Eleanor Raymond
| Eleanor Raymond | |
|---|---|
| Born |
March 4, 1887 Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A. |
| Died | April 2, 1989 (aged 102) Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A. |
| Alma mater | Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture |
| Occupation | architect |
Eleanor Raymond (1887 – 1989) was an American architect with a professional career of some sixty years of practice, mainly in residential housing. She designed one of the first International Style houses in the United States, in 1931. She also explored the use of innovative materials and building systems, designing a plywood house in 1940 as well as one of the first successful solar-heated buildings in the Northeast, the “Sun House”, in 1948.
Raymond was born in 1888 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on March 24, 1887, and graduated with a bachelor's degree from Wellesley College in 1909. After graduation, she enrolled in the Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, a school that was then closely affiliated with Harvard’s School of Architecture. She was among five women architectural design students of Henry Atherton Frost and Bremer Whidden Pond in 1915, the school's first year of operation. It was there that she developed her lifelong interest in the relationship between architecture and landscape architecture. She graduated from the school in 1919.
Raymond took part in a number of social movements of her day, including the women's suffrage movement and the settlement house movement. It was through a suffragist organization that she met her life partner, Ethel B. Power, who went on to attend and graduate from the Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture as well. Raymond and Power—who became a longtime editor for House Beautiful magazine—remained together for more than half a century, until Power's death in 1969.
Raymond renovated a townhouse at 112 Charles St. in Boston as a group home for herself, Power, and other women. It was planned for the needs of businesswomen who required some work space at home and who needed the house to be as "self-running" as possible, which led to a reduction in the footprints of both dining room and kitchen.
On graduating, Raymond joined Frost's practice as his sole partner (she had previously been working for him as a draftsperson while a student). Raymond opened her own office in 1928 after working with Frost for several years. She was drawn to the simple vernacular structures expressive of rural American life, avoiding the grand facades and the exclusively modern styles that were popular with her contemporaries. In 1931, after five years of work, Raymond published Early Domestic Architecture of Pennsylvania, in which she explored what she called the “unstudied directness in fitting form to function” of very early American architecture. The book was one of the first systematic inventories of vernacular American architecture and defined Raymond’s career.
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