Theodate Pope Riddle

Theodate Pope Riddle (February 2, 1867 – August 30, 1946) was an American architect. She was one of the first American women architects as well as a survivor of the sinking of the RMS Lusitania.

Born Effie Brooks Pope in Salem, Ohio, she was the only child of industrialist and art collector Alfred Atmore Pope and his wife Ada Lunette Brooks, and was a first cousin to the mother of architect Philip Johnson.

When Effie was 19, she changed her name to Theodate in honor of her grandmother Theodate Stackpole. She graduated from Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Connecticut and later hired faculty members to tutor her privately in architecture. The first woman to become a licensed architect in both New York and Connecticut, in 1926 she was appointed a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects.

She designed Hill-Stead, the family estate (now Hill-Stead Museum) in Farmington, and designed and founded the famous Avon Old Farms School in Avon, as well as Westover School.

Among her best-known architectural commissions was the 1920 reconstruction of the birthplace in New York City of former President Theodore Roosevelt. In the fall of 2014, Pope's work on that site was recognized in a competition, Built by Women New York City, launched by the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation to identify outstanding and diverse sites and spaces designed, engineered, and built by women.

1898-1907 Alfred Pope House, Hill-Stead, Farmington, CT (with McKim, Mead and White)

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