Join me for a talk at Zane Bennett Gallery in conjunction with Powerhouse: The Engaged Regionalism of Judith Chafee’s Architecture.

Decades before Judith Chafee established her successful practice in Tucson, Arizona, other women architects and builders wrestled with the uneasy marriage of modernism and Southwestern regional forms. In the reconstruction of Georgia O’Keeffe’s house at Abiquiú during the late 1940s, Maria Chabot (1913–2001) navigated the realities of building with adobe, postwar material shortages, and the need to establish trust within the local community. Steeped in the history of New Mexico and connected to figures like Kate Chapman and Dorothy Stewart, who fought to keep tradition alive in Santa Fe, Chabot brought her knowledge of craft and local form to the challenge of creating a year-round residence for one of the country’s foremost modern painters. Where Chabot chose to draw on the language of modernism, she did so in a site-specific and responsive way. Attuned to national debates around architectural style, Chabot was suspicious of the European-inflected modernism that influenced Chafee’s education and early practice. While Chafee came to her engaged regionalism through the canon of the International Style, Chabot drew modernism into a practice grounded in craft and local tradition. Chabot’s approach to negotiating regional forms and modernist design strategies is an under-recognized precedent for later theories of critical regionalism and the study of vernacular architecture.