Natalie de Blois

For thirty years, architect Natalie Griffin de Blois (b. 1921–d. 2013) worked for the firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), where she helped design the firm’s best-known mid-century buildings, all of them exemplars of corporate modernism. While design decisions explicitly attributed to de Blois are difficult to pinpoint, there is unanimity in the historical record that she made key contributions to what are now regarded as iconic modernist buildings. These contributions were largely behind the scenes—the institutionalized sexism of the era meant that de Blois was prevented from dealing directly with clients—but they embraced design development, spatial programming, and structural, façade, and interior detailing. De Blois, who was born and raised in New Jersey, decided to become an architect at an early age. She graduated from Columbia in January 1944, one of only five women in her class. After de Blois was fired from her first postgraduate job for rebuffing the advances of a male colleague, she entered the New York office of SOM in October that same year. Her first major project, the modernist high-rise Terrace Plaza Hotel in Cincinnati, opened to great fanfare in 1948. During the 1950s, de Blois worked on the Lever House, the Union Carbide building, and the Pepsi-Cola headquarters, all on Park Avenue in New York. With their sleek glass curtain walls and stainless-steel mullions, these buildings exuded the urbane glamour that, for many, characterized the era. In Connecticut, de Blois worked on the corporate campuses of Connecticut General and Emhart. These low-slung buildings, surrounded by lush landscapes and surface parking, were the horizontal suburban counterparts to SOM’s towers. Like the skyscrapers, these groundscrapers also typified the period in which modernism established itself as the architectural aesthetic of the establishment. While SOM partner Gordon Bunshaft most often receives credit for these projects, de Blois was the senior designer for many of them. During her time at SOM, de Blois was a rare woman practicing at the profession’s highest levels, and while she was well-respected, when she moved to the Chicago office in 1964, after two decades with the firm, she was promoted only to associate partner. While sexism remained an unwelcome touchstone throughout her career, it also prompted her engagement with second-wave feminism. In 1974, she cofounded Chicago Women in Architecture and served as a member of an American Institute of Architects (AIA) taskforce studying gender discrimination in the profession. That same year, de Blois left SOM and eventually moved to Texas, where she would practice architecture for another two decades; she also began to teach, offering skyscraper studios at the University of Texas, and influencing a generation of young designers. By the time de Blois died in 2013, her profound contributions to mid-century modernist architecture were increasingly acknowledged by the profession and studied by scholars. But appreciation of an architect’s work is no guarantee of a building’s longevity: while some of her buildings have been placed on the National Register of Historic Places (Connecticut General) and other have been landmarked (Lever House and Pepsi-Cola), Emhart and Union Carbide were both demolished, in 2003 and 2020, respectively.