Margaret Hicks (architect)

Margaret Hicks
Margaret Hicks
Born	1858
Died	1883; Cambridge, Massachusetts
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Cornell University
Occupation	Architect
Spouse(s)	Arthur Karl Volkmann

Margaret Hicks (1858–1883) was an American architect who was the first woman architect to publish in a professional architectural journal.[1]

Biography

Design for a workman's cottage by Margaret Hicks, 1878.

Hicks was born in 1858 and attended Cornell University, where she got a B.A. in 1878 and then a bachelor of architecture degree in 1880. She was the first woman to receive an architectural degree from Cornell, one year after Mary L. Page became the first woman in the United States to receive an architectural degree from a university.[1][2]

While still a student at Cornell, one of her projects, a workman's cottage, was published in American Architect and Building News (1878).[1] It was republished in The Builder and Wood-Worker in 1883.[3] Her "commencement essay" on tenement housing has been cited by one historian for its concern for such critical features as light and air that were often overlooked by other contemporary architects.[1] This places Hicks squarely among a group of American women architects from the late 19th and early 20th century who became known for ignoring the middle-class market and giving their attention to the practical necessities of tenement and workers' housing—architects such as Mary Gannon and Alice Hands of Gannon and Hands and Marcia Mead and her partner Anna P. Schenck.[4]

In 1880, Hicks married architect Arthur Karl Volkmann, who had graduated from Cornell in 1877. She died prematurely three years later in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the age of 25.

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References

Allaback, Sarah. The First American Women Architects. University of Illinois Press, 2008.
Kostof, Spiro. The Architect: Chapters in the History of the Profession.
"Our Illustrations". The Builder and Wood-Worker, July 1883, plate 50 (p. 126).
Wright, Gwendolyn. "On the Fringe of the Profession: Women in American Architecture". In The Architect, Spiro Kostof, ed. Oxford University Press, 1977, pp. 292093.

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[alla-1] Allaback, Sarah. The First American Women Architects. University of Illinois Press, 2008.

[kostof-2] Kostof, Spiro. The Architect: Chapters in the History of the Profession.

[builder-3] "Our Illustrations". The Builder and Wood-Worker, July 1883, plate 50 (p. 126).

[wright-4] Wright, Gwendolyn. "On the Fringe of the Profession: Women in American Architecture". In The Architect, Spiro Kostof, ed. Oxford University Press, 1977, pp. 292093.