in the US and to place the work of women and today, black women squarely at the center of architectural history. We hope that eventually our 50 profiles can be seen as more than group biography. We hope they can also help us to rethink our notions of how the work of architecture gets done and who does it. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. I also just wanted to mention and not fable was the co-editor, the co-writer of the George and Louise Harris Brown profile. And it was amazing that it took two different nationalities to dig out her rich career with Roberta focusing on the early part and not on the Brazilian half, but quite an accomplishment. Roberta, it turned it over to you now to talk about your next profile. So to start, I want to say that I think that what was just said in terms of how women are placed in history is really important. And of course it's more important, I think, if you're talking about black women to place them in history. And so what I'm starting off with is a look at where Louise, me, where Beverly Lorraine Green starts in history and to do that next. And to do that, I did an architectural timeline, but my timeline is I think related to Beverly Green, specifically, in that she's black and she's female. So if you're black and you're talking about architecture in the US, you have to look at where we come from, where black folks, black women came from. And you have to look at what was happening when architecture in the US was getting off this beat. And so if we go back to like 1845, I know that sounds like a far travel distance, but we look there just to see what was happening in terms of Americans traveling to Paris to study architecture and the creation then of one of the first architectural firms in 1853. And then looking at the American Institute of Architects and when they were created in 1857 and looking at when the capital dome that we discussed this week a lot being finished in 1863, next. And then things were happening during those times, like there was a civil war going on for a lot of the activities that I just described. And that civil war ended in Rome in 1865, making it possible then for black men to think about other careers. Women were thinking too, but there was more activity on the side of men looking at professions. And how is it that they even got the opportunity to think about architecture? And we know what's happened in terms of the reconstruction period, a term, a period when actually the rights of blacks were held back and Jim Crowism started. So some things that could have seemed like really great opportunities at the close of the war in the end didn't quite work out that way. And racism and discrimination, but just all out racism became the law of half of the land. But then we know that in 1875, Mary Louise Page graduates in architecture from the University of Illinois. And about that same time, the first black architect is working in Washington DC, Calvin Brent, who was designing churches and homes and he'd never been a slave, which gave him a little head start. He lived in DC and he was freed in DC. So he did have a head start, but still it was that period when anyone, any black figure came about as an architect and had, and could say they had a practice. And we also see that Louise Black, but then started her practice in 1888. And then we look at what was happening with black architects and see Robert Taylor. And I had to say senior because we're going to also meet another Robert Taylor, his son, but this Robert Taylor graduates and is the first black man to graduate in architecture from MIT. And that was in 1892. But right after that, George Washington Cover approached him and asked him to come to Tuskegee. And at Tuskegee, they worked at starting something that became a school of architecture. At first it was drafting classes and it was based on what Robert Taylor had learned and how he had learned it at MIT. And yes, and then we had Robert Taylor and yes, and then we have the first African-American licensed in 1902 in New Jersey. So this is the background to Beverly Greene, her career and the fact that she had some choices and the fact that she was able to accomplish some of the things that she had to do or that she had to do to become an architect. But there, so there is a backstory and this is that backstory, next. And as was mentioned before, there is at least one other woman and I think there are at least three other women who you could say were architects before Beverly Greene. Now, these were women who did architecture who designed one or two buildings in some cases, in one case, in the first case, the Etho-Madison Furman case is said that she has more than 200 buildings that she designed. And one of her buildings, her first major building was just a house. Her father was a contractor, so I suppose that that helped. But she did a house in 1923 and this was a house for the first, it was the house where Virginia's first black governor was born, it was his family home. And we also have Elizabeth Carter Brooks, who in 1906 designed this home for the aged in Bedford, Massachusetts. And in this, but she had an opportunity that few women had and a few black people had and that was to go to a design school, which I think was called Sloane, but she went to a design school and she learned the basics of architecture there. And this is one of the results. And then the third person is Amaze. The Meredith and she's like the person who was spoken of before, who was described before as a person who is an architect, who was an architect. Her design was a design for a house that she built in Virginia. So there are two actually, there are two women from Virginia. And so we have one who did several buildings and was considered, if you look in other history books now, as one of Virginia's first female architects. But Amaze was amazing in that, and she was also a Columbia graduate, although she graduated from the School of Art. She has a bachelor's and a master's from the Columbia Teachers College. But she was in New York and she also established a, in Long Island, a housing development. She and her sister and she bought land and they developed it. And she designed many of the houses that were placed on the land. And so these three women are like what was there, although it's not like a definite, it's not taken as a definite, that Beverly Greene actually knew about these people because as we know, Barry Little is written about black women who are pioneers in anything. And the Little that's written is not usually national. But these women were all written about in their areas and during their times, which is how I could find them. And I would like to also say that they each lived for a period in New York. And Ferdinand worked for one of New York City's first black architects. And Brooks ran a women's development program in Brooklyn for several years before going back to bed for Massachusetts. So I think that with this backdrop, you can see that there is some history, but like I said, I think it only really helps if you know it. And I don't think that it was as well known as it is now, which is still not that great. Next. So this is our subject, Beverly Lorraine Greene. And she was the first black woman licensed as an architect as far as it can be determined. And she was licensed in 1942. She was born in 1915. Let's go to the next slide. So she was born in Chicago. Her parents were from different states and they were part of that 1930s migration of black folks to Chicago. Now we don't know enough about Beverly to know why she chose architecture. She did live in an area which was predominantly black and considered, I mean, it was called the black belt, but it was considered one of the worst areas in Chicago in terms of housing. Now that may have inspired her to go to college to study architecture. And so in 1932, she was accepted and started attending the University of Illinois. And she was one of the few black students in her class but also one, there still weren't a lot of women. And this is a photograph of Beverly and classmates at the University of Illinois taken of members, of student members of the American Society of Civil Engineers. And Beverly is there on the left side with a circle, if you can see it in the back row, like three people over. But this isn't the only thing she joined. She was an outgoing kind of person. She wasn't a real wallflower type. She was interested in meeting people and doing things. And so in addition to belonging to this club, she also belonged to the drama club. And one of the things that I found or got I was able to get was a letter from a classmate of hers who was describing her as, well, he described her as mostly quiet but she knew what she was doing basically. And about her at that time is also important in understanding what she was all about. Next. Okay, so this is a article. This is a cut out from an African-American newspaper and it's announcing a presentation of a scheme for a housing project. So to explain how we got here, one of the things that Beverly did was to meet other black architects and work with other black architects. But she also was interested in social development a group of black architects, including people who were part of the urban league in Chicago decided that they should propose a housing plan. Now this is in the end, it sort of morphs into what is now known as the Ida B. Wells housing project but it started off as a presentation from a group of black architects and city and civic leaders who wanted housing for the south side, which is the side I was describing as where Beverly's family originally lived. And one of the main points about the presentation is that it was before there was a Chicago housing project and it came about, it seems because certain black architects, certain black politicians thought that they had power and thought that they had some influence over getting some housing, getting some money for housing. And so this is what they proposed. And at the same time, there were other groups proposing housing but none of those groups had proposed at this point. Next. Okay. So there was a meeting at a party called a party that was organized by Robert Taylor Jr. This is the son of the other Robert Taylor who was the first black graduate of MIT. And this was a party, it was called a party in a newspaper, in a social column item in a newspaper. And this party was supposed to be a party to honor Paul Williams, who was traveling back to California from Washington, DC, where he'd been working with Hilliard Johnson. And the reason I'm talking about the party is because Beverly Green was one of the attendees, the invitees at the party. And it just shows that even though she was just 22 years old, she knew what was happening in terms of the world of black architecture or architecture altogether. I think she would have known more than the average woman or a black American who was thinking of becoming, thinking of wanting to become an architect. And the fact that Robert Taylor Jr. was there to support her and his father having been an architect. He also was an architect, this Robert Taylor, who became eventually the first black commissioner of the Chicago Housing Authority. He attended Howard before. But at the party, there were people who were to be instrumental in providing, to be instrumental in making sure that the project that these, this group of people, including people at the Urban League and including the organizer of the National Technical Association, that all of these people were influential in terms of getting more than they thought they could get. And I think it's really like an untold story of how they were able to accomplish what they were in terms of getting the housing on the south side, which eventually morphed into the Ida B. Wells Housing Project. But the other point I wanted to make was that Beverly had mentors. She had people who were rooting for her. And I think that that also is something that's lacking in the lives of some other women and some other black, young men who may want to be architects. And that it helps if you don't have even a mentor, if you know and at least have a chance to speak to other folks who are doing what you would like to be doing. Next. And in terms of what Beverly's life was beyond her involvement in the housing project, she had a full life. One of the things that she was most involved in though was being a part of the AKA, the Delta sorority. Sororities were relatively new and this sorority had been established at Howard University some years, a few years before. But she took to this and throughout her entire life, even after she moved to New York, she was very involved with the deltas. And this is just a newspaper clipping showing her at a Delta meeting, planning for a Delta event. And the newspapers are full of articles that name her in association with different events that the deltas are planning. So she had that going for her but she was also interested in other things. She working with her mother established a girls club which ran for a couple of years at least in Chicago on the South side. And she also worked with a political group that was raising money to buy ambulances, to send to Spain during this, their civil war. So she was politically active in addition to wanting to do architecture and to accomplish her goals and architecture. Next, this is a photograph of the Ida B. Wells housing project as it was opening. This was like from opening day. And the result of the, so from the first newspaper article that we saw that talked about the need for housing there and the fact that in addition to the need, there was a group and she was a part of the group it seems that wanted to not only have the city do a project here, but they also wanted for the, which they wanted for the new housing, the Chicago housing authority to hire black architects and black drafters. And so it was a two prong fight. And so it took time and it took a lot more time than they anticipated, but eventually the new Chicago housing authority did place housing, decided to place housing more or less where the original request or plan or suggestion said it should be. And so it was there. And then the second part was to make sure that black architects and drafters got an opportunity to work on it. And that was maybe even more difficult to do, but they were, they seem to have been successful. Although I once did talk to people at the Chicago housing authority about this project and they have no idea of anything that involved black architects and drafters. They don't know that. And basically I think that the information that I have comes from the black press, but it's a story that's told like week after week. So it's not just one article and then you don't hear anything about it for another year. There were regular articles that talked about what was happening. And it was through reading those articles that I found out about the first black architect who was being hired to be on a team, but not this team. And later I found out that Beverly Greene herself was selected as a person who would be hired as an architect with the title of architect. And it did not specifically say for the Ida B. Wells housing. It said that her title will be architect at the Chicago housing authority. And during this period or near the, or before she left Chicago to come to New York, she also was listed in the census as a supervisor of a technical center. But there's no more explanation to that. But I think it could be that she ran the drafting part or office that's connected to the Ida B. Wells projects. In addition, another I guess more evidence of why I think that she was much more involved in the development and the design of the project than is normally that was thought before is because there were several articles about her giving presentations to black folks from Chicago about what was happening with the Ida B. Wells project. She did updates and at one of the presentations, it was a presentation for black women who were looking for careers. And at one of these presentations, she's talking about the size of the apartments. This is before they're built, how much they're gonna charge per each size and all of that. But at the end of the article, Beverly Greene is making an appeal to other young black women there to consider architecture as a profession. And there's another article about her when she's in New York, where she also talks about architecture as something that black women should think about. Okay, next. Okay, so she leaves Chicago. And when she came to New York, so one thing I should say about her for a second is that Beverly Greene had a way of making friends who were making friends with people who were connected with newspapers. When she was in Chicago, there were two social editors, social article editors, who were very close with her and wrote about her. And when she came to New York, there were two different writers for the Amsterdam News who wrote about her. And which is a good thing because that's a source of some material, right? And not everyone has that luck. Anyway, so if you look now online, there are many articles, there are just a bunch of articles about Beverly Greene designing Stuyberson Town. What is that about? Well, it's not the truth, but it's based on an article that where she gave an interview to Amsterdam News that was published in Drek Wilson's book. And so what I wrote was that from that article, it seemed that Beverly Greene moved to New York in 1944 because she wanted to work on Stuyberson Town, which was just a bare plot of land for as far as you could see, right? But they had apparently advertised in Chicago. And so she decided that she wanted the job. She applied for the position and then she thought she wouldn't get it because after she applied, she read somewhere else that Stuyberson Town was announcing that no black people would be allowed to live in Stuyberson Town. So she thought that if black folks aren't allowed to live there, then certainly they're not going to hire me. But they did hire her and she was the first architect hired there. That during that time though, she had other ideas about what else she could do in New York now that she was here. And one of them was to attend Columbia. So she describes how she goes over to Columbia during one of her days, her first or second day in New York and she applies. And then on the third day, she finds out that she's accepted and that she has money to go to Columbia. And so she quit her job. But online, some people who are telling the story, second and third hand, in a second or third hand manner, just they'd missed the part about she never went back. And so you can see articles, they talk about celebrity architect, unknown celebrity architect designs Stuyberson Town. So, but she didn't, as you now know. But she graduated from Columbia. And so then she had three degrees, right? Because she originally had a bachelor of architecture degree in housing. And then she had a master's architecture degree in planning, but she wanted a master of architecture degree in Columbia, from Columbia. And that's what she got. So her life in New York is pretty different from Chicago. But I think that she knew people here because just as she was at a party where she's meeting the number one black architect in the country, maybe the world, she had connections here too. So she would have known other architects, right? But one of the things that she did was to get involved with Canna, which was an organization council for the advancement of the Negro in architecture, which was an organization made up of black and white architects who together wanted to advance the careers and the livelihoods and the possibilities of black architects. And so she joined that as many of the architects, black architects, licensed architects, especially at the time. And she, through Canna, met architects who she later worked with, it seems. And Isidore Rosenfield was one of the architects and along with Percy Eiffel, who were part of Canna. But those two had been part of another organization before Canna that basically also had white and black architects working to advance and improve the situation of black architects. And she did work for Rosenfield. And I only know because I interviewed someone, the relative of someone else who did, who said that she did. And the other little photo there is Percy Eiffel, who was also a major player in Canna. And Canna is the organization also that had a major exhibit in, I can't remember the year now, 1950 something, which was one of the first large exhibition of the work of black architects. Next. And these are some of the guys who I think would have been her mentors, both in Chicago and in New York. Charles Duke, who was an architect and an engineer and the founder of the National Technical Association, would have worked with her, did work with her on the Ida B. Wells Housing Project. And he was very involved in that project from the beginning to end. And he's the architect who did the drawing and with the drawing that I showed, but also all of the floor plans and all of the information that they put together to send to Washington when their group was requesting that there be a built up A housing project on the south side. And Roderick O'Neill is an architect who was was like the second black architect in Chicago and the first one to have a downtown office, but he hired Louise Harris Brown, the previous subject of a write up that I did that we just looked at before. So he was important to her, but I know through other interviews that Roger O'Neill knew her and talked to her and that they were friends. Although I thought at one point that she had worked there, but I'm not so sure she did. I just know that they were really good friends and that he was a mentor for her. In New York, she had Conrad Johnson and Percy Eiffel who were partners who had their own business and who did a lot of work in Harlem, but in other parts of New York too. And it was Conrad Johnson who was working at Rosenfield in Rosenfield's office before Beverly Green, when Beverly Green was hired there. Next, in addition to Rosenfield, she, Beverly Green also worked for Edward Durell Stone. And although we don't know exactly what she did, basically we know that there was some work at Sarah Lawrence College and that there was some work on a theater at the Fine Arts Center at the University of Arkansas. Next. And she also worked for Marcel Breuer and she worked on the Gross Point Library in Gross Point, Michigan. And she also worked on the Winthrop Rockefeller House and these were projects in 49 or 50 that she worked on. And so there's just a sample of her drafting because it's like really rare to find evidence of an architect's drawing skill or whatever, but to see it is important because it reinforces that this person, at least in some areas, you can say what the person did, right? So we know that she did that. And there's a letter that she wrote in reference to some things at the Gross Point Library. And I think that the letter is important because it's all I can only say that she was at least a drafter, but I don't really know beyond that, but the letter suggests that she was more than a drafter. So I think that's important. Next. And this is another project that she worked on, the UN Building in France. And there's a little excerpt from a book that mentions her and another woman working in Brewery's office in 1951. And the writer is saying that it's just really, it's rare to see two women, well, actually it's rare to see two women of any color working in a major architectural firm and having responsibilities, but he's naming Beverly Green. He's mentioning Beverly Green as one of these women who has that. Next. And we don't really know all that she did here. And we're not, we can't even say exactly what other architectural firms she worked for, but we do know that there are two projects that she did some design on, right? One was a church with the first floor of a building. And we don't really have much in terms of what it was in terms of drawings, like what is it that was actually done, but we know that these two projects are projects that she did drawings for. And the Unity Funeral Home was a building that was completely renovated. It was a shell, but she did the work to make it a funeral home. And she may have done other projects, but we don't know that. So we'll just go on with these two next. And I think then that is, those are the high points or the major points that I want to tell you about Beverly Lorraine Green. So she died in August of 1957. And she had her memorial service or her funeral was at the funeral home that she designed. This is a before picture, but her funeral home was, her funeral was at that place. And so because of that, we do know some of the things that we know about her because of obituaries that followed. So that is my story about Beverly Green. Thanks. Thank you so much, Roberta. It's a rich story. Pat, I turn it over to you to deal with Norma Skolart. Thanks again. Yes, thank you, thank you so much. I'd like to thank Mary and Victoria for asking me to be part of this project. It was a real pleasure to work on Norma Marek Sklarik. And the words pioneering, groundbreaking and trailblazing are often used in reference to her. She was even called the Rosa Parks of Architecture when she was given an award. And this is because she achieved so many firsts. And you'll see as I go through the story, she was the first time and time again. She was not the first woman or a black woman architect, however, and I think that there was something in the Q&A and I think that's been corrected. So as you'll see, she was among the first. I would say her intelligence, her talent and tenacity allowed her to overcome racism and sexism and become an incredible architect and leader in the profession. She was born April 15th, 1926 in Harlem and she was the only child of Walter Marek, a doctor and Amy Marek, a seamstress both of whom had migrated from Trinidad. She grew up in Harlem and Brooklyn and attended predominantly white schools including Hunter High School, a selective public school for girls where she excelled in math and science but also showed a talent in the fine arts. And this aptitude for math and art prompted her father to suggest a career in architecture. She attended Barnard College for just one year, 1944-45 which was what she needed to as a prerequisite for admission to the School of Architecture at Columbia. By her own account, architecture school was difficult. Many of her classmates were veterans of World War II so they were older. Some had bachelor's or master's degrees already and they collaborated on assignments whereas she commuted to school from Brooklyn and struggled to finish her work on the subway or at home alone. And she said later, the competition was keen but I had a stick to it attitude and never gave up. She graduated from Columbia in 1950 with a B. Arc one of only two women and the only African-American in her class. Next slide. And I would just say I don't have pictures from this early part of her life. I think they truly exist but I wasn't able to find them when I did the profile. After graduating from Columbia, scleric based discrimination in her search for work as an architect applying to and being rejected by 19 firms. That's what I've already been saying. As she put it, they weren't hiring women or they weren't hiring African-Americans and I didn't know which was working against me. So she took a civil service job as a junior draftsperson in the city of New York's public department of public works. According to her former partner, Kate Diamond, scleric received the highest score on the civil service test when she applied for this job. And the department was required by law to hire in the order of test scores. So she should have been the first to be hired. To avoid hiring a black woman, however, they postponed all hiring until they were forced by short staffing to offer her position. Feeling her talents and skills were underused in the city position, she took an architecture licensing exam, the exam, in 1954, passing it on her first try and becoming the first licensed African-American woman architect in the state of New York. After being registered, she worked for a brief time in an architectural firm earning the position despite a bad reference from her supervisor at the Department of Public Works who resented her. She said, it had to be personal. He was not a licensed architect and I was a young kid. I looked like a teenager and I was black and a licensed architect. And apparently her coworkers also resented her. At her new firm to her disappointment, she was given menial tasks such as designing bathroom layouts. Next slide. In 1955, scleric was offered a position at Skidmore Owens and Merrill. At SOM, she was given more responsibility on increasingly large-scale projects. And in fact, she talks in a number of different memoirs about how her boss really relied on her and said, you do all the hard work, which she didn't know at the time. In her time at SOM, scleric took on highly technical work that more experienced architects could not complete. One of the more extraordinary things about her life is that during this period, she was a single mother of two children having been married and divorced twice. She was married twice while she was a Colombian fact. Her mother cared for her children where scleric worked. In 1959, she became the first African-American woman member of the American Institute of Architects. So this is where we start to run into the first after first phenomenon with scleric. Next slide. In 1960, after five years at SOM, she relocated and took a job at Gruen Associates in Los Angeles where one of her sons was living. At Gruen, she was aware of extra scrutiny from her supervisor because she was the only black woman in the firm. As a new employee without a car, she took rides to work with a white male colleague who was consistently late. In her words, she said, it took only one week before the boss came and spoke to me about being late. Yet he had not noticed that the young man had been late for two years. My solution was to buy a car since I, the highly visible employee, had to be punctual. In 1962, she became the first black woman licensed as an architect in California. Scleric rose to the position of Gruen's director of architecture responsible for hiring and overseeing staff architects and coordinating technical aspects of major projects. And I love this image, which I just found. I did, unfortunately, when I was doing the research for the project, for the profile, I did not have this image, but I was delighted to see how she's holding the attention of all the white men around her and with such an ease and such a look of power. So she was very involved in a number of really major projects. So next slide, including the California mart in Los Angeles, 1863. Next. Fox Plaza, San Francisco, 1966. Next. The iconic San Bernardino City Hall in San Bernardino from 1972, 73. Next. The even more famous Pacific design center which she worked on with Cesar Peli. Next. And the United States Embassy in Tokyo. Next. And here you see her with the drawings for the Tokyo, the American Embassy in Tokyo. Like many women architects and corporate firms, most of, for most of her career, Scleric served as a project manager rather than a design architect. Although she is credited with Cesar Peli as design architect on the US Embassy in Tokyo. I guess those are not drawings, those are photos. Her collaboration with Peli resulted in several like my modern icons as I've already mentioned such as the Pacific Design Center and the San Bernardino City Hall. Although she was not a design architect, her formal technical skills and rigorous work ethic made her a brilliant project manager and propelled her to the top position, to a top position in the firm. She stayed at Gruen for 20 years during which time she married her third husband of a Bauhaus-trained wealth Scleric and associate at Gruen who died in 1984. And she served on the architecture faculty at UCLA and USC. Next. In 1980, Scleric was the first African-American elected to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects. In fact, she was the first woman in the Los Angeles AIA chapter to be awarded this honor. That same year, she joined the Los Angeles firm Welton Beckett Associates as a vice president. And she was responsible. Next. For a terminal one at Los Angeles airport, this large project that had to be completed before the start of the 1984 Olympic Games which she was able to do. Her prominence and success made her a role model for younger architects. According to Diamond, K Diamond quote, for Norma to be leading the entire department of a major architectural practice and doing truly high visibility cutting edge work was something that we all looked to and we all took pleasure from. She was teaching, she was engaged, she was available to young architects, particularly to women and minority architects. Next. Her next professional affiliation broke more barriers when in 1985 she co-founded the women owned firm Siegel Scleric Diamond with Kate Diamond. You see on the right there. At the time it was the largest woman owned architectural firm in the United States and she was the first African-American woman to co-own in architectural practice. Most of their work however was small scale and low budget. So after four years, she left the partnership because they were not able to get commissions for large skills projects and she missed the income and the challenges that they brought. So next. She joined GERDI partnership as principal of project management where she worked on the Mall of America which you see here in Minneapolis among many other big projects. She retired from the firm in 1992. During the nineties, she was very involved with public and professional service. She lectured at Howard University, Columbia, elsewhere mentored younger minority and women architects. And this is really important in regards to what what Roberta was saying about green because Scleric said she herself had no mentor. She said, quote, in architecture I have absolutely no role model. I was happy to be a role model for others that follow. She served on many professional boards and committees and then in 19, sorry, 2008. Next, the AIA awarded, honored her with the Whitney M. Young Junior Award which recognizes an architect or organization embodying the profession's responsibility to address social issues. And in accepting the Whitney Award, she asserted, quote, I stand here as living proof that no matter what your race or gender architecture is one field where your hard work perseverance and talent can be recognized and rewarded. Scleric concluded, so don't let anyone try to tell you otherwise. It is with great pleasure and humility that I accept this award. Next. On February 6, 2012, after a lifetime of extraordinary accomplishments and leadership, Scleric died of heart failure in her home in Pacific Palisades, California. Her legacy, however, continues to garner acknowledgement. In 2013, the AIA California Council established the Norma Scleric Award to be, quote, confirmed by the AIA California Council Board of Directors on an architect or an architecturally-oriented organization in recognition of their social responsibility. In 2019, she was posthumously awarded the AIA LA, or Gold Medal, by the AIA Los Angeles Chapter. Most notably for her future scholarship on Scleric, Michelle Joan Wilkinson, the curator of architecture and design at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, has established the Norma Merrick Scleric Archive at the museum. And some of these images come from that archive. And this is very exciting. I had no archive when I worked on the profile. In a keynote address at a 2019 Princeton University event, Norma Merrick Scleric redefining public, Wilkinson quoted a 1975 letter that Scleric had written to the Vice Chancellor at UCLA, where she was a faculty member. Quote, as far as I know, I am the first and only black woman architect licensed in California. I am not proud to be a unique statistic, but embarrassed by our system, which has caused my dubious distinction. This letter demonstrates her sharp cognizance of the inequities embedded in the profession and her efforts to counter them. As a practitioner and a mentor, Scleric broke ground knowing she faced long lords as a black woman architect. But nevertheless, she persisted, thrived and built community in spite of the anti-black racism and structural sexism of the profession. She continues to serve as an exemplar and to gain recognition for her remarkable accomplishments. Thank you. Thank you, Pat. And thank you again, Roberta. I think we have just a rich image of two very strong, impressive women. I wanna open it up soon because of the hour to the audience. But I mentioned to both Roberta and Pat three issues that I thought they might wanna respond to, although they've addressed them to an extent in their talk. The first one was research. You heard the challenges of working on architects where there are no official archives. It's great to hear that Scleric now has one. And the particular challenges they had on it, perhaps anything else you wanna comment about that. I noticed Roberta said black newspapers, mentioned interviews, any other kind of advice, especially to the students in the audience doing research, the first thing we usually do is just go to some public archive. What do you do when you don't have it? I think that what you just mentioned, it is like looking up going, it is going and looking through library files, black libraries primarily. I would think you usually have files on whoever's considered important black folks. And so that's a start. I spent a lot of time at the Schomburg in the beginning, not just because they, I thought they had files, but they have, in those days they had card catalogs, but they have access to information from other, or various black newspapers and magazines and who's who in black America. And so those things were all helpful. And that's what I sort of depended on. But it's really good when you have a subject like Beverly Greene, who newspaper writers, feature writers liked to write about. I found an article that someone wrote about her going to a tennis match with the forgotten name, woman who was the first black champion in terms of tennis in New York. But she's listed in the article of people who, about people who went to the match. Like that's weird, you know? So sometimes you're lucky and you get someone who everybody writes about, but there are cases where no one is writing about. Yeah, it was much more like that with the case of Norma Sklarik, that she was actually more covered in her early years by papers like the New York age. That was invaluable because there were all these little social tidbits. And I am so grateful that those newspapers who are online now have been digitized because they're an incredibly rich resource. And I totally agree with Roberta. Really have to look at the black press, black libraries. That's where you find the material. Honestly, there was so much misinformation about Sklarik that I had to really sort through as many sources as I could find. The Wikipedia entry was mostly wrong. So it's just like just almost counter information as well. But yeah, also there's an audio file with an interview with her that was very helpful, although she's kind of non-committal about a lot of things. But still every little piece of evidence I would have to make sure I had another source because people got things wrong in interviews and it was really interesting. Very, very difficult research. I was even struck how we had trouble trying to correct the spelling of Beverly Lorraine Green because everybody spelled it once because of a typo with one R. And even when I corrected it on Wikipedia just the other day, I got a mean email saying, what's your source? And I said, you know, the Columbia records and the world scholar on her it sure made that it's two R's and it was a misprint. I don't know what the Wikipedia image says now, but there are these just sort, I think that kind of what I so appreciate about both of your research and the research going on more broadly now, is this attempt to get beyond the same little few lines that show up online. And I think that's good advice. I also just, what didn't show up maybe in these two was the need for even personal material. Maybe, Roberta, I don't know how much you want to mention but you found that personal memoirs in one case when you were working on an architect. And I think that too is a source. Yeah, and that came about because I had heard, this was in the case of Louise Harris Brown. I heard that there was this architect and that she had lived and I could not find her. I could not find anything about her. And I did everything I could. This was just when the internet was becoming a thing. But before I knew what that thing was, but I had a friend who said, I can help you, I can find it. And so his thing was to put in her name, George Harris Brown, and just wait for a hit. And for a year, we waited. And then he called me one day and said, I have it, I have something, good news and I have bad news. And the good news was that he had a hit. He knew something had been printed, something was on the internet about her. And the bad news is that it was her obituary. But I used that as a start and I interviewed her relatives who were listed in the obituary. And from there, I met her son who had a trunk full of her letters, had her diary, had all of her cards and her registration card. So it was just, but it was, I don't want to say it was a lot because it had to, it only happened because she died. But it was a source, a close to true source of information about someone that normally I could, I would never know those things. And she happened to be a person who wrote letters. And so that helped too. Yeah, I mean, we have, I mean, even finding obituaries for some of the figures has been a challenge and having to go to obscure sources like Elizabeth Mock who you, a woman and not black, you would think it is a curator of moment. She might appear in the New York press. We had to go to Princeton, Tom topics to find an interview and some citation on Taliesin. So I think obituaries are a source, but even those, you have to go to other presses, yeah? The, because you have to tune out, leave soon. Before I ask about my other questions, do you have some questions you wanna pose to the speakers or points you wanna bring up? Well, I'm just, I know these stories so well, but I just am so struck by the coincidence really, maybe it's a coincidence that the two subjects we're talking about today, we're both so eager to put themselves out there as available role models for the next generation of young black women. And with Beverly in particular saying, architecture is a great career for like literally recruiting. And so many of the other women we've profiled in pioneering women explicitly don't say that. They don't wanna be known as women architects. They find it like belittling to them as professionals. And I wonder if you just have any comments on that disparity which I find so striking. Well, I think that in the case of Beverly Greene, she, I think she thought that her life could have been better if she had a mentor. And so she, because of that, that was, I think that was her reason or her motivation behind wanting to do something different. But I also think that it has to do with a person's personality and not everyone's personality is outgoing and talking whatever. In the case of Georgia Brown, Georgia Louisa Brown, she didn't want to talk about any of it. She didn't talk publicly. She didn't wanna be anybody's mentor. And she had that attitude that you were just describing as wanting to make sure that, no one saw her as a mentor for black women because she only wanted to think of herself as an architect. So if you wanna talk about it that way, yes. But she clearly, from her writing, did not appreciate ideas of people referring to her as a mentor. Yeah, it's a heavy categorical burden to be asked to sort of represent. Yeah. And I think that's one of the unusual things about Norma Sklarik that she not only put the words into action, but she, the letter that Michelle Wilkinson found, really going to that for her students and advocating for them and positioning herself, in fact, as the first and perhaps only women black women architect in California. I think that that's exactly why then the AI honored her for her activism. But it is really, I think quite unusual to both be able to be successful in the profession and then also foreground your marginality. So she was very strong character and very outgoing, I gather. But one of the other things that I don't think you mentioned is that Norma was like selected by her peers to be a mentor. I mean, she didn't have to, even if she wanted to, but even if she hadn't wanted to, she still would have been. And that first, there were two or three conferences in the early eighties about black women by about, by and for black women in architecture. And at the first one at Howard in 82 or 83, she was the stark. And she was someone who everyone, so you saw a room full of black women of different levels in terms of their architectural career, but we all like bowled down. She had that, she had that force. Yes. Fantastic. It's great. I added to the lot of things out, but yeah. Anyway, it's great to hear this. I have more questions, but I saw some good questions in the chat. So I'll read them and then maybe turn to some others as well. David Rifkin, also an alum asks, he was in our doctoral program and now teaching in Miami. Did green and scolaric make a point of working with black consultants, such as landscape architects and engineers and did they promote the careers of black building contractors? Any knowledge or? Yes, I agree. I know that the project that I described, the IW Wells housing project, she and other black architects and engineers worked on in that project, working on that project, they not only promoted themselves, but they promoted black contractors and the newspapers are full of articles about the fights that they had with the city over not hiring who didn't want to hire the black superintendent. They would use the firm, but they didn't want the superintendent. And I think that those are the kinds of battles that they had and they fought, but that's not always common. It's not always in New York, when she worked in New York, Beverly Green didn't have any, she didn't have choices. I mean, she worked on two small projects that we know of, but when she worked for larger companies, she had no input as far as I can tell on the selection of engineers or contractors or any of that. So it depends on what your strength is, I guess. And Pat? I don't know. Yeah, I don't know if she used consultants or contractors, but I do know that she hired very diversely because she grew and she was really the person doing the hiring within the firm. And I know that she hired a number of people who I've had correspondence with. So she was very explicitly diversifying the firm as to whether she used black contractors, I don't know. I don't know that she had that kind of control. Yeah, that's helpful. I have a thank you both. I have another question from another Columbia graduate, Kate Regev, first thanking both of you. And she asks, she writes, it's interesting that both women, along with several other black architects attended Columbia. Do we think that this is because the school was perhaps more open compared to other schools or because it was in New York, which was such a diverse city, is a diverse city? Any thoughts about that? I have a few. Let's see if yours. Yeah, I think that it was for Norma Skarik, I think it really was about being in New York. This was the architecture school in New York where she was. And I think, yeah, and I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on it. First, Roberta. Well, for Beverly Green, I agree. I think she also, it was New York first, and then Columbia. And I think that that's the choice of many architects that because I've researched a great number, large number of black architects who came to New York for whatever reason, but went to Columbia. Some went to Pratt, some went to Pratt, and then Columbia. But I think that that was sort of like, if you're here and if you can get in, that's the place to. The good answer. I was actually thinking, Roberta, maybe you wanna talk more personally about your own situation. One thing in my much later period, coming to teach at Columbia in 78, I would say the point we made earlier about mentors was all critical in that period. Because when I came, not only were people like Max Bonn teaching, but there was John James, Elaine Hermanus, there were black faculty. And then Max was chair of the architect department. We had a chair at that point. And Jim Polshek, the dean was very committed. And I think Amal is following his, is very much in the same vein to increasing numbers. We all knew there was a moment when Roberta went to school when there was a larger percentage of black students. But I think there was a commitment to having at least represent the national percentage. And specific scholarship money was raised. And we had quite a few black students in the early 80s relative to what we had in the 90s and first part of the 21st century. And really until the last five years, a few years or so. And I don't know quite what that was, if it had to do with issues of urbanism, if it had to do with other concerns. But I can't help but think that the presence of so many black faculty, and especially Max Bond, wasn't important then. But maybe there are others who have thoughts on that too. But I think that the period that you're describing, that period when I went to Columbia that Sharon Sutton writes about in her book, that period is atypical. I mean, it's not. Yeah, it is atypical. And when I went to Columbia, I did not know before I went to Columbia that what was happening there was happening. I had no idea there was a program to recruit because I wasn't recruited. I was working in Chicago. No, I was working in Detroit then. And I was working for a company doing hospital design and someone there, actually they're only black associate there, suggested that if I really wanted to get ahead, if I wanted to do hospitals and get ahead, I would study it. And I was like, you mean you can do that? Yes, he said. You can study hospital design. People have been doing that for years. And he and this architect suggested Roger Marjoram, actually, suggested Columbia. And so I wrote to Columbia and asked if I could ask for an application and then turned it in. And I was really surprised that it was that easy. When I got to Columbia, I found that there was a whole different thing. But I didn't know that that was different. I thought that that's how it was. When I got to Columbia, Max was there and the school was full of black folks. And there were black teachers and black people in charge and all over. And it was so, I just took it for granted that that was Columbia. Then like about five or six years later when I went back to do, I was doing a talk at Columbia, I realized that there were no black, there were no black students. There were no black professors. And I mean, maybe there was one. I don't know, I never saw any. But it was just, and so that time was a very particular time caused by a particular urgency and program that both some students and some faculty had. But it's, and that's why it's good to have a book about it because that ceased to exist after six or seven years from the time I was there. And so then it was like just a regular school with very few students and no black faculty. And that's what it was most of the time after that I remember. I think it's a kind of reminder too of how do you sustain these changes and not just react to particular events like in the case of your generation, Roberta, it was 68 and the protests and maybe even now we're very conscious given recent events but how do we sustain it when those things begin to seem like past history in a field? We have some more questions, let me read one more. Someone asked Elvin Brown whether he writes, can it be that Scalaric had an immigrant background and he was wondering if this may have shaped her views? Yeah, I think so. I think that her family had, by all accounts, were really quite extraordinary, very, very supportive. She had a very close relationship to her father in particular and there does seem to be some relationship there between and I think the question was asking about mentorship. I think she herself had been so well supported that in many ways then building community and kind of paying back came very naturally to her. That's by her own account. That's how she really presents her early life and then how she felt she could further this mentorship in her professional and community work. Okay, one more question that came in from Abigail Sacks, another author on the website thanking you first for your great presentations. And then she writes Patricia's comment that Scalaric was not identified as a designer but it was actually an opportunity to widen our understanding of architecture as a profession to include a wide range of active professionals and maybe you wanna comment on that. I think that was as Victoria mentioned, one of our real goals on the website was to think of the profession in a broader sense. Well, and you had asked sort of posed the question to us about intersectionality. So I was thinking about that and I found a quote which I took out of the presentation but it was Marshall Pernell who was a former president of the AIA and this may have been in fact when, well, I'm not gonna be able to come down the source but he said that she was more than capable of designing large projects. But, and this is his quote, it was unheard of to have an African-American female who was registered as an architect. You didn't trot that person out in front of your clients and say, this is the person designing your project. And I was shocked by his frankness but that I think really does point to the degree to which there's the intersection of race and gender very clearly that we're operating throughout her career. And so even though she was really a brilliant architect, Kate Diamond says she could think three-dimensionally like no one else that Kate had ever met. Nevertheless, her gender and her race disqualified her from becoming a front-facing member of the team. Sorry, Cattus. And Roberta, maybe you wanna comment on that too if someone mentioned in the Q and A, it seemed like in some of those photos not only are there very few black architects, there are very few women. How do you feel? You know, we tend to put these things in silos in architectural history. Women in architecture, black architects. And one of the things that's amazing about your work to me is that you really bring them together and other people as well like Mario Gooden does in his recent book when he talks about Amazole Meredith. Any thoughts on this about, can we even pinpoint what part of their struggles have to do with being a woman or being black or... Yeah. I find it difficult to pinpoint. It's very rare that when I was like working for other companies and trying to work my way up before I got licensed and after I got licensed, but it was very rare to understand sometimes why something happened if it was because you were black. Occasionally you wouldn't know, but mostly you couldn't tell because women were in the beginning anyway as disadvantaged as black folks. So if something happened to me or something could have been seen as maybe racism, I'd have to remember, oh, but I'm a woman too. So who knows, you know? And it doesn't even, it's not even worth the time to try to figure out which it is because that's just time wasted. But I think the thing is to just figure out, just decide to go ahead and to push ahead and to do what it is that you think you can do. But, and there was one article where Beverly Greene was saying that she had gone for an interview. Yes, this was Beverly Greene who says she had gone for an interview, but she couldn't tell if she did not get a job because it was because of sex or if it was because of race, you know? And she thought sometimes it was mainly because of sex, you know, because she was female and that they could have accepted her possibly in some firms if she were a male, right? Even if she were black, but it's hard to tell. You know, all you know is that if you got, you know, two strikes against you, you have to fight in both lanes. Yeah. Yeah, just working. Well, I think we do. And I think, you know, there probably is which I think you kind of alluded to, Roberta, there's been a change since second wave feminism and perhaps let's just hope that the events of the last couple of years also mean a change in status of black architects and numbers. I mean, I think we're really struggling with that. Look, it's been a very rich discussion. I think some people are very hungry and ready for their lunch or they have studio projects to go on to. I can't thank you enough. And I hope too we will continue these discussions in other venues and other places. So thanks very much. And thanks to the audience. Yes, thank you so much. This has been a lovely discussion, really terrific. And yes, to be continued for sure. Yes. Goodbye. Thank you. Bye. Bye.