Margaret Van Pelt Vilas

Margaret Van Pelt was born in Ithaca, New York on January 26, 1905 to John Vredenburgh Van Pelt and Betsey Southworth.[4]

She attended Vassar College, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1925, and then obtained a Bachelor of Architecture from Columbia University in 1928 and subsequently a Master of Architecture from MIT in 1930.[4]

Van Pelt began her career with an early partnership 1926-1930 with her father, a prominent architect and architectural professor, in New York City from 1926 to 1930.[1] In 1930, she traveled throughout Europe for a year, where she was impressed and inspired by the prolific use of glass and metal, particularly in Germany.[5] In 1933, she began work as a draftsman at the firm of Mayers, Murray & Phillip in New York City; she then moved to the firm of Aymar Embury in 1936, where she worked as a renderer. From 1936 to 1942, she worked as a draftsman with the Department of Public Works in the Department of Hospitals and the Department of Parks.

During World War II from 1942 to 1945, she completed a tool design course at Yale University and worked as a designer at M.B. Manufacturing Company in New Haven, CT.[1] The company was known during WWII for producing airplane parts.[6]

She began working for the Connecticut-based office of Douglas Orr in 1946, remaining there for twelve years until 1958, when she established her own firm based in New Haven, Connecticut.[2] By 1962, she was a registered architect in Connecticut, New York, and Rhode Island, and had completed residential, commercial, and educational projects throughout the United States.[2]

During the 1960s, she became active in her local AIA chapter, serving as the AIA delegate to the X Panamerican Federation of Architects Congress in Buenos Aires; in 1961 and 1962, she was Chairman of the AIA delegation to the first and second round tables of Pan American Federation of Architects in Lima, Peru and São Paulo, Brasil.[1] She remained active in the Panamerican Congress of Architects into 1965, when she was Chairman of the "Themes" committee at the Joint AIA convention and Congress.[1]

As one of the few practicing female architects in the early 1930s, she declared in a 1931 interview: "I don't believe there is such a thing as a woman's point of view in architecture. There is architecture that is good and that is bad."[5]

Van Pelt married Charles Harrison Vilas in 1932 in Patchogue, Long Island at the summer home of her parents.[7] Vilas worked in the printing industry for Paper Mills of Chicago, and the two became avid sailors. Their daughter Diana Van Pelt Vilas born in March 1939.[8]

She died in 1995, at the age of 90, in New Haven, CT.[3]

Memorial Bench of Andrew Hasewell Green, Central Park, New York City[5][9]

Seaman's Church Institute, New York City, ground floor renovation (1959)[2]

Residence of Mrs. Ely Grlswold, Old Lyme, Conn (1961)[2]

Res. of John V. Van Pelt, Birmingham, Alabama (1961)[2]

Phi Beta Kappa, Vassar College, 1925[10]

Warren Prize, Beaux Arts Institute of Design, 1930[5]

Henry Adams Prize, B.A.LD, 1928[4]

Illustrations in "From Here to There... With Nothing But the Wind," by Charles H. Vila, in Cruising World. Vol. 1, No. 6 (1975): 42-46.

Illustrations in "Triple Roller Headsails," by Charles H. Vila, in The Best Of Sail Trim