New York City Buildings Designed by Women
Even though women are still underrepresented in the architecture profession, they’ve had an enormous influence on urban life, especially in cities like New York where it’s hard to walk a full city block without encountering the work of a woman designer. Explore the map below to learn more about some of the women behind your favorite New York City buildings.
520 West 28th Street (2017)
Pritzer Prize winner Zaha Hadid is perhaps the best-known female architect working today. This swirling glass building in Chelsea, Hadid’s first New York City building, is visible from Chelsea’s iconic high line park, its feminine curves standing out as a luxurious work of art among other, more practical building designs.
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts Redevelopment (2009)
Elizabeth Diller is a co-founding partner of the New York-based firm Diller, Scorfidio, and Renfro. The firm is best known for their museums and other civic projects, like the High Line in New York City, the Broad Museum in Los Angeles, and the 2009 redevelopment of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.
Chelsea Modern (2009)
Audrey Matlock, who founded her firm in the mid-1990s has earned a reputation for her creativity, flexibility, and ability to design buildings that fit into the ecosystem of a neighborhood. In addition to private, residential buildings, like this one, she has designed public works like schools and libraries.
V33 Building (2008)
Winka Dubbeldam is a Dutch-American architect and founder of the NYC firm, Archi-Techtonics. She is best-known for her innovative use of sustainable materials and creative building systems. The V33 building in lower Manhattan is a perfect example — a modern take on the warehouses for which Tribeca was once known, it combines sustainable materials to create a modern, open space that blends indoor and outdoor areas seamlessly.
The New Museum of Contemporary Art (2007)
Kazuyo Sejimi is a Japanese architect celebrated for her elegant modern constructions and use of glass, marble, and a variety of metals. She’s been working alongside her former employee Ryue Nishizawa at their Tokyo firm since 1995.
African Burial Ground Interpretive Center (2006)
Roberta Washington is one of the only Black women to lead an architecture firm in the United States. She is also the commissioner of NYC’s Landmarks Preservation Commission. In 2006, she designed the visitor’s center at this colonial era-burial ground, which contains the remains of thousands of Black slaves, forgotten until the site was discovered in 1991. The Lower Manhattan monument is a reminder of Lower Manhattan’s legacy as one of the largest urban centers of slavery in the US.
48 Bond Street (2006)
Deborah Burke became the first woman dean of the Yale School of architecture in 2016. Before that, she served as an adjunct professor at the school for nearly 30 years, drawing on her experience working on projects like this NoHo apartment building and its modern, charcoal-grey facade.
Waterside Plaza (1973)
Phyllis Birkby can truly be called a feminist architect. An active participant in the Women’s Liberation Movement in the early 1970s, she organized her own sort of consciousness-raising groups with the goal of exploring questions about gender and the built environment. Through these meetings, which she called “environmental fantasy” workshops, she encouraged participants from all walks of life — not just architects — to imagine solutions to design problems that went beyond traditional, male-dominated approaches. Her imaginative approach to design philosophy has left as strong a legacy as her buildings, including this iconic East River plaza.
Lever House (1952)
Natalie de Blois was one of just a few women architects working in the field in the 1950s and 60s and her big, ambitious projects like the Lever House, inspired by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s International Style, never got the attention they deserved, in part because of de Blois’s gender. De Blois was a senior designer at the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and had a huge impact on the built environment of New York City, though her name is seldom mentioned even today.
