Lois Gottlieb

Lois Davidson Gottlieb
File:GottliebPortrait001.jpg GottliebPortrait001
Born	(1926-11-13) November 13, 1926 San Francisco, California, U.S.
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Stanford University, The Taliesin Fellowship with Frank Lloyd Wright, Harvard University's School of Design
Occupation	Architect
Design	Val-Goeschen, Inverness [1951] Robert S. Gottlieb House, Riverside [1964] Mark Gottlieb House, Fairfax, Virginia [1996]

Lois Davidson Gottlieb (born November 13, 1926) is an American architect best known for residential designs. She was born in San Francisco, California. Gottlieb's professional career spans more than 50 years. She practiced architecture in and outside the U.S. as a prolific residential designer. Most of her domestic designs can be found in California, Washington, Idaho and Virginia. Gottlieb's works have been featured in various publications, exhibits, and the documentary video made about her work on 'The Gottlieb House' in Fairfax Station, Virginia. Lois Davidson was an apprentice to Frank Lloyd Wright as a part of the Taliesin Fellowship in Scottsdale, Arizona, and Wright's winter home and the western counterpart to Taliesin East in Spring Green, Wisconsin, 1948-1949.

Education

Gottlieb attended Stanford University, where she studied pre-architecture, a combination of art and engineering before earning a Bachelor of Arts degree from1944 to 1947.

In the last quarter of her senior year, Gottlieb was about to graduate from Stanford University and did not know what to do with herself. she visited Frank Lloyd Wright's Hanna House [1936] near the university campus for one of the classes she took. As she would later recall, "I was stunned and enchanted. lt was as though l had never heard music before and here was confronted with the visual equivalent of a Beethoven symphony." Driven by the appreciation for, and a desire to learn more about the design philosophy of Wright's architecture, Gottlieb applied and later accepted as an apprentice to the Taliesin Fellowship. She began a two-year journey of work and study with Wright in 1948; she was to discover that architecture could be "a way of life". Gottlieb was one of the few women who have been apprenticed to Frank Lloyd Wright as a Taliesin fellow. During her time at Taliesin, she worked on the Pratt house in Michigan, and the Walker house in Carmel, California. Her book, A Way of Life: An Apprenticeship with Frank Lloyd Wright records the eighteen months that she spent with Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin Fellowship in the late 1940s.

Upon the completion of Taliesin fellowship, Gottlieb went to Harvard University's School of Design from 1949 to 1950 to continued professional training and eventually got certified as a licensed architect.

Career

Gottlieb began her career working as a designer for Warren Callister in San Francisco. Her first solo project was the design of the Val-Goeschen house, a one-room unit with 576 square feet, in Inverness, CA. She went on to design other residences in Marin County as part of the design team Duncombe-Davidson based in Sausalito, CA. This partnership spanned the years 1951 to 1956. From 1956 to 2002, Gottlieb worked as a freelance residential designer on over 100 projects in the Bay Area and in Riverside, CA, as well as in Washington, Idaho, and Virginia.

Gottlieb served as a lecturer at the College of the Holy Names in Oakland, CA from 1960 to 1964, at Alameda State College in Hayward, CA from 1962 to 1964, and at the University of California Extension in Riverside, CA from 1966 to 1972. She also gave guest lectures at various universities around the world, including one at Virginia Tech in 1996.

Architecture

At Taliesin, Gottlieb recalled, "if you wanted something, you made it." As a result she was "creative about using new methods and materials, such as Trex decking made from melted trash bags and sawdust, and block made from recycled plastic bottles as forms for concrete walls, camouflaged with brick veneer." [Women & Creativity 36] One of her final architectural projects was the design and construction of an 11,000 sq. ft. home and office complex for her son and his wife and family, Mark & Sharon Gottlieb. It was built in Fairfax Station, VA, of recycled materials (such as laminated wood and ice block). This was chronicled and produced with Eva Soltes in the documentary film “Building a Dream: A Family Affair”. ] See also photographs in [https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu VTechWorks from the "Lois Davidson Gottlieb Architectural Collection" in Virginia Tech Libraries' Special Collections, Ms1997-003.

Publications

Gottlieb was also one of the few women who have been apprenticed to Frank Lloyd Wright as a Taliesin fellow. She is one of the six women in architecture featured in the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation movie "A Woman is a Fellow Here". The other women featured included Marion Mahony Griffin, Eleanore Pettersen, Jane Duncombe, Isabel Roberts, and Read Weber.

Bibliography

• Gottlieb, Lois Davidson, Environment and Design in Housing, Macmillan, 1965.
• Gottlieb, Lois Davidson, A Way of Life: An Apprenticeship with Frank Lloyd Wright, Images Publishing Group, 2001.
• Gottlieb, Lois Davison. Images. https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/handle/10919/7415