Eleanor Raymond '09

Alumnae Achievement Awards 1982

Architect

Eleanor Raymond graduated from Wellesley in 1909 and went on to the Cambridge School of Art and Landscape Architecture for Women. After her graduation in 1919, she began to work in the office of the well-known Boston architect, Henry Atherton Frost. In 1928, Raymond opened a firm of her own.

In 1931, after five years of independent work, Raymond published Early Domestic Architecture of Pennsylvania. This book, which explores the “unstudied directness in fitting form to function” in early American architecture, brought her considerable renown in the world of architecture. She always worked within the “three fields” of a house—the exterior, the interior, and the landscape—and maintained that it was crucial to know exactly how her client planned to use the space she designed.

In 1948, with the help of Dr. Maria Telks of the MIT Solar Laboratory, Raymond built the Dover Sun House, the first solar powered residence in the country. She practiced architecture for over fifty years and was made a fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 1961. One client called Raymond, “an architect who combines respect for tradition with disrespect for its limitations.”

Raymond passed away in 1989 at the age of 102 in Boston, Massachusetts.