Please Join Frances Loeb Library for a Panel Discussion: Reflecting on 50+ Years of iPress Publishing and Women in Architecture

Speakers and discussants

Doris Cole, Mary Otis Stevens, Pelin Tan, Aliza Leventhal, Nicole Baas 

Doris Cole, FAIA

 Doris Cole, FAIA, is an architect, artist, and author. She was a founding principal of Cole and Goyette, Architects and Planners Inc.in Cambridge, Massachusetts with Harold Goyette, AIA, AICP from 1981 to 2012.  The firm specialized in residential, educational, and commercial buildings for private and public clients. Her numerous design awards include the Boston Society of Architecture Women in Design Award of Excellence and the AS&U Bronze Citation Award. Her design competitions include the Atlantic City Holocaust Memorial, Dubai Tall Emblem Structure, and others. She founded Doris Cole, FAIA, Architecture/Planning in 2012. Her Commentary Posters were exhibited at Harvard University, Graduate School of Design, Frances Loeb Library Special Collections in 2017.

In addition to From Tipi to Skyscraper, she has written several books on architecture including Eleanor Raymond, Architect (New Jersey: Associated University Presses, 1981), Candid Reflections: Letters from Women in Architecture 1979 & 2004 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 2007), numerous essays and articles. She has lectured at the University of Virginia, Boston Society of Architecture, Chicago Women in Architecture, and elsewhere.

Cole was born in Chicago, Illinois and graduated from East Grand Rapids High School in Michigan. She received her AB cum laude from Radcliffe College and her Masters of Architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Her professional and personal papers are at Harvard University Graduate School of Design Frances Loeb Library Special Collections.

Mary Otis Stevens

MARY OTIS STEVENS, AIA, is an architect, author, scholar, and societal activist centered in Cambridge MA. Born in New York City but raised upstate in a rural farm community, she graduated from Smith College with a BA degree in Philosophy & Art History. She spent the following decade exploring possible careers before entering MIT’s School of Architecture & Planning. Among her teachers and mentors were Kevin Lynch, Eero Saarinen, György Kepes, Lawrence Anderson, and Buckminster Fuller, who was also a family friend. 

Working briefly under Walter Gropius at The Architects' Collaborative (TAC),  Stevens formed a multi-faceted architectural practice with MIT faculty member Thomas McNulty. Most known for a series of all-concrete houses, especially their curvilinear, communal experiment in Lincoln MA that manifested sketches of “Movement and Hesitation” and “Freedom within a Limited Environment” from their book, World of Variation. In 1968 Stevens and McNulty founded iPress to publish architectural, urbanist, and societal concepts.

“Think globally— Practice locally” led Stevens to establishing Design Guild (DG) in 1974. A multi-disciplinary firm committed to sustainable and socially responsible developments, its mission statement—  “to preserve the past while building new, and to build new what will be worth preserving in the future”— guided professional teams in selecting projects, most in the public domain, that were long term and process, not product oriented. 

Receiving two successive Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1975-1978) for her scholarly pursuit of “Vernacular traditions in American architecture” led Stevens to her long-term involvement with the Boston Architectural Center. (BAC), founded in 1899 with the mission to provide professional instruction in the practice of architecture to those unable to attend university sponsored architectural schools.

A member of the Boston Society of Architects since 1973, Stevens served on its Board, co-founding Architects for Social Responsibility (ASR) to promote sustainable architecture and urban planning.  Associating with other professional societies, ASR sponsored public educational programs on environmental issues, organized design Charrettes dealing with the adaptive re-use of demobilized military bases like Fort Devens & similar public facilities. ASR published numerous handbooks on sustainable architectural practice & urban planning that were distributed to other AIA chapters and the interested public.

Besides co-authoring World of Variation with Thomas McNulty, Mary Otis Stevens has written articles for professional and literary journals here and abroad. Further information on Design Guild and i Press is available from her MIT Museum archives.

Pelin Tan

Sociologist/Art Historian based in Mardin/Turkiye. Head of the Film Dept., Fine Arts Faculty, University of Batman. Senior researcher at the Center for Design, Arts and Social Research (Boston). 6th recipient of Keith Haring Art&Activism (2019, New York). Lead Author of Towards an Urban Society (Cambridge Univ.Press, 2018) edited by S.Sassen and E.Peitersen, the International Panel of Social Progress. Her current short documentary “Landscapes as Archives” is about the production of architecture in Palestine and Al Mashrou supported by the Qattan Foundation, Ramallah (2023). With Vidokle she produced “The Fall of Artists’ Republic” in Tripoli/Lebanon (2014). Her last film "Gılgamesh: She, Who Saw the Deep" (2022) supported by Sharjah Film Platform. Agonistic Assemblies (Sternberg Press/MIT Press, 2024), From Public to Commons (Routledge, 2023), Climates: Architecture and The Planetary Imaginary (Columbia Univ.Press, 2017), Refugee Heritage (2021), Designing Modernity: Architecture in the Arab World 1945-1973 (Jovis, 2022), Urgencies in Architectural Theories (Columbia Univ.Press, 2015). Forthcoming: “Forms of Non-Belonging” E-flux books.​

I have been involved with pedagogical practices for twenty years, and in that time, I have challenged myself to rethink what knowledge production is, to question institutional structures, and to produce in situ methodologies for meaningful engagements in urban space and social justice. Being educated in sociology and art history and having a practice “outside” of academia led to a long struggle with methodologies. After working in the architecture and art theory and history programs at the Istanbul Technical University Faculty of Architecture from 2001 to 2012, I sought out, with my architect colleagues, urban and social justice engagements in Istanbul, which hit its peak with the Gezi Park resistance in 2013. I should mention that my experience in urban activism and socially engaged art coincided with my academic work, which was supported by my PhD advisor Susanne von Falkenhausen at Humboldt University of Berlin, and my postdoc mentor Prof. Dr. Ute Meta Bauer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who always provided support and discussion on the role of architecture in the struggle for rights. For me, it is essential to initiate collective unlearning environments while also questioning the body of educational institutions. As a methodology, taking action on-site, meaningfully creating improvised methods, and thinking about de/archiving as an alternative method have been vital for my pedagogical approach. 

In 2013, at the invitation of my colleagues, I moved to Mardin, in the southeast of Turkey, a primarily Kurdish region, to be a part of a new experimental architecture faculty. This was an experience of both success and failure: the intense sociopolitical pressure and also the variety of architectural pedagogical practices led the institution to fail, in a sense, but it was an experience from which I learned a lot. We were very close to the Syrian and Iraqi borders, and while trying to maintain and restructure an alternative curriculum and socially engaged education, the flow of migration from Syria started. The urban conflict and surveillance in Kurdish cities, including Mardin, Nusaybin, Kızıltepe, and Diyarbakır, was unbearable. Surviving day-to-day became a struggle that consumed the energy one needs for students and colleagues. Sometimes our collective classes, design studios, and on-site workshops became spaces for us to practice solidarity and sustain our collective energy. Failure can be important in experimental pedagogical practices under pressure of censorship or fascist threats, as well as the constraint of acting collectively. It is something like one step forward, two steps back. It is always important to instill pedagogies with comradeship and collective narratives of survival that exist outside of institutionalism.

Collaborating with DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Research) in Bethlehem, West Bank, Palestine, Pelin began to focus more on decolonizing pedagogical methodologies in art, urban design, and architecture. My students in Mardin were mostly Kurds and Arabs from the region. So, to operate in this context, first, I had to deal with linguistic and cultural differences and the daily intense political agenda of the region, which is a bit similar to the situation in the West Bank

 Refugee camps, as sites of unlearning where pedagogies provide a commoning practice, are vital to my learning in survival and temporariness. 

Urgent Pedagogies came out of the need to bring together many practices and experiences as an alliance and to talk to each other about our struggles.

Living archives offer a vital methodology to map practices: an urgent pedagogical experience in one condition and region might link to another practice that is in another place and responds to a different kind of urgency. I think each pedagogical initiative, whether long-term or temporary, comes from its own sociopolitical history and practice of social struggle.

Aliza Leventhal

Co-Director of iPress, as well as the co-founder and co-chair of Society of American Archivists’ Design Records Section’s Digital Design Records Committee (DDRC), Aliza is currently the Director of the Fleet Library at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Prior to joining RISD she was the Head of Technical Services for the Prints & Photographs Division at the Library of Congress. Her other work experience includes serving as the corporate librarian and archivist for the Boston-based interdisciplinary design firm, Sasaki, and as a database designer for EBSCO Information Services. 

Since 2012, Aliza's research has primarily focused on lowering the barriers to engage with both analog and born-digital design records and raise awareness within the design industry of the significance of the records they produced. Aliza prioritizes collaboration and cross-disciplinary sharing whenever possible in her work, emphasizing the fecund outcomes when multiple stakeholders can develop a shared language and appreciate diverse perspectives. She has written and presented extensively in a variety of forums including Society of American Archivists (SAA), the Visual Resources Association, the International Confederation of Architectural Museums, and the Library of Congress. 

Additionally, she co-facilitates the SAA course Managing Physical & Digital Architecture, Design, and Construction Records. Notable recent publications she co-authored include “Preserving Born-Digital Design and Construction Records Technology Watch Report” for the Digital Preservation Coalition, the SAA three-Module series on Born-Digital Design Records, and two American Archivist articles in 2021 "Of Grasshoppers and Rhinos: A Visual Literacy Approach to Born-Digital Design Records" and “Design Records Appraisal Tool.” 

She holds an MLIS and an MA in history from Simmons University’s Archives Management Program, and a BA in economics and American studies from Smith College.

Nicole Baas

Nicole began her career in marketing strategy and analytics for Victoria’s Secret and eventually LLBean and Digitas (Publicis Group) in Maine and Boston respectively. Her passion for the arts, specifically photography, inspired her to start a photography business while working in advertising.

After 11 years of business ownership and various awards and repeated features in media outlets such as the New York Times, The Boston Globe, Cosmopolitan and the Huffington Post, Nicole has become a widely recognized and best-in-class photographer. Passionate about the Boston community and arts education, Nicole served as a “Big” with Big Sisters Boston for 12 years and as a docent at the Boston Athenaeum.

In 2020 Nicole obtained her Master’s degree in Library and Information Science from Simmons University in Boston. In addition to her photography business, Nicole works as an archivist and private archival consultant for personal and private collections. She has worked for the Tavern Club and Mary Otis Stevens’ MIT collection amongst others.