Compliments to our brave architect!

The Netherlands’ First Women Architects

Compliments to our brave architect! (also available in Dutch as Hulde aan onze kranige architecte!) is the first comprehensive overview of the Netherlands’ first female architects. It contains noteworthy monographs on amongst others Grada Wolffensperger, Riné Boerée and Wil Jansen. The extensive research by author Erica Smeets-Klokgieters is supported by beautiful visual material from the Nieuwe Instituut archive. To bring the portraits of the architects to live, lithographer Marc Gijzen used AI to turn them from black and white into color.

About the book

Margaret Staal-Kropholler (1891–1966) is regarded as the first woman architect in the Netherlands. She completed her first work as an unqualified architect in 1917. Less well known is that Grada Wolffensperger (1887–1965) became the first woman to complete the univer-sity course in architecture at the Technische Hogeschool in Delft that same year. A further twenty women had completed their architectural training by 1945.

Why and how did these women become architects at a time when women were expected to raise a family and take care of a house-hold? What was their education like? And was it actually possible for them to practise a profession so dominated by men?.

Compliments to our brave architect! describes the emergence of women architects. Including 21 biographies, the book forms an indispensable reference work on a neglected aspect of Dutch architectural history.