https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/02/arts/beverly-willis-dead.html
(with several photos)

First half or so:

Beverly Willis, 95, Dies; Architect and Advocate for Women in the Field
With her own firm in San Francisco and a foundation in New York, she made it her mission to recognize the work of her female predecessors and contemporaries.

By Jori Finkel
Oct. 2, 2023

“Can you name five female architects?”

That question was posed repeatedly and pointedly by Beverly Willis, an architect who helped women break through her field’s glass ceiling by running her own accomplished firm in San Francisco and creating a foundation in New York for promoting women’s contributions to the industry.

She died at 95 on Sunday at her home in Branford, Conn., where she was in hospice care, her spouse, Wanda Bubriski, said. The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.

In San Francisco, Ms. Willis created several destination buildings. She won acclaim for her 1965 conversion of three Victorian homes into a retail and restaurant complex — an early example of finding a modern purpose for a historic building, a practice now known as adaptive reuse. In 1983, she completed the San Francisco Ballet Building, recognized at the time as the first building in the United States designed exclusively for a major ballet school.

As one of the few prominent women in her field, Ms. Willis, who spent the following decades in New York, made it her mission to recognize the work of her female predecessors and contemporaries.

She celebrated the achievements of Emily Warren Roebling, who spent years helping with the planning and building of the Brooklyn Bridge after her husband, Washington Roebling, the bridge’s chief engineer, fell sick and was bedridden. She championed the work of the landscape designer M. Betty Sprout, who, in the 1930s and ’40s in Manhattan, shaped the plantings for Bryant Park, the Conservatory Garden in Central Park and City Hall Park, among other major projects. And she recognized the work of little-known 20th-century female architects, as well as more established ones who worked into the 21st century as well, like Zaha Hadid, Annabelle Selldorf and Elizabeth Diller, of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

These are just a few of the architects, designers and construction chiefs highlighted in Ms. Willis’s short film “Unknown New York: The City That Women Built.” That film, made in 2018, features a compelling narrative device: a map of Manhattan redrawn to show how the city has changed because of women’s contributions.

Ms. Willis said she created the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation in 2002 out of frustration at seeing women largely absent from architectural history textbooks. When she asked people to name five female architects, a favorite question of hers, most could not come up with more than two or three.. As she said in her film, “I knew that women had planned, designed, built or developed all types of construction in Manhattan, yet their works — their blood, sweat and tears — were either blatantly shunned, labeled as anonymous or credited to someone else.”

Beverly Ann Willis was born on Feb. 17, 1928, in Tulsa, Okla., to Ralph and Margaret (Porter) Willis. Her mother was a nurse, her father an oil industry entrepreneur.

Some of her earliest memories were of exploring rugged oil fields and being mesmerized by the big machinery there. The sites were her playground of sorts. “I climbed derricks,” she told Frances Anderton of the California public radio station KCRW in 2017.

By 1934 her parents had divorced and her father’s business had gone under. He soon disappeared from her life. Her mother, unable to provide for Beverly and her younger brother, also named Ralph, placed them in an orphanage for six years.

In a biographical section of Ms. Willis’s book “Invisible Images: The Silent Language of Architecture” (1995), written with the architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, Mr. Ouroussoff wrote that her orphan years had been formative. Under the “crushing weight of unfeeling institutions,” he wrote, she established a fierce independence as a means of survival, building on the self-reliance she developed in the oil fields.

By the time she was 17, he noted, she had “worked in a welding shop, learning to rivet, to wire equipment and to practice woodworking.” She also learned as a teenager to fly a single-engine propeller plane.

By then she had moved with her mother to Portland, Ore., where Beverly studied engineering at Oregon State University from 1946 to 1948. After studying and living for a while in San Francisco, she transferred to the University of Hawaii and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree there in 1954...

(snip)