Marion Manley: Miami's First Woman Architect

MARION MANLEY BOOK REVIEW

Marion Manley didn't build Depression-era nautical Art Deco hotel gems on Miami Beach, nor did she fuel exuberant and multi-colored condo confections on Brickell Avenue by Arquitectonica and others and she did not elevate town planning to an art form like University of Miami School of Architecture and the Duany Plater-Zyberk (DPZ)have.

Perhaps that is why her name is not well-known in Miami, a city full of big names, headline grabbers and artful self-promoters.

Thank goodness for Marion Manley: Miami's First Woman Architect, a straightforward-titled biography of a straightforward architect who practiced in Miami for six decades.

Finally, the late Manley gets her due -- both as a fine architect and as a trailblazing female architect who practiced in a time when woman architects were almost unheard of. As the outstanding book authored by University of Miami School of Architecture Professors Catherine Lynn and Carie Penabad aptly point out -- architecture is still a male-dominated profession.

Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk -- longtime dean of the University of Miami School of Architecture, founding principal of DPZ, co-creator of the New Urbanism and one of the most successful female architects of the late 20th and early 21st centuries -- penned the foreword for the University of George Press book.

In it, Plater-Zyberk deftly points out that the renown School of Architecture occupies a series of postwar graduate student housing buildings that were designed by Manley and her associates in 1947. With renovations for academic use, the structures are still very functional and sustainable more than six decades later, where Plater-Zyberk praises "Their cantilevered eyebrows modulate the subtropical sunlight, minimizing need for artificial light, while allowing views into studios, offices, and the library."

Lynn and Penabad point out Manley (1893-1984) was building sustainably long before we all went green -- recycling military material for semi-permanent on the University of Miami's post WW II campus, designing houses to take advantage of local materials and natural breezes and situating a house to perfectly protect a densely-wooded lot.

When Manley was 74, a young couple approached her in 1967 with the dream of creating a special house that would interact with, not clear cut the verdant landscape around the lot in Palmetto Bay, an area about 20 miles south of Miami.

Instead of cutting down everything in sight, a so many production builders do, Manley worked with the Scott family to build a house that protected two natural Miami habitats -- pineland and seasonally-wet prairie.

The house, with a small footprint to protect its surroundings, was largely built from salvaged Dade County pine and cypress. The home still stands today, still enjoyed by the original family more than four decades later.

Sadly, some of Manley's vernacular houses have been torn down to make room for McMansions and others altered to the point of being unrecognizable.

Thankfully, much of her modern design for the University of Miami still exists, a living testament to what was widely heralded as the first modern university in the United States. Forty color and 70 black and white illustrations document every known building of Manley's illustrious career.

The 248-page, $34.95 book is a must have for the collection of anyone interested in Miami architecture in the 20th century and of the dynamic career of Florida's first woman architect.

http://www.ugapress.org/index.php/books/marion_manley/

Wright is the author of 5,000 published articles on urban life, architecture, public policy, planning and design. He is active in working to make sure universal design, which provides barrier-free access to people with disabilities, is incorporated to the essential and rapidly-evolving practice of sustainability.