Lulah Maria Riggs: Devoted and Admired Architect

During her fifty-plus-year career as an architect, Lulah Maria Riggs (1896 - 1984) exhibited a strong talent for design, fulfilling her clients’ desires, and sensitivity to the environment. She spent most of her professional life in Santa Barbara, California, where she contributed to the development of a California style of modernism without ever adopting or being constrained by a style herself.

Born in Toledo, Ohio, Riggs moved with her mother to Indianapolis after her father died. There she earned her high school degree at a manual training school in 1914.? She moved with her mother to Santa Barbara and earned a certificate in architecture from a junior college in 1917. Riggs went on to study architecture at the University of California, earning her B.A. in 1919 and completing her architecture degree in 1920. With help from a scholarship, Riggs pursued graduate studies in architecture at Berkeley for another year and a half, until, she later wrote, “Family responsibilities necessitated quick exit—and getting to work.”

Four decades later, Warren Charles Perry, FAIA, one of Riggs’s professors at Berkeley, recalled of Riggs, “She was a most unusual student displaying characteristics even in those early years of her career which gave unmistakable promise of her future success. She, as I remember very well, never wavered in her devotion to architecture and in her firm determination to become an architect even in the face of considerable discouragement in the way of preliminary preparation, and she eventually proved to be one of our most distinguished students.”

Learn more about Riggs' career and recognitions, including her becoming only the fifth woman inducted into the AIA College of Fellows, and find links to more photographs of her work. Please subscribe to The Architectress, my free monthly newsletter about women, architecture, and the history of America.