Becoming the Self: Judith Chafee and the Ramada House
Gabrielle Harlan
University of Virginia (Estados Unidos)
This paper traces the life and career of the mid-twentieth century architect, Judith Chafee, through an examination of her 1974 Ramada House located in Tucson, Arizona. Chafee graduated from Yale in 1960 and spent ten years working for some of the most esteemed architecture firms of the twentieth century. However, in 1969, disenchanted with constrained professional gender roles, she created her own atelier in Arizona. Her 1974 design for the Ramada House in Tucson gained her international recognition in architectural circles when the house was subsequently published in the 1987 second edition of British architectural historian William J.R Curtis’s Modern Architecture Since 1900. However, throughout her life, Chafee chose not to speak in depth on her work and often presented it in silent presentations after a brief introduction. She thought answering too explicitly the question of why she made her buildings the way she did was always something made up for an audience She wanted the work to speak for itself. However, I believe that questioning the “why” of her buildings is necessary.
This paper examines the Ramada House as a text that “speaks” compellingly of who Judith Chafee was at one moment in time and helps us to understand not only how this house was shaped by Judith Chafee, but perhaps more importantly, to better understand its maker. It examines the Ramada House as a cultural artifact to show how the shaping hand of Judith Chafee is reflected in the way the space is rendered. Chafee’s work is often described as capturing a sense of place, which she attributed to her childhood spent in Tucson. Therefore, the cultural fabric of the desert community of Tucson during Chafee’s childhood is examined as well as more personal influences, such as Chafee’s relationship to the Progressive movement of the early twentieth century as embodied in her memories of her mother and close family friend, Margaret Sanger, founder of the modern American birth control movement. Through the Ramada House, one can glimpse the refracted image of the intersection of Chafee’s childhood identity with her adult identity when she encountered the larger world as a woman practicing architecture in what was largely considered to be a man’s profession.
The life of Judith Chafee, and the forces that both shaped and divided her, are important testimony to one life lived, as both an architect and a woman, in the twentieth century. Chafee was a committed modernist, and she believed in the power of architecture to transform people’s lives. Through the architecture of the Ramada House, she sought to create an alternative vision that would break with the past in order to effect a future of expanded freedom. However, in the Ramada House, Chafee was also engaged in a more personal process of growth. As an artist engaged in the creative process of seeking personal expression, she also struggled with her own authenticity as she sought to articulate an alternate social vision. This paper demonstrates that the Ramada House and Chafee are constitutively intertwined in a process of “becoming” and that the one illuminates the other.
About Gabrielle Harlan
Gabrielle Harlan is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art and Architectural History at the University of Virginia. She also holds a Master’s degree in Architectural History and a Certificate in Historic Preservation from the University of Virginia, as well as a professional Architecture degree from the University of Arizona. She has practiced architecture in Atlanta, Georgia and Phoenix, Arizona.