ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Florence Luscomb (1887–1985), who was among the earliest female graduates in architecture of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1909) and of the women’s Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture in Massachusetts, where she was a student shortly after its founding in 1916. Luscomb later worked with the women’s architecture firm run by Ida Anna Ryan and was eventually made a partner. Her work as an architect, however, was greatly overshadowed by her contributions to the Women’s Suffrage movement. Luscomb’s political activism continued into her late eighties; she opposed McCarthyism and supported the women’s movement.
Among her little-studied architectural works is a modest cabin she designed and built for her own use in Tamworth, New Hampshire, in 1940. The design showed her reliance on vernacular New England dwellings and was typical of the work of Cambridge School graduates in that it reflected Luscomb’s concerns with simplicity and functionality. Several of Luscomb’s colleagues, including architect Eleanor Raymond, built rural retreats which functioned as autonomous spaces in which they expressed their creativity and continued nineteenth-century experiments in “scientific” home management by reformers such as Catherine Beecher. These retreats provide context for interpreting Luscomb’s room of her own.
