Introduction

Between 1939 and 1958, the American architect Chloethiel Woodard Smith helped organize four architectural exhibitions.¹ These were held in Washington, DC, in 1939, in Montreal, Canada, in 1941, in Havana, Cuba, in 1950, and in Moscow, USSR, in 1958. The first two championed the importance of planning within the cities where they were staged, while the second two displayed the recent achievements of architects based in the United States. Our interest is not so much in the exhibits themselves as in the role they played in furthering Smith’s career, which culminated in an independent practice that between its establishment in 1963 and her retirement two decades later was the largest female-headed architecture office in the United States (Simon; Zipf 2006). Exhibitions were key to Smith’s emergence in the 1960s as an important designer of federally subsidized housing across the northeastern United States and to her effectiveness in Washington, where she also designed prominent office buildings, served on the Commission of Fine Arts, and helped establish the National Building Museum. In addition to enabling her to advance her own ideas about planning and enhance the international reputations of her male colleagues, exhibitions provided an opportunity for her to demonstrate the organizational abilities that proved key to her success as the head of a busy firm. They also facilitated her ability to communicate with a public that included journalists, real estate developers, and policymakers. Reconstructing their importance to her career thus confirms the importance of exhibitions like the ones she helped organize to 20th-century architectural culture and to their use in soft power diplomacy, especially during the Cold War (see Cohen 2012).

Smith’s advocacy for planning and architecture in general rather than simply her own work was crucial to the success of her practice at a time when architecture remained among the most masculinized occupations in the United States. In 1974 Judith Edelman (1989: 117) claimed in a report to the American Institute of Architects (AIA) that only coalminers and steelworkers were more likely to be men (Martin 2014). Reviewing an exhibition Women in Architecture, held in 1974 at the headquarters of the New York chapter of the AIA, the New York Times’s architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable noted that, in 1970, only 300 of the AIA’s over 24,000 members were women, and that women represented only 3.5% of the country’s roughly 56,214 practicing architects. She remarked as well that half of the 58 women whose work was being exhibited had been born and often trained abroad, while less than half were married. This makes Smith, who did not leave the United States until she was a married woman in her thirties, even more exceptional, especially as she did not practice in partnership with her husband. Only a fifth of the women members of the AIA in 1970 were partners in the firms where they worked and a similar number had children, while Smith, even more unusually, was a mother who ran a large practice (Huxtable 1974). Breaking through at the level that Smith did thus required not only talent and determination, but the ability to make herself useful to those who were unlikely to recognize the first but could not possibly ignore the second.

Evidence of the degree to which, in addition to shaping the planning and political debates of the time, Smith’s exhibitions advanced her career comes from the degree to which her activities garnered her the respect and support of her peers. In 1959, at a time when she still had built relatively little, the architecture and planner Louis Justement nominated her for fellowship in the AIA. Smith and the much older Lutah Maria Riggs were both elected the following year – at a time when the only women who preceded them in receiving this honour were Louise Blanchard Bethune (1889), Theodate Pope Riddle (1926), Lois Lilley Howe (1931), Elisabeth Coit (1955), and Marion Manley (1956); Eleanor Raymond would follow the next year. Justement gathered more than sixty letters in support of Smith. Many of those who responded, almost all of them men, noted the impact of her exhibitions. Walter Taylor (1959), the staff executive for the AIA’s Committee on International Relations, commented:

The fact that the candidate has overcome the handicaps and prejudices against women, which exist in several professions including ours, is additional testimony to her competence . . . In her own professional and private life she has been an excellent representative of this country and the profession in Latin America. Her knowledge, judgement and experience gained abroad have been carried into her practice and personal interests in this country . . . The outstanding success of the A.I.A. exhibit at the Moscow Congress . . . was due to her insistence on high quality backed up by expenditure of time and energy to see it through.

Exhibitions clearly offered Smith a way of furthering the cause of her profession in ways that were far less threatening to her male counterparts than had she called the status quo into question. Oscar Stonorov (1959), who had known her for more than two decades, wrote:

Chloethiel is an accomplished designer, but especially is she the type of practitioner who is capable of representing to the public the ideal of social dedication, public spirit and civic responsibility in which our profession takes profound pride as representing next to design and structural competency, the essence of the architectural contribution to our culture.

Charles Goodman (1959), a Washington colleague, concurred, noting, ‘She is one of the rare group of architects whose deep sense of integrity and articulateness regarding the place of the architect as a professional man [sic] in the community contributes to the understanding of the profession by the layman’.

As these remarks suggest, Smith’s work on exhibitions not only garnered the respect of her peers, but also taught her how to communicate with a lay public. This skill comprise the bedrock of her successful independent practice. The many lectures she gave, articles she published, and profiles that were written about her during the 1960s demonstrated a talent for thinking about architecture in terms of what it did for people rather than what it looked like. The city planner Martin Meyerson (1959), writing in his capacity as Director of the Center for Urban Studies at Harvard (he later became president of the University of Pennsylvania), forcefully concluded his letter in support of Smith’s election to fellowship by saying that ‘There is no architect in the United States who has a better sense of the human needs of the people who use architecture’. This quality helped provide Smith with concrete opportunities to build and contributed to ensuring that her housing remains popular with residents today.

Chloethiel Woodard Goes to Washington

Smith (neé Woodward) was born in 1910. Her mother, who died before her daughter entered university, taught science at the college level; Chloethiel’s father was a tram conductor. Thus, although she had access to only modest resources, she had observed first-hand what it was to be an educated, working woman. She trained at the University of Oregon, where she initiated a life-long correspondence (that was often confessional in tone) with Lewis Mumford, and Washington University in St. Louis. The first was an outpost of resistance to the Beaux-Arts approach she struggled to appreciate upon her arrival in the Midwest, where she appears to have been more interested in an affordable qualification than an indoctrination in what she already viewed as an outmoded approach to planning (Willcox 1932). From there she headed east, settling first in the New York area before moving to Washington, DC, in 1935 following the dissolution of a brief marriage to the son of the architect and planner Henry Wright.² In New York, she met Mumford in person and through him Catherine Bauer. She also briefly served as a research assistant for Ernst Kahn, a German émigré housing expert from Frankfurt.

In Washington, Woodard worked for four years for the newly founded Federal Housing Agency. She also joined the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA).

Through her participation in the chapter’s planning committee, she widened her network to include Justement, with whom she would later collaborate on a plan for the city’s Southwest quadrant, and Alfred Kastner, who chaired the chapter’s housing committee and was best-known for the Carl Mackley Homes, Philadelphia social housing he designed in collaboration with Stonorov.

In 1939 the fifteenth international congress of architects was due to be held in Washington at the same time as the AIA’s annual convention; the international congress at which Woodard was scheduled to present a paper co-authored with Kastner was cancelled upon the outbreak of World War II, and so the joint meeting between the two groups did not happen, but the AIA went ahead with its convention. Working again with Kastner, as well as eight other men, Woodard also spearheaded the organization of the exhibition Washington: The Planned City Without a Plan, which was held in the Gridiron room of the Willard Hotel in conjunction with the national meeting. Here she challenged the focus on monumentality that had dominated the planning of the city in the first four decades of the century and particularly the construction of Federal Triangle in the 1930s. Although the exhibition was disavowed by the local chapter of the AIA because of its criticism of the city’s famed L’Enfant plan, it brought together figures from the Philadelphia and Washington architecture and planning communities who would have a major impact on postwar developments (Conroy 1989) (Figure 1).

Figure 1

Chloethiel Smith, 1964 (Phillip Harrington Alamy stock photo).

The extent of Woodard’s role stands in stark contrast to what was expected of women by the conference organisers. The final section of the published program for the intended joint conference, entitled ‘Ladies’, noted that ‘a committee of ladies has been named to welcome the wives of the delegates. The ladies will be welcome at Congress sessions and at the social functions of the Congress. They will find much of interest in Washington and every effort will be made by the committee to insure them a pleasant stay’ (Fifteenth International Congress of Architects 1939: 15). No one involved apparently considered the possibility that women might attend in any other capacity than as spouses.

We have not yet located photographs of this exhibition, but its memory has endured. Half a century later, a survey of her career related that by 1939, ‘she was considered a young firebrand by her chapter colleagues. . . . Her forceful expositions on architecture and urban planning, presented in discussions at chapter meetings, intimidated opponents and gained the support of her fellow associate members’ (Conroy 1989).

Moving to Montreal

The year after the Washington exhibition, Woodard married Bromley K. Smith, a journalist who had just joined the Foreign Service, and whose surname she would begin to use professionally in the late 1940s. Their first posting was to Montreal, where she continued to practice. She also quickly galvanized younger male members of the local Architectural Research Group, founded in 1938 and undoubtedly named for its Philadelphia precursor, to stage an exhibition entitled City for Living. The exhibit emphasized the importance of the planning process. Smith complained in a letter to Mumford about ‘hav[ing] had to do about 99% of the work myself’, adding that the other architects were ‘quite amazed that their years of “over the beer” conversations may involve some work’.

The display, which was first mounted at the Art Gallery on Sherbrooke Street before being displayed at city hall and at the annual exhibition of handicrafts, consisted — like its Washington predecessor — of drawings and photographs, along with bilingual text in both French and English, mounted on pegboard panels arrayed around the edges of the room. A local newspaper wrote that ‘It indicates how uncontrolled expansion has produced today’s unsightly conditions and ventures what changes could be effected to create the necessary balance between health, convenience, and amenities’ (‘Exhibit Envisions “City for Living”’ 1941). The exceptionally well attended exhibition was a great success and very effective, helping to spur the creation of a planning department within the Montreal city government (Valen 2017) (Figures 2 and 3).

Figure 2

City for Living exhibition with visitors, Montreal, 1941 (John Bland Fonds, John Bland Canadian Architecture Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Library).

Figure 3

City for Living exhibition, Montreal, 1941 (John Bland Fonds, John Bland Canadian Architecture Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Library).

The Canadian historians Derek Valen and Stephen Ward maintain that City for Living was part of a shift in Canada away from US-based and towards CIAM-inspired approaches to modern architecture and urbanism. However, Woodard never showed much interest in Le Corbusier, nor did she engage with CIAM and its networks. Entirely characteristic for her, though, was an emphasis on the advantages of planning. Valen notes that the Montreal exhibition ‘argued for better planning measures to control uncontrolled expansion, remove slums, improve urban health, and provide better parks, schools, and other amenities’ (2017: 27). These were goals to which she would remain loyal for the rest of her career.

Considering Woodard’s network and the contents of the two displays, it is very likely that the Washington and Montreal exhibitions provided partial inspiration for the much more celebrated Better Philadelphia exhibition that Stonorov, who she had known since the 1930s, organized with the assistance of Louis Kahn in 1947. The scale of the model of Philadelphia featured at the exhibition was probably influenced by Norman bel Geddes’s Futurama exhibition for the New York World’s Fair of 1939–1940, and other aspects of the Philadelphia installation were clearly more sophisticated than anything in which she had yet been involved, but its basic purpose — to demonstrate why planning mattered to the general public as well as local politicians and other policymakers — was remarkably similar.

Expert on South America

By 1947, however, Woodard’s star had temporarily faded in North America. The links she forged during World War II with Latin American architects provided much of the basis for her return to the national architectural stage. In January 1942 Woodard and her husband were posted to La Paz, the capital of Bolivia, where she taught and wrote for the local newspaper as well as designed buildings. She quickly mastered Spanish, which enabled her to establish relationships with architects in Argentina and Uruguay even before she won a Guggenheim fellowship to study city planning across South America. Although her book on the subject never materialized, upon her return to the United States in 1946, she served as a key point of connection between North and South American architects. This mattered enormously as, unlike many of her peers, she had not traveled to Europe before the onset of the war. And yet much of the most exciting new architecture in global terms built during the 1940s was in Latin America, where the war’s effects were felt much less than in territories where fighting took place.

Brazil’s influence on architecture in the United States is well known, but Woodard undoubtedly benefitted enormously from her familiarity with her exposure to work from across Spanish-speaking South America, although in her letters to Mumford, she often expressed hesitancy about the application there of the latest European fashions (Deckker 2001; Smith 1942). This did not hinder her, however, from publishing largely positive evaluations of what she had seen in Architectural Forum, the top US journal of the day, the managing editor of which at the time was her former brother-in-law Henry Wright (Woodard 1946; Woodard 1947). While She struggled to get her architectural practice off the ground, she also once again contributed her time to the AIA. Although only an associate member, she eventually served on the international relations committee, chairing its pan-American subcommittee.

It was in this capacity that Smith (as she by then termed herself professionally as well as personally) attended the Pan-American Congress of Architects, held in Havana in April 1950. Nearly 700 delegates from 19 countries descended on the Cuban capital, where they were welcomed by the island nation’s president. The United States sent the largest delegation, led by Ralph Walker, then the president of the AIA. Smith was one of the 15 other architects who comprised the official delegation; 51 more attended in other capacities. Several of the other delegation members, all of whom were men, were or would become well known to Smith. She had already worked, for instance, for Julian E. Berla’s Washington office and would later enter a professional partnership with Nicholas Satterlee. Her fluency in Spanish must have assisted her colleagues from across the United States, who were more likely to know French, if they had mastered a foreign language at all. She would have had little trouble communicating with the more than 20 people, including planners, professors, and public works officials as well as architects, that Argentina, Mexico, Uruguay, and Venezuela each sent (Architects on Delegation 1950; Solow 1950). Indeed, she probably already knew a number of them.

Writing in the Journal of the American Institute of Planners, Anatole Solow noted that ‘an outstanding feature of the Congress was the Inter-American exhibit of plans and photographs’, to which ‘the US submitted 600 panels including master plans of San Francisco and Philadelphia and the proposed Civic Center of Chicago’ (1950: 82). Although it is not clear who chose the material, it was Smith who made sure that it made an excellent impression upon the architects in attendance. Another member of the delegation, the Atlanta architect Samuel Inman Cooper, credited Smith with having ‘personally supervised the shipping, arranging, and hanging of a large AIA exhibit. This work was so well done that the Institute’s presentation was widely recognized as the most outstanding one of the Congress’ (1959). Her efforts were apparently particularly appreciated by Walker: ‘I have worked with her and think she is quite a person — she represents to me all that an architect should be/she goes her own way — she designs well as she sees things and she has had a fine warm sense of what our international relations should be’ (1959).

As the wife of a foreign service officer, Smith was uniquely positioned to understand the importance of such displays of soft power in the first phase of the Cold War (Loeffler 1998). The exhibition was particularly important at a time when the South influenced the North but not vice versa, although that would change across the course of the 1950s, not least because of the US’s good showing in Havana. Smith herself probably learned the most at the congress from the debates about housing, which concluded that the neighbourhood unit approach to residential planning she would later adopt was to be preferred, although delegates disagreed over the ideal height of such housing (Solow 1950).

The exhibit’s success anticipated the more celebrated activities of the State Department’s Foreign Building Office, which sponsored the design of modern US embassies, particularly in the global South (Loeffler 1998; Barber 2020). Smith, by that time a partner in Keyes, Lethbridge, Satterlee and Smith, designed the chancellery and residence for the United States in Asunción, Paraguay, completed in 1958. Although this embassy commission was less prestigious than the ones many ambitious male architects received, these were the most high-profile buildings she had yet designed. She incorporated key aspects of their brick screens into her first apartment block, part of the urban renewal in the southwest quadrant of Washington that she had already helped spearhead (Figures 4 and 5). This detailing was probably based not upon the work of Le Corbusier, about whom she was ambivalent at best, but the recent work she had viewed in Montevideo and Asunción.

Figure 4

Satterlee and Smith, US embassy residence, Asuncion, Paraguay, 1960 (photographs related to embassies, consulates, and other overseas buildings, record group 59, National Archives, https://catalog.archives.gov/id/24260566).

Figure 5

Satterlee and Smith, US embassy residence, Asuncion, Paraguay, 1960. (photographs related to embassies, consulates, and other overseas buildings, record group 59, National Archives https://catalog.archives.gov/id/24260580).

In Moscow

In 1957, Smith and Satterlee split off from Keyes and Lethbridge; the new partnership dissolved six years later when she went out on her own. In the years that followed she became increasingly occupied with the design of housing, including widely acclaimed apartment and townhouse complexes in Brookline, Massachusetts; New Haven, Connecticut; Reston, Virginia; and St. Louis, Missouri, as well as in Southwest (Ammon 2009; Ammon 2020). But before this work made it unnecessary for her to continue to help with exhibitions, she assisted in organizing the Cities-USA exhibition, held in Moscow in 1958 in conjunction with the fifth meeting of the International Union of Architects (Figure 6). Although the organizing committee was officially headed by Henry Stern Churchill, who had also attended the Havana conference, Alice Korff, the curator of the AIA Gallery explained that

it was almost entirely through her efforts that the exhibition came about. She understood the importance of showing the best of American architecture and city planning to people of other countries and used great imagination and determination to see to it that the Institute was well represented. Mrs. Smith drew up the outline herself for the contents of the show, raised the necessary funds, engaged the designer, overcame political and technical obstacles and succeeded in producing a major showing. (1959)

Figure 6

Chloethiel Smith (second from right) in front of a scaled-down layout of the 1958 Moscow exhibition (Moscow Exhibition for the IUA 1958: 299).

In Moscow, Smith helped curate as well as organize, if not design, a display that featured the work of many of her prominent male colleagues, thus promoting members of the profession from across the entire country rather than herself. Cities-USA was part of a series of national exhibitions that also encompassed urban planning, in which the Soviets invested heavily (Köhring 2016). The exhibition enhanced the degree to which the United States portrayed itself abroad as a forward-thinking country in which modern architecture assisted in delivering a high standard of living. Staged at Moscow University, it consisted of 82 panels of photographs which were on display for just one week. It was divided into sections that emphasized the role of the automobile, still a luxury in much of the world, in the American city and its suburbs, as well as showcasing recent urban renewal project and industrial buildings, and featured the work of I. M. Pei, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Eero Saarinen, and Rafael Soriano (‘Moscow’ 1958). The display was designed by Peter Blake and Julian Neski. Multilingual captions targeted audiences who could read English, Russian, Spanish, or French (Conroy 1989).

While it is difficult to judge what impact the exhibition, which received 4000 visitors a day, had on the Soviets, it is clear how it was received within the foreign policy community in the United States. Time magazine, one of the most widely read periodicals at the time in the country, devoted an entire article to it (Art: U.S. Architecture in Moscow 1958). Its reporter noted that ‘while the model kitchen evoked a unanimous ‘so convenient,’ the many-storied parking garage, the interlocking multitiered roadways, and the sheer number of cars on the roads caused the greatest awe.’

Cities-USA also set the stage for one of the most famous encounters of the Cold War. The following year Blake organized the architecture section of the American National Exhibition, a six-week long fair held in Moscow that attracted three million people, a far larger and more diverse audience than had attended the 1958 show. George Nelson organised the design of the display, to which Charles and Ray Eames as well as Buckminster Fuller contributed. Sponsored by the United States Information Agency (USIA) rather than the AIA, this much larger exhibition featured actual American commodities, including even a Levittown house, rather than simply photographs. It is nonetheless likely that USIA officials were well aware, not least through Smith’s ties to the upper echelons of the State Department (USIA director George Allen was a former member of the Foreign Service), of the AIA effort for the IUA, which would explain the overlap in the two design teams. The 1959 show was widely deemed a great success in the United States, due above all to it being the site of the famous ‘kitchen debate’ between United States Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev (Blake 1993: 228–248; Castillo 2010: 157–163).

Back in Washington

After 1958, Smith was finally able to devote her considerable energies to designing buildings rather than organizing exhibitions. For the rest of her career she focused on her practice and on planning issues in Washington, DC. She never became an influential designer at the national level, but she ran a large office that realized an impressive amount of housing, as well as three office buildings clustered on a single corner of Washington’s Connecticut Avenue. Clients found her particularly sensitive to their concerns, but Smith’s motivation was above all to keep those who used her buildings satisfied.

Across the 1960s, the decade of her greatest professional success, Smith gave a lot of talks and wrote a lot of articles. In both she typically adopted a self-deprecating tone, professing to have little expertise about the subject at hand and resorting to dictionary definitions to get started. She never situated herself in relation to leading architects or design trends but instead consistently put the emphasis on how people inhabited buildings and cities. She excelled at getting her message across to audiences unschooled in the fine points of modern architecture. Speaking in 1965 at Winterfest in Boston, she declared, in a critique of the planning orthodoxy of the day that ‘rules cannot breathe life into brick and mortar, or set the fountain playing in the square; or raise the gay striped awning over a table; or build the street with the shaded picnic green; or create the shadowed arch where lovers find a moment alone as the cars turn into the street.’ She also knew what was at stake, admitting that ‘when men lose pride in their places to live and in their cities, they may soon lose themselves and find no place in society’ (1965: 3). The following year she told the Mortgage Bankers of America that ‘design . . . does not mean just building design. It means social, legal and financial design; it means economic design; it means creative thinking in all fields’ (1966: 7).

Smith used her communication and organizational skills to achieve a larger civic good as well as to build housing and office towers for developers. In Washington, she was known as much for her civic activism as for her architecture. President Lyndon Johnson and First Lady Claudia ‘Lady Bird’ Johnson appointed her to President’s Council on Pennsylvania Avenue and the First Lady’s Committee for the Beautification of the Nation’s Capital. Local newspaper reports suggest that on the council, as had been the case with the exhibitions, her ability to quietly toil behind the scenes long after the men had gone home made a very favourable impression (McLendon 1967). Undoubtedly in part as a result, in 1967 President Johnson placed her on the National Commission of the Fine Arts.

Her most enduring legacy may be helping to launch the National Building Museum, which was finally established in 1980 in Washington, DC, more than four decades after she had first proposed something of the kind in conjunction with her 1939 exhibition. She and Kastner had called for a city planning museum which ‘would be a meeting place and a workshop as well as a place for study . . . which would educate the citizen, the architect and all others professionally interested in city planning’. Such an institution, they claimed, ‘would become the architect’s laboratory in his [sic] work with people’. (Kastner and Woodard 1939). As early as 1967 she had identified the former Pension Building as the place where it should reside (Schaden 1969) (Figure 7).

Figure 7

US National Law Enforcement Memorial and National Building Museum Pension Building, Washington DC, photograph by Carol M. Highsmith (LC-DIG-highsm-12502, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress).

Women of Smith’s generation struggled to secure even a toehold in the architectural profession in the United States. Initially, exhibitions, none of which apparently featured her own designs, enabled her to make the case, as in Washington and Montreal, to first the profession and then the public, for the importance of city planning, the field in which she first hoped to pursue a career. While she was not singly responsible for either, she was clearly willing to put in much more than her share of the work. Her broad view of her profession and her ability to articulate why it mattered to society as a whole, forged in the context of these displays in Washington and Montreal, meant in the first case to be viewed by fellow architects, joined in the second by ordinary citizens, accounted for much of her later success. So did the generosity she displayed in her contributions to the Havana and Moscow displays, which garnered the respect of men not necessarily inclined to view a female colleague positively. Exhibitions provided a context in which she supported and celebrated rather than challenged her colleagues. They thus provided an unthreatening path into the profession for a woman whose goals remained what she saw as properly planned cities, rather than personal glory. That these contributions also accorded with the Cold War positions supported by her husband’s employers in the State Department and the National Security Council confirmed their relevance and her usefulness in Washington, a city more wedded to discussions of politics than of architecture. Earning the respect of her peers more on the basis of her organizational abilities than her design skills (though these were also considerable), she opened the door to finally placing her stamp upon a city that most of the country’s architectural establishment ignored, and where the Building Museum keeps her focus upon the lived experience of the built environment rather than the celebration of the starchitect alive.

Author’s Note

This article is based upon a talk Kathleen James-Chakraborty delivered to the women in architecture interest group at the 2022 EAHN meeting in Madrid. She thanks Eliana Perotti and Katia Frey for organizing the session and for all they have done to promote the study of women architects and Weronika Kocurkiewicz for research assistance. The article was prepared during the time that James-Chakraborty was an Ailsa Mellon Bruce senior fellow at the Center for Advanced study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art and is also a product of her project Expanding Agency: Women, Race, and the Dissemination of Modern Architecture. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 10109419). In her capacity as the manager of the School of Art History and Cultural Policy at University College Dublin, from which she has recently retired, Elizabeth Varley facilitated this research, much as Smith did that of her male colleagues.

Competing Interests

The authors have no competing interests to declare.