Gannon and Hands

Gannon and Hands
Partners	Mary Gannon, Alice Hands
Founded	1894
Dissolved	ca. 1900
Location	New York, New York, U.S.

Gannon and Hands, founded in 1894, was the first partnership of women architects in the United States. Its partners were Mary Gannon (b. 1867) and Alice Hands. In the firm's very short existence (1894–ca. 1900), it became known for innovative approaches to low-cost urban housing.

Mary Nevan Gannon was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1867. With some prior experience in an architect's office, she entered the New York School of Applied Design for Women in 1892 as part of its first class. Her future partner Alice J. Hands was one of her classmates. Even less is known about Hands than about Gannon, apart from the fact that she had been studying at the New York City YWCA for a couple of years before entering NYSAD. Gannon and Hands thrived at the school, winning awards for their drawings as well as architectural commissions while they were still students, including the Woman's Building for the 1895 Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia.

Right after graduating in 1894, the two women opened their own architectural practice, Gannon and Hands, and in that same year they won a large commission to design a hospital in San Francisco with a project budget in the neighborhood of $30,000–$40,000. After the Florence Hospital was opened, it received praise from physicians as a model of "sanitation, convenience, and architectural beauty."

Early in their career, Gannon and Hands joined a city task force, the Sanitary Investigations Committee, and went the extra step of living in a New York tenement in order to better understand urban living conditions for the poor. Calling New York's tenements "a reproach to the humanitarianism of this enlightened century," they set to work to find better solutions to urban housing for the poor. The firm quickly became noted for designing innovative apartment buildings that were affordable, sanitary, well-ventilated, and practical. One of their model tenements was designed around a central court (for light and air), with balconies for each apartment, front and rear fire escapes, and ash chutes and garbage receptacles for refuse management. Some were specifically designed for the rising class of young urban working women, and the partners were elected to the Women's Health Protective Association of New York.

Gannon and Hands were praised by the social reformer Jacob Riis in his book A Ten Years' War (1900) for their light and airy buildings; he credited them with solving "the problem of building a decent tenement on a twenty-five-foot lot"—a problem he admitted that he himself had thought insoluble. Similarly, philanthropist Sir Sidney Waterlow, who was chairman of the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company in London, called their work "the best plans for single tenements I have ever seen, the most clever and ingenious." As late as the 1930s, their apartment designs were still being reproduced as models of low-cost housing.

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