Georgia Louise Harris Brown, Architect and Engineer

Georgia Louise Harris Brown (1918 – 1999) is believed to be the second African-American woman in the US to become a licensed architect, in 1949. (Beverly Green is thought to be the first, in 1942.) Harris was born in Topeka, Kansas and attended Washburn University from 1936 to 1938, when she moved to Chicago where her brother was living. Harris took her first architecture class there the following year.

The night class Harris took was taught by recent immigrant Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe at the institution now known as Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). Harris had a knack for structural engineering, and her future career in Chicago would include conducting the structural calculations for several of Mies’s high-rise buildings.

Harris returned to Kansas in 1940 and graduated from the University of Kansas with a B.S. degree in Architecture in 1944.  She married 1941. In 1944, Harris Brown found work in the office of Kenneth Roderick O’Neal, a black architect and structural engineer in Chicago.

‍ 860-880 Lake Shore Drive (Marc Rochkind, 2017, CC BY-SA 4.0)

After earning her Illinois state architectural license in 1949, Harris Brown moved to Kornacker Associates where she worked on buildings of varied scales and types. It was there she completed the structural calculations for Mies’s 860 Lake Shore Drive (pictured) and Promontory buildings. Harris Brown was reported as describing “her most exciting experience as working on reinforced concrete and multi-storeyed apartments designed by the famous Mies Van der Rohe,” the Associated Negro Press (ANP) reported in 1949. During this time, Harris Brown also studied civil engineering at IIT at night and designed houses, churches, and offices on the side.

In 1951, after Brazilian modern architecture had received notice in the US for several years, Harris Brown visited Brazil. In addition to the country’s architecture, she was also drawn by the lure of working in a less racist, less sexist society. After returning to the US, Harris Brown began to study Portuguese. She divorced her husband in 1952 and sent her children to live with her parents in Topeka. In October 1953 Harris Brown moved to Brazil, where she was granted permanent resident status a few months later.

For decades, Harris Brown had a successful career in Brazil, earning her Brazilian architecture license in 1970. When she retired in 1993, Harris Brown returned to the US. After an illness, she died in 1999 at age 81.

In 2024, less than 1 percent of licensed architects in the U.S. were black women, according to NCARB.

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Sources:

ANP, “Architect,” New Pittsburgh Courier, December 3, 1949: 9.

Roberta Washington, “Georgia Louise Harris Brown (1918 – 1999).” In African American Architects: A Biographical Dictionary, 1965–1945, ed. Dreck Spurlock Wilson. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Anat Falbel and Roberta Washington, “Georgia Louise Harris Brown.” Pioneering Women of American Architecture.