Natalie de Blois Interviewed by Detlef Mertins

June 17, 2004
Chicago

Detlef Mertens: What was it that drew you into architecture?
Natalie de Blois: My father was a civil engineer with a big family and I was brought up during the Depression. My parents wanted all their children to go to college, but they didn't have any money. They worked on getting us interested in going to college and expected that we all would. Mostly my father, but even my mother encouraged me as a young girl.

DM: Specifically to study architecture?
NdB: My father was an engineer, as were his father and grandfather. My mother was a schoolteacher. I was selected to be the one that would go into art. I told my father that I wanted to be an architect from the age of ten or twelve. He was always encouraging.

DM: You went to Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, to begin with.
NdB: I went there on a scholarship for one year only and then transferred to Columbia. My father wanted me to go to MIT. Of course, he didn't have any money. At that time you had to take two years of college to get into an architectural school. Columbia was still an undergraduate program.
So my father kept tabs on Columbia as an alternative. I had letters to the school and talked to them. They changed their rules that year to require only one year of college instead of two. It was during the War in 1940. The fact was that they wanted women. We had foreign and 4-F students in the program. It wasn't a large class. There were eighteen students including five women.

DM: What was it like at Columbia?
NdB: I liked it. But already after my first year I thought, "Well, I want to get out of school and start working.” But I didn't. I stayed. That was when I decided, "You're a woman and you're in a man's profession. You better get a degree." So I enjoyed my experience at Columbia. It was a good education. It wasn't a Beaux Arts school. We took a survey course in math, descriptive geometry, and statistics as well as an introduction to design and history. There were yearly courses in materials and methods of construction. And we always had painting and sculpture in the art school. Professor Lally was the structural engineer. He invented the Lally column, so who better than Professor Lally. We got an awful lot of background in technical subjects—in structures and mechanical engineering, and I was given an award for my ability to understand structures. It was a New York State exam award, and I got that for the school, for the graduating class.

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Natalie de Blois was born in Paterson, New Jersey in 1921. She completed her professional degree in Architecture at Columbia University in 1944 and began a fifty-year career in architecture working initially with Ketchum, Gina & Sharp in New York. De Blois joined Skidmore, Owings and Merrill in September 1944 and worked as a designer with Gordon Bunshaft on many significant projects including Lever House, Pepsi Cola, Connecticut General Life Insurance, and Union Carbide, and as a designer for the Lever House. During this period she achieved national recognition for her designs. From 1962 to 1974 she worked in the Chicago offices of SOM where she became an associate partner in 1964. During the 1970s she became active in promoting greater awareness of women's issues within the profession and was celebrated as an outstanding figure in the field. From 1980 to 1993 she taught at the University of Texas at Austin, where a scholarship was created in her name. She became a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 1974 and in 1998 received the Romieniec Award of the Texas AIA for distinguished achievement in education.

Detlef Mertins is Professor and Chair of the Architecture Department at the University of Pennsylvania. He has written extensively on the history of modernism in the 20th century and has conducted interviews with former SOM partners Walter Netsch and Bruce Graham for SOM Journals 1 and 2, and edited the interview with Gordon Bunshaft for SOM Journal 3.


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