Ethel B. Power

Ethel B. Power (1881–1969)[1] was the editor of House Beautiful magazine in the 1920s and early 1930s, and in this capacity she championed a generation of women architects who emerged from the newly founded Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture.[2] A trained architect herself, she also published a compilation of plans for small houses by notable architects of the day.

Education and personal life

Power was part of the first cohort to enter the Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture in 1915, along with her life partner, architect Eleanor Raymond (1887–1989), whom she had previously met through a suffragist organization.[1] She graduated in 1920.[1] Power and Raymond remained together for more than half a century, until Power's death[2][3] They resided on Beacon Hill in Boston.[1]

Publishing career

For more than a decade, Power was the editor of the influential shelter magazine House Beautiful (1923–34).[3] She championed the work of Cambridge School graduates in general, and in particular she often published articles on Raymond's work, many of which she wrote herself.[1] When in 1934 the magazine was sold and its editorial offices transferred to New York City, Power resigned because she did not choose to leave Boston.[1]

Her book The Smaller American Home (1927) is a compilation of 55 designs by notable architects of the 1910s and 1920s, with a focus on built-in features.[4] She includes floor plans of houses in the Colonial, Spanish Revival, Creole cottage, and Storybook house styles together with shots of example interiors and landscaping. Selected architects included Dwight James Baum, Wallace Frost, John F. Staub, Wallace Neff, Eleanor Raymond, and Henry Atherton Frost.[4] Unlike some critics of the day who liked to position historicist and modernist architecture as antithetical to each other, Power stressed the features the two approaches shared, such as simple rectilinear plans and absence of ornamentation.[5]

A portfolio of materials about Raymond's architectural work held by the museum Historic New England includes a number of articles by Power about Raymond.[6]

Publications

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Frederickson, Kristen, and Sarah E. Webb, eds. Singular Women: Writing the Artist. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
  2. 1 2 Gruskin, Nancy. "Designing Women: Writing About Eleanor Raymond". UC Press E-Books Collection, 1982-2004.
  3. 1 2 Friedman, Alice T. Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History. Yale University Press, 2006.
  4. 1 2 Power, Ethel B. The Smaller American Home: Fifty-five Houses of the Less Expensive Type Selected from the Recent Work of Architects in All Parts of the Country. Little, Brown, 1927.
  5. ↑ Davis, John, Jennifer A. Greenhill, and Jason D. LaFountain, eds. A Companion to American Art. Wiley Blackwell, 2015, p. 554.
  6. ↑ "Eleanor Raymond photographic collection". Historic New England website.
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