Today marks the anniversary of the birth of Sophia Gregoria Hayden on October 17, 1868, in Santiago, Chile. The first female graduate of the four-year program in architecture at MIT, Hayden won the national competition to design the Woman’s Building for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.
In her essay on the Woman’s Pavilion, Anna Burrows observes that “due to its limited dimensions, Sophia Hayden deemed it more effective to concentrate attention on the outside details. For these reasons, the building was criticized for too easily revealing the sex of its designer.”
The excerpt below comes from “Woman’s Triumph at the Fair” by Julian Ralph in Harper’s Chicago and the World’s Fair (Harper & Brothers, 1893), Chapter 14.
The Woman’s Building was itself designed by a woman, and, beyond the manual labor of the builders, nothing about it now or when it shall be opened to the public reflects credit upon the sterner sex. Fourteen women architects, not one of them above twenty-five years of age, and the majority hailing from the South and West, submitted designs for the structure to the scrutiny of the Board of Architects of the Exposition, and Miss Sophia G. Hayden, of Boston, had hers accepted. The choice of the masculine architects is not concurred in by all the women interested in the woman’s department by any means. As for the architects themselves, one said to me, “Its fault is one which makes it especially suitable for the purposes for which it is to be used–it is chaste and timid.” To my lay eyes it is far more creditable as a work of art than the more pretentious Government Building, and than many of the buildings put up as headquarters by and for the various States.
The Woman’s Building, World’s Columbian Exposition. 1893. Sophia G. Hayden, architect. [Image from the University of Maryland Digital Collections.]