Have you ever imagined yourself juggling six children’s needs, housework, and professional career? It may sound like a bit of a challenge; yet, these two women, Sarah (“Sally”) Harkness, a mother of seven, and Jean B. Fletcher, a mother of six, were able to manage their professional lives while fulfilling their duties as mothers and wives. They both were graduates of Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture for Women, originally affiliated with Harvard University and Smith College after 1942. In 1945, the two talented women teamed up with six other architect friends and founded The Architects Collaborative (TAC), a leading architecture firm based in Boston, MA.

Thanks to the “permissive attitude of the office,” Sally and Jean did not have to work full-time. Instead, they worked in shifts--one in the morning and the other in the afternoon--and shared the same babysitter. Yet, their professional and domestic lives inevitably overlapped. Sally said she “learn(ed) [an] awful lot of things from domestic life” especially when she thought about her kids and envisioned an environment surrounding them, a school. The application of their real-life experience to architectural practice must have contributed to TAC’s projects for numerous school buildings including Classical and Central High Schools.

Classical and Central Education Center was the first project to which TAC applied the design of “a really urban school.” In 1963, TAC in collaboration with the local Providence architectural firm Harkness & Geddes won the first prize for the new design. However, it was not until 1970 that the buildings took the shape as we see today. Apart from the main building of Central School, everything that exists today was developed in the 1950s under “The Master Plan for Public School Sites.” The original Classical School building was proudly built in a mixed Italianate and Colonial style in 1878 as the first public high school at the City of Providence. It was a three-storied, massive structure with a basement with a high ceiling. TAC made a radical change to the design of the original masonry Italianate style by introducing raw, grey, concrete Brutalism. In addition, they changed the school's interiors by introducing novel concepts like multifunctional classrooms with movable walls which might have reflected the philosophy of TAC and experience of Sally and Jean's domestic lives.

This drastic alteration is probably the main reason why Classical High School is still subject to frequent negative comments about its appearance. Even the well-known architectural historian William McKenzie Woodward made harsh comments on the buildings in his book PPS/AIAri Guide to Providence Architecture: “The Modernist vision here, intended to challenge, now merely defeats. It’s no wonder Modernism has gotten such a bad reputation in Rhode Island.” Though not everyone agreed with its aesthetic, the majority of the public praised the working ethos and concept. John Ware Lincoln, chairman of the Division of Design at RISD recognized the new building as “exemplary of the new concept of the architect as an environmental planner, working with social and civic sciences, demography, transportation engineering, building technologies, and, in this case, education philosophy.” Both school buildings are celebrated as the first of their kind in Providence but they should also be understood as a rare vestige of the work of pioneering female architects.

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If you walk into the woods of East Greenwich, you would hear the shouts and laughter of children from the forest. Where is the sound coming from? A few more steps later, you would encounter not Hansel and Gretel's House, but surprisingly, a raw-looking concrete, modern building which would not be out of place in an urban setting. Its “straight-forward geometry, executed in warm, red-brown brick framed by textured ‘form board’ concrete” projects a peculiar impression of veiled modernism in nature.

The building is East Greenwich High School. The school was originally Kent Academy but later became East Greenwich Academy--a private Methodist boarding school. The building was transformed into a public school in 1942-1943 when its stockholders handed it over to the town of East Greenwich because of plummeting enrollment in the wake of the Great Depression and World War II. It was moved to the current location in 1967 from 100 Cedar Avenue in the course of a major transformation by The Architects Collaborative (TAC), a leading architecture firm at the time based in Boston, MA. Most if not all of the original buildings at the site were demolished in the 1960s for the construction of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church.

TAC, as its name indicates, consisted of eight talented architects including Walter Gropius--a founder of the famous Bauhaus school of architecture in Germany. In addition to having Gropius on staff, the firm had the unique privilege of having two women architects as founding members, Sarah (“Sally”) P. Harkness and Jean B. Fletcher. Neither female architects nor architectural collaboratives are unusual these days. However, TAC's team-based approach was distinctively progressive considering the fact that individualism was the prevailing ideology in the profession at the time. Its inclusion of women and the fact that they were part of the leadership attest to the firm's forward-looking nature.

Despite East Greenwich High school's manufactured materials such as concrete and brick, the building “complements the landscape’s carefully preserved random quality” and successfully achieved an ideal integration of natural and manmade form. After a series of renovations in 1967, 2004, 2010, and 2012, the building is finally filled with the energy and dynamism of children again.

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Frances Henley’s involvement in the construction of Wheeler School in Providence can be interpreted as a means of positioning herself in the collective memory of the city by linking her name with the values of education. Both Henley and Mary Colman Wheeler, the founder of the eponymous school, had artistic backgrounds, which made the association of the two women natural and interesting.

The idea to found a school for women exclusively came from Miss Wheeler’s practice of instructing girls in the art of painting. However, she turned to a more classical format of a holistic system of teaching. Wheeler founded her private school in 1889, after a rich experience in France and Germany. She was trained as an artist and studied in Paris for six years, before she returned to Providence in 1882. Henley, who graduated cum laude from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1897 was also interested in sharing the principles of architecture and interior design with young women. She disseminated her ideas about residential architecture not as a teacher, but as a professional, who was invited to give public speeches to the Clubs and association that she was also a member of.

To accommodate the increasing number of students, Miss Wheeler decided to build a new structure, commissioning Franklin J. Sawtelle (1846-1911), a renowned architect in Providence, in 1910 to make the project for a new building on Hope Street. Sawtelle died unexpectedly just one year later, while in the middle of the design of the school. As a result, Henley took over the entire project. She added an elevator to the main building of the school in 1913, and she signed the project alone.

Later she was asked to design a playground dedicated to hockey and athletic activities that would become part of Wheeler School, in Rumford, a project originally known as “Wheeler School Farm.” The project, even though apparently minor, shows her ability to appropriate the natural terrain in a successful landscape design, as the lot is still being used today for athletic scopes. Moreover, it shows Henley’s personal and professional knowledge of the sportive technical equipment, as she was herself teaching women how to play basketball. She remained the consulting architect for the school for about 25 years.

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Upon entering the nineteenth-century stable that is now 48 Crestwood Road during the Great Depression, a visitor to the old Waterhouse estate ‘on the hill’ which lies between Warwick and East Greenwich would have found a gloomy, cavernous space. They might have seen a young girl playing on a tire swing that hung from a beam on the first floor, or perhaps they would have seen her father watching vigilantly out of one of the building’s few windows. His bargain with the landowner? To keep an eye on the comings and goings of workmen in lieu of paying the rent that he could not afford to pay.

What a surprise that visitor would have had when returning to the same property just over thirty years later… Upstairs: a light-filled and airy modern home replete with fashionable furnishings imported from Copenhagen, geometrical light shades, pale birch woodwork, crisp white walls and an abstract painting, all arranged around a black, cantilevered hearth of reinforced concrete set into white masonry. Downstairs: a barely begun drafting room soon to be fitted out with bespoke cabinets and bookshelves. Outside: a sprawling garden of one and a quarter acres with magnificent views of Greenwich Bay, also in the process of being tamed…

The authors of these changes were Elizabeth Greenleaf Pattee and J. Carol Fulkerson. Pattee was an architect and landscape architect by profession and a keen traveller, photographer and conservationist by avocation who purchased the property in 1955. By that point the stable had already been converted into a habitable dwelling by its previous owners, but a lot of work remained to be done in order to bring the house and its grounds up to Pattee’s exacting standards. These emphasised a comprehensive understanding of design which integrated approaches to architecture, landscape architecture, ecology and interior decoration ‘for [the purpose of healthy] living’.

This was a philosophy that Pattee developed over many years as a result of her educational background. She began her career as an architectural draftswoman, having obtained a BS degree in architecture from MIT in 1916, before shifting her focus to landscape architecture, which she studied at the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture for Women from 1916 to 1918. Here, she would have learned about botany, planting and surveying. Ecology and conservation issues would have been present in her training too, but it was not until the 1950s that these came to the forefront of her work as an educator and advocate for good design practice.

One topic of concern to Pattee and the nascent conservation movement in Rhode Island in general at this time was the sustainable development of the local shoreline. For Pattee, this necessitated a reconciliation of the functional needs of people and the requirements of the natural environment. In recent times, this has been realised in the planning of the nearby Buttonwoods Beach. Today, these principles are so often taken for granted that it is easy to miss the novelty of the way in which Pattee's home reconfigured the relationship between house, user and landscape in order to reflect the integrity of all three.

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The house was named for Jean-Baptiste-Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau (1725-1807), the French General who fought alongside George Washington in several critical endeavors—including the siege of Yorktown and the Battle of the Chesapeake—in the American Revolutionary War.

De Vimeur landed in Newport, Rhode Island in 1780, and had under his command several thousand French troops with whom he was to assist the Continental Army, under General George Washington. The French chateau that now stands at 84 Prospect Street was dubbed the Rochambeau House in honor of de Vimeur’s outstanding achievements during the war, and it is rumoured that at times, he was in command of more men than Washington, himself. The Comte, however, never actually resided in the house, as it was not constructed until 1929, more than a century after his death.

Nowhere inside the house is there any mention of the Comte's legacy, though there is a marble plaque in the building’s main foyer commemorating the life of another remarkable individual: Mary Elizabeth Evans Sharpe, of Providence, Rhode Island. Sharpe was the wife of a Providence-based industrialist, Henry Dexter Sharpe Sr., who later became the twelfth Chancellor of Brown University. The Sharpes commissioned the Boston-based architectural firm of Parker, Thomas, and Rice to design their dream home, and after its completion in 1929, Mary Sharpe lived there until her death in 1985 (Mr. Sharpe having passed away in 1954). After her passing, her only son, Henry D. Sharpe Jr., donated the house to Brown University in his mother’s honor, knowing how she and his father had for so many years worked with and loved the University community, and how she wanted to see her home remain in the care of the family's alma mater.

Mrs. Sharpe was an avid gardener and self-taught landscape architect, and over the decades during which she lived at 84 Prospect St., ensured that the house was always surrounded by beautifully-tended gardens and greenery; in the spirit of her love for garden and landscape design, the University still maintains the gardens on the grounds, today. Just outside the front door, on each side of the entrance to her home, stand two beautiful examples of Mrs. Sharpe's favorite tree: the Japanese cherry blossom, whose delicate boughs still embrace visitors and welcome her guests into the house today.

The house was given the name "Rochambeau" as a commemoration of the Comte's stay in Providence during the Revolutionary War, where he and his troops were actually sheltered at Brown (then known as The College in the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations) before a march through Connecticut to connect with General Washington. De Vimeur remained in the newly-born United States for only a few years after the war, and upon his return to France, he became a key supporter of the French Revolution. That it, while his stay here in our humble Rhode Island was a brief one, his legacies have left an indelible mark upon our community and our history.

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In 1978, three women engaged in a conversation about the role women professionals could play in changing women’s lives. Within 16 months, they had started a business: the Women’s Development Corporation. Katrin Adam, Susan Aitcheson, and Joan Forrester Sprague were coordinators of the Third Session of the Women’s School of Planning and Architecture (WSPA), held in August 1978 at Roger Williams College (today Roger Williams University) in Bristol, RI, a program focused on design by and for women. They soon met and invited Alma Felix Green to join them, a former employee of the Providence mayor’s office with ties to the local community. The WDC exists today as one of the largest nonprofit housing developments in Rhode Island, developing scattered-site, low-income housing, with an emphasis on community investment and a participatory design process. Over nearly 40 years, they have provided housing for between 9,000 and 10,000 people.

In the early years, the WDC focused its efforts on Providence’s Elmwood, then “a multi-ethnic neighborhood in which more than half of the residents are single, widowed, or divorced women… [with] the state’s highest percentage of families receiving welfare payments.” At the outset, the organization also sought to help support and empower community women professionally, in addition to providing housing opportunities. They organized workshops to teach women how to go into business—how to get help from the Small Business Administration, plan a business, sell services to the government, and so forth—as well as training women to be eligible for employment as carpenters’ and painters’ apprentices in the construction industry. The WDC provided transportation and child care for these programs, as required. This emphasis on self-empowerment was and is critical to the mission of the WDC, originally serving a client group of marginalized women by offering “a chance for stable housing within a support system network that encourages independence and self-sufficiency.” Today, they also build alliances with elderly, disabled, veteran, and homeless communities.

The WDC addresses a number of social issues in their developments. First, they seek to tackle the stigma of low-income housing that leads many communities to resist such development initiatives. They rehabilitate triple-decker houses, transforming existing buildings into multiple apartments in scattered-site plans that blend into the neighborhood. The WDC manages the properties themselves to ensure that the housing will be taken care of, maintaining a good reputation for low-income housing. Second, according to Aitcheson, they “thought it was very important to try to be sure that the housing is responding to the people who live in it… So we spent quite a bit of time in participatory design process where families could tell us about where they live and why they live and how they live.” Taking direct input, they designed spaces intended for single mothers: a standard plan of three- and four-bedroom apartments has more, smaller bedrooms to allow for greater privacy alongside a shared open space, visible from the kitchen, to facilitate group play. Substantial storage spaces significantly ease quality of life, while parking directly in front of the unit and small, fenced-in backyards with lighting address security.

Finally, since opening their doors in 1979 the WDC has held a commitment to building environmentally conscious, energy efficient homes. In the 1990s, when it had become the largest producer of low-income housing in the state, the organization expanded this emphasis on environmental conservation to historical preservation. They joined forces with the Providence Preservation Society to address affordable housing and the preservation of endangered historic homes in the inner city. The high costs of preservation standards can make it prohibitive to maintain buildings in low-income neighborhoods, resulting in the destruction of turn-of-the-century structures. The WDC bought, renovated, and managed historical houses as low-income rental properties, protecting the buildings as well as the neighborhood itself, preventing gentrification and displacement.

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From August 13–26, 1978, 78 women from 17 states as well as Canada gathered at Roger Williams College (today Roger Williams University) in Bristol, RI, to discuss the integration of values and identities they held both as women and as designers. The Women’s School of Planning and Architecture (WSPA, pronounced “wis-pa”) met for its Third Session organized around the relationships women have—personally and professionally—to their home and work environments, historically, cross-culturally, and based on differences in race and socio-economic class.

Conceived by seven women in 1974, the WSPA was “a ‘school’ of our own where we could learn from each other—all of us teachers and students, exchanging questions, challenging convention, inventing new areas of inquiry and research, and sharing knowledge in a supportive atmosphere where women’s accomplishments would be visible, their skills respected, and their differences valued.” The WSPA held four sessions between 1975 and 1979, each organized in August and lasting two weeks with approximately 60 women in attendance, as well as a symposium in 1981 with well over two hundred women in attendance. Each session was held in a different state, to help make it easier for women all across the country to be able to attend. Women were invited to bring children between the ages of 3 and 12, and child care was provided to enable women to participate fully in the session. While there were instructors and students, the spirit of the program was cooperative and non-hierarchical, and courses were often team-taught.

This radical approach to education was mirrored in WSPA’s programming: the course covered energy-conscious design, feminist analysis of the built environment, and the politics of architecture and planning, particularly as related to social housing projects. The group explored their local surroundings, visiting colonial homes and mansions in Newport, and went on walking tours of Newport and Bristol to gain a sense of the daily life of women in the area. They visited the Junius Eddy House in Little Compton (1975), the first solar air-heated house in the state. Women presented on their own environments in slide presentations of dwellings and workplaces, with a particular focus on “Women’s Anonymous Architecture of the West Coast” to balance their location in the Northeast. They held seminars on the “ecology of sex roles,” examining personal perceptions and biases about the built environment based on traditional sex roles, and on China, looking at women’s daily life as experienced in four weeks of travel in China in 1977 at the invitation of the Architectural Society of China. Workshops covered low technology energy conservation, working in the private and public sectors, the feminist curricula in academia, as well as planning for the future of WSPA.

The middle weekend was a break-out session, which could be attended separate from the rest of the program (as 31 women did), with workshops on energy conservation, women’s professional organizations and networking, the challenges of neighborhood revitalization, and a presentation by the newly initiated Women’s Policy and Program Division of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which also ran a workshop on Community Block Grants. Throughout, conversations centered on how, as women architects, they could do what they wanted to professionally with the lifestyle they desired, and how they could help other women in the process. The participants were not building a school, per se, but a space in which to network, workshop, and think collaboratively—a means of connection that allowed them to support each other in fostering creative growth.

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On any given summer day in the city of Providence, you’re likely to notice a steady flow of people—Rhode Island locals, university students, families and young children—making their way down North Main Street towards Wickenden St., in the Fox Point neighborhood of the city.

It’s more than likely that all of those individuals are en route to India Point Park, located along India Street, where the Providence River meets the Seekonk. Providence has long been a crucial port city of the Eastern Seaboard of the United States—in fact, the area now known as India Point was an important center for trade since the late 1680s, far before the United States was even a nation.

In the late 17th century, goods such as teas, spices, and textile were exchanged here between the early settlers of Providence and the world; over the years, as time and industrial needs developed continued to grow into the 1800s and later, the focus would shift more to the exchange of valued products such as hardware and machinery, wool, and coal. After the Crash of 1929 and the devastation of the Great Depression, trade activity in the area declined greatly, and came to a full halt. However, in that span of 250 years, this port saw the coming and going of an incredible volume of ships, traders, merchants, and goods, although it looks quite different today than what one would have imagined it to be all those years ago.

Today, India Point Park is one of the largest public spaces in the city of Providence. After trade activity in the area ceased, and most of the incoming cargo was redirected to a new port located along Allens Avenue in Providence, the area was used mostly as a scrapyard and fell into disarray. In the 1960’s, with increasing efforts to urbanize Providence, the I-95 Interstate was constructed, running through the Fox Point neighborhood and essentially creating a divide between the India Point grounds and the rest of the city and infringing upon the lands of other public parks in the city, leaving them fragmented and neglected.

However, in the 1970s, one woman would come about with an arsenal of great ideas and mission—a passion—to beautify to city. That woman was Mary Elizabeth Sharpe, of Providence: a passionate gardener and self-taught landscape architect with a deep love for her city. Sharpe, the wife of the 12th Chancellor of Brown University, Henry Dexter Sharpe, parlayed her passion for her sprawling home gardens into landscaping projects for the University and, later, for the city of Providence. She had a particular passion for Japanese gardens, as well as for trees—she worked many years on creating a tree-planting program for the city, and lead efforts to combat the pervasive Dutch Elm Disease, whose effects were felt strongly in the city of Providence.

Sharpe established a committee of philanthropists and donors from among the citizens of Providence in order to petition the city to allow for a conversion and repurposing of that industrial scrapyard as public land—complete with a variety of green spaces, public amenities such as benches, piers, and walkways, and direct access to the waters of the Providence and Seekonk Rivers. Mrs. Sharpe not only appealed for the allocation of funds to found what is now India Point Park and to restore other parks around the city, but also donated roughly $153,000 of her own money to the realization of her project.

Her valiant efforts did not go unrewarded, and in 1974, India Point Park was formally dedicated, and given its name hearkening back to the earliest roots of the area as a point of commerce and trade with what were then called the East Indies by the early citizens of Providence. The park’s history, rich and colorful, truly cannot be told without acknowledging the work and passion of Mrs. Mary Elizabeth Sharpe, though much of the publicly-available information regarding the park today fails to mention her incredible efforts. Even after her death in 1985, she continued to support the beautification of the city of Providence with the Mary Elizabeth Sharpe Tree Endowment, a trust dedicated to tree-planting created by the Sharpe Family Foundation in 1988 to ensure that beautiful foliage would always be had wherever it was needed.

Today, the park is a hallmark of the city’s landscape, and provides some of the most scenic views of Providence and the surroundings waters. The park has recently been outfitted with an amphitheater for public events, as well as a newly-renovated pedestrian bridge and towering staircases that have reintegrated the park into the city and made it far more accessible, allow passersby to enjoy views of Providence and the Harbor as they cross above Interstate 95 on their way to the park, the Brown University boathouse, or to the popular hotel that was recently built right along India Street.

Now, each year, the July 4th celebrations at India Point also attract thousands of people from Providence and beyond—undeniable evidence of the fact that Mrs. Sharpe’s determined efforts have not gone unrecognized, and that the park will be loved and appreciated by all those who visit for many years to come.

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