‘Build on it’: A new exhibition at the U looks at the legacy of women architects in Minnesota
Go Deeper.
Create an account or log in to save stories.
Like this?
Thanks for liking this story! We have added it to a list of your favorite stories.
Cheryll Fong stands in front of a tantalizing collection of buildings.
There’s a gabled sea captain’s cottage, an art deco veranda cafe and a colossal monument built into red rock reminiscent of the ancient Colossus of Rhodes.
“It’s absolutely stunning,” Fong says.
They’re architectural sketches and watercolors made by women studying at the University of Minnesota in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s.
Turn Up Your Support
MPR News helps you turn down the noise and build shared understanding. Turn up your support for this public resource and keep trusted journalism accessible to all.
Putting women back on the blueprint
Fong curates the Northwest Architectural Archives at the University of Minnesota. Fong — along with Minnesota-based architectural historian Jane King Hession and University of Wisconsin-Stout associate professor of design Kimberly Long Loken — spent the last year curating the exhibition ”Making Room: Women’s Histories From the Northwest Architectural Archives.” The exhibition is on view in the first-floor gallery of the Elmer L. Andersen Library on campus.
“We thought we really need to lift up these stories and show the world that women have been doing this for a long time,” Fong says. She says the exhibition is just a starting point for restoring women to the historical architectural record.
On view are drawings, blueprints, models, books, timelines, newspaper and magazine articles and photographs by and about women architects in Minnesota over the past century.
“This is really an invitation for historians, for students, for those in the field, to look into these names, find what we couldn't find in a year,” Fong says. “Please build on it.”
The woman behind Minnesota’s Modernist wave
For a large chunk of the 20th century, Fong explains, if women were admitted to architecture school, they were often the sole female in their cohort and were not provided basic amenities, like women’s restrooms. And if they earned a degree, the next hurdle was getting hired by a firm.
She points to the experience of Elizabeth “Lisl” Scheu Close (1912-2011) during the Great Depression.
“Poor Lisl Close. She was told that she would have to pay an architect to hire her,” Fong says. “Eventually, she is hired, and then becomes just an extraordinary architect here in Minnesota.”
Close was a leader in Modern architecture, known for designing the University of Minnesota’s Ferguson Hall, which features clean lines and a concrete-and-glass structure. She also designed the 1957 “Thunderhead” cabin on Lake Vermilion, with a low profile and large windows that connect the indoors with the outdoors. The Thunderhead was listed for the first time in 2023 for $1.6 million.
In 1969, Close became the first Minnesota woman to be named a fellow by the American Institute of Architects, one of the highest honors in the field. (According to an exhibition didactic, only 3 percent of architects are named fellows, and of that 3 percent, only 18 percent are women.)
What a name in a ledger hides
Fong says it was a challenge to create the exhibition as the work of many of these architects were undocumented or mis-documented in their time.
Sometimes the curatorial team just had a name in a ledger. Many of these women were married to architects, and the husbands often got the credit for their work.
“They're literally tucked in, maybe under their husband's name and collection, or just a little note in history,” Fong says.
Minnesota’s oldest woman architect tells her story
Another woman who shaped the field locally and nationally is Su Blumentals. At 88, Blumentals is the oldest living woman architect in Minnesota. Blumentals started her degree at the university in 1954 when the architecture school was under the deanship of famed architect Ralph Rapson.
“She was told to wear a nice dress because she would be pouring coffee at a faculty event in the School of Architecture,” Fong says. “She takes that opportunity to really network and to talk to all the notables who would be there that evening.”
Blumentals remembers it all too well.
“It was an opportunity to get to talk with these famous architects and planners,” Blumentals says. “The women saw it as demeaning. The guys saw it as standard practice.”
Blumentals graduated in 1959 and worked across the region for seven decades before retiring her license in 2024. She would work with the firm Gingold-Pink and for decades with her husband and fellow architect Janis Blumentals, who died in 2017, at the Brooklyn Center-based firm Blumentals Architecture, Inc.
Her projects include the Mann Southtown Theater, with its sweeping, curved roofline and a prominent marquee, in 1962, which was razed in the 90s, and the Hennepin County Medical Center in 1973, with heavy use of raw concrete, strong geometric forms and minimal ornamentation. She also helped design a series of Lund’s grocery stores, including the first major location in Richfield, where Blumentals has since shopped regularly for decades.
The grocery store that wowed the world
Standing outside what is now the Richfield Lunds & Byerlys, Blumentals stares up at the stone pylon that rises from inside the store entrance and soars through the roof. It’s one of the few elements still visible from the original design.
"It's nice having a little piece of its original look,” Blumentals says. “It's picked up immediately from the intersection we're on."
Inside, she points to the ceiling — there used to be a mural about the history of food that encircled the entire store. At the time, the store was cutting-edge design for grocers and attracted visitors from around the world, Blumentals recalls as she hunts for green lentils.
“After this store went up, Lunds was named the grocer of the year, and I believe it was by ‘Progressive Grocer' magazine,” Blumentals says. The 1960s magazine spread is on view in the exhibition, highlighting the “prestige” areas of the grocer, including a pitched wood-beamed ceiling, a “polished-wood alcove for the Food of the World gourmet section” and a “gold foil-lined arch with small chandeliers” at the checkout.
It’s one of her favorite projects. "Gosh, 15-20 years after this was built, there would still be groups of grocers from all around the world that would be coming here on tour, because it was just not normal,” Blumentals says. “It was turning groceries from a necessity into a thing that you love."
In the exhibition, you’ll also learn that in 1999, Blumentals was also named a fellow by the American Institute of Architects. She was at a design conference in Duluth when she found out.
“I got this call and immediately burst into tears like a baby. It was so exciting.”
Shaking up a board stuck in time
Blumentals received a fellowship for her service to the profession, including her time on the Minnesota Board of AELSLAGID, the state’s regulating board for the fields of architecture, engineering, land surveying, landscape architecture, geoscience and interior design.
Not only was Blumentals the first woman appointed to the board in 1991, she became the first woman board chair a few years later. One of her major accomplishments there was setting board term limits.
“Some of the people, when I entered the board, had been there for 30-some years, and it was a feeling of: It belonged to them,” Blumentals says. “By replacing people that had been there way too long, were totally burned out and really saw helping the professions as secondary, this, in actuality, did really solve the problem.”
The field of architecture still lags in gender parity. As the exhibition outlines, women hold 53 percent of architecture degrees, but only make up 31 percent of practicing architects. Blumentals has advice for women aspiring to be architects.
“Do it!” she says. “If you don't follow your heart, you always regret what might have been.”
The past is waiting to be uncovered
Back at the exhibition, Fong says she’s learned so much from the women in the show. There are so many more: Miriam “Mimi” Bend Lein (1912-2008), who co-designed the Walker Art Center’s renowned “Idea House” in 1941; Sarah Susanka, who predated the tiny home movement with her bestselling 1998 book “The Not So Big House”; and Sarah Nettleton, who became a fellow in 2016 for being a leader in sustainable design.
An extensive timeline created by Loken, “The Evolution of Women in Architecture,” shows how much these architects shaped the Minnesota — and the world — that we walk around in.
“What brings me joy is they found a way, and where they found a way, they made room for others,” Fong says.
There will be an exhibition reception from 5:30 to 8 p.m. Monday, March 24. Speakers include Blumentals, Nettleton and architect Katie Leaf, as well as Jennifer Yoos, head of the university’s School of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Interior Design.
Blumentals will not be pouring coffee.
“Making Room” is up through May 30 (weekdays only), in the first floor gallery of the Elmer L. Andersen Library at the University of Minnesota.
Correction: (March 24, 2025) An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of Katie Leaf.
