Founding Mothers: Architecture Criticism from Mariana Van Rensselaer to Esther McCoy, Ada Louise Huxtable, and Jane Jacobs

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From the emergence of the architectural profession in the 1880s, there have been female critics, starting with Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer, the first biographer of Henry Hobson Richardson and a keen observer of domestic architecture.  Her work, like that of later critics, including Esther McCoy, Ada Louise Huxtable and Jane Jacobs, has sometimes been seen as a parallel or alternative narrative. Alexandra Lange argues that these women are not outliers but an integral part of the development of both the critical and the architectural professions.  Her talk will focus on the exemplary and enduring qualities in the writing of these four authors and attempt an answer to the question, “Why are women born critics?”