Dunay, Donna

"Glass Ceilings: Highlights from the International Archive of Women in Architecture" was developed in partnership with Virginia Tech’s International Archive of Women in Architecture (IAWA) Center and the Virginia Center for Architecture (VCA),in in recognition of Minds Wide Open, the statewide initiative celebrating women in the arts. The exhibition was held at the Virginia Center for Architecture in Richmond, Virginia, as part of their Dominion Exhibition Series and was on display from March 4-June 6, 2010.

The exhibition, featured the work of pioneering women in architecture and design from the International Archive of Women in Architecture (IAWA) collection at Virginia Tech, including Lilia Skala, who fled the Nazis in 1939 carrying her student architectural portfolio and who later became a well-known actress in the U.S., Nobuko Nakahara, one of the first women to be licensed as an architect in Japan, Lois Gottlieb, a California architect who was one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s apprentices in the 1940’s, Beverly Willis, who, in the 1970’s, developed CARLA, among the first software used for architecture and planning, Mary Brown Channel, the first woman to be registered as an architect in the state of Virginia, and Han Schroeder, who grew up in the famed Rietveld-Schroeder House, was educated in Switzerland, practiced as an architect and interior designer in the Netherlands, and later moved to the U.S. and taught interior design at Virginia Commonwealth University.

The exhibit also featured a series of 100 postcards (100 POSTCARDS: A Glimpse into the IAWA Center) highlighting the range of materials in the IAWA collection, developed by students in Virginia Tech’s Researching Women in Architecture seminar. Student contributors are Marissa Brown, Antonia Ciaverella, Candice Davis, Alexandra Phelan, Heather Riley, and Rehanna Rojiani.