Beverly Willis FAIA, born February 17, 1928, an American architect who played a major role in the development of many architectural concepts and practices that influenced the design of cities and buildings, died Oct. 1, in Branford, Conn., due to complications of Parkinson’s disease.
Willis developed a design philosophy of humanism, influenced by Renaissance artist-architects, and her architecture work and art have been exhibited in six exhibitions since 1952, including Emerging Ecologies at Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, which opened September 17, 2023. She authored the 1997 book Invisible Images: The Silent Language of Architecture (National Building Museum) and has authored several essays in architecture journals.
Highlights of her career include:
- Willis started her career as an independent artist in 1954 and established her own firm as an architect in 1966.
- In 1980, she was one of the founders of the National Building Museum (NBM) in Washington, D.C.
- In 2002, she founded the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation (BWAF), a nonprofit working to change the culture for women in the building industry through research and education, which won numerous grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in 2012, as well as 2022 grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the NEA, and the Graham Foundation.
- Willis introduced the first computerized programming into large-scale land planning and design with CARLA (1971), a software program developed in-house by Willis and her firm and called “Computerized Approach to Residential Land Analysis.”
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San Francisco Ballet Building entry, Civic Center, San Francisco, Calif. (1984).Photo by Peter Aaron/courtesy Esto Photographics Inc. In 1995 Willis created the Architecture Research Institute (ARI) as a think-tank to develop and advocate urban policies through interdisciplinary partnerships between academics, governments, corporations, and the public. The institute sought to “promote research in design and planning that informs public policies and strategies that create livable, compact, global cities that are eco-sustainable, walk-able, and less automobile dependent.”
- Willis designed many works of architecture. She is best known for the San Francisco Ballet Building, completed in 1983 in the city’s Civic Center and the first U.S. building “designed and constructed exclusively for use by a major ballet company.”
- She was elected the first woman president of the California Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in 1979. In 1976, she served on the first U.S. delegation to the United Nations conference on Habitat.
