Elizabeth G. Pattee: Professor, Architect, Landscape Architect

Elizabeth Greenleaf Pattee (1893-1991) enjoyed a long career as an architect, landscape architect, and professor in New England. In recognition of her contributions to the profession, Pattee was named a Fellow in the American Society of Landscape Architects in 1961. She was also a member of the AIA beginning in 1933.

Born in Quincy, Massachusetts, Pattee graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a B.S. in Architecture in 1916. In 1916 she became Assistant Principal at the Lowthorpe School of Horticulture and Landscape Gardening for Women in Groton, Massachusetts. Concurrently, Pattee studied landscape architecture there.

Lowthrope was founded in 1901, one year after male-only Harvard established the first degree program in landscape architecture. Lowthorpe provided the first an opportunity in the US for women to enter the profession through an academic path. Harvard shared some faculty with Lowthorpe and some of its faculty helped guide the curriculum at the women’s school. Harvard-educated Frederick Law Olmstead Jr. loaned library books to Lowthorpe and served as a lecturer and trustee for the school.

After graduating from Lowthorpe in 1918, Pattee worked as a draftsman for several Boston firms until 1921. That was the year Pattee opened her own firm with Constance E. Peters, a 1920 graduate of Lowthorpe. Over the course of her career, Pattee designed residential houses and gardens as well as landscapes for commercial and institutional clients throughout New England.

In addition to her design practice, Pattee served as a part-time instructor of design and architecture at Lowthorpe from 1921 until 1945. Pattee’s partnership with Peters ended in 1941; Pattee continued as a solo practitioner. In 1945, when Lowthorpe merged with the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Pattee was among the four Lowthorpe professors who moved to Providence to teach at RISD. Pattee moved her practice to Providence as well. For the next eighteen years, Pattee taught landscape architecture at RISD; for some of these years, she served as department head.

Pattee married city planner and landscape architect Arthur Comey in 1950; he died four years later.

Kidder Peabody and Company garden in Boston, from House Beautiful (March 1928)

After more than four decades of teaching design and landscape architecture to generations of female students at Lowthorpe and then at RISD to co-educational classes, Pattee retired from teaching in 1963. She closed her practice in 1965.

Pattee died at a retirement community in New Jersey in 1991 at age 97.

Day School for Girls, 1916 thesis project (Courtesy of MIT Museum)

Sources:

“Pattee, Elizabeth G(reenleaf),” The AIA Historical Directory of American Architects, 1956 and 1962.

Paula Sarathy, “Women, Education and the Birth of a Profession: The Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture of Groton, Massachusetts, 1901–45.” Garden History, Vol. 50, No. 2 (Winter 2022), pp. 127-152 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/27281671)

“Elizabeth G. Pattee, 97,” Boston Globe, March 1, 1991: 51.

“Elizabeth Greenleaf Pattee,” The Cultural Landscape Foundation.

Sarah Allaback, The First American Women Architects (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008)

Elizabeth Leonard Strang, “A City Garden” House Beautiful, March 1928: 308-309, 344-345.