Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture

The Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture—previously known as the Cambridge School of Architectural and Landscape Design for Women and then as Cambridge School of Domestic and Landscape Architecture for Women—was an educational institution for women that existed from 1915 to 1942. It was the first school to offer women graduate training in the professions of architecture and landscape architecture under a single faculty. It was affiliated originally with Harvard University and later with Smith College.

The Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture developed as a result of the fact that in 1915 a recent graduate of Radcliffe College, Katherine Brooks, who intended to study landscape architecture at the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture, wanted to begin by taking architectural drafting at Harvard but was refused entry because the school did not admit women. Brooks consulted with the school's head, James Sturgis Pray, who then arranged for architectural design professor Henry Atherton Frost to tutor Brooks privately. Somewhat to his surprise, Frost found his unexpected pupil an adept and enthusiastic student, and in an account of the school's founding he wrote: "Teaching a woman what we had always considered strictly a man's job was not the painful ordeal it had promised to be."

Within a year, Frost had four women students and another professor, landscape architect Bremer Whidden Pond, had come on board. Even though the women followed the same curriculum as their male peers, Harvard students tended to dismiss the school with belittling terms such as the "Little School" and the "Frost and Pond Day Nursery".

Word about the informal program spread, and by the 1916–17 academic year, the college was advertising the experimental program and its curriculum as the Cambridge School of Architectural and Landscape Design for Women. In its first few years, the school had from 9 to 12 women students. The first two women to complete the school's three-year program were Brooks and landscape architect Rose Greely; another early graduate was Eleanor Raymond.

In 1919, the school's name was changed to the Cambridge School of Domestic and Landscape Architecture for Women, a shift that Frost later regretted for its implication that women were only suited to residential (i.e. domestic) architectural design.

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