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Sophia Hayden

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Architect

The Resume

    (October 17, 1868-February 3, 1953)
    Born in Santiago, Chile
    Sophia Gregoria Hayden
    First female architecture graduate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1890)
    Designed the Woman's Building for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1892)

Why she might be annoying:

    She designed a memorial for women's clubs in the U.S. in 1894, it was never built.
    She repeatedly clashed with Women's Building committee chair, socialite Bertha Palmer, who eventually fired her from the project over creative differences.
    The public rift between her and the committee was used to support arguments that women were unfit for supervising construction projects.
    Allegedly discouraged from the negative experience associated with the project, she opted to retire from architecture. She would take on no future assignments.

Why she might not be annoying:

    She grew up in Boston's Jamaica Plain with a Chilean mother and an American father.
    She graduated MIT with honors, but struggled to find work in her chosen field because she was a woman.
    She was chosen for the Women's Building project from a field of thirteen other trained female architects (she was only 21 at the time).
    She received $1,000 to design the Women's Building, barely ten percent of what male architects for the Exposition made.
    Although dismissed from her supervising the building itself, she was still invited to the Inaugural Celebration and received a special award for her work at the Fair's conclusion.
    Along with the other buildings at the Exposition, the Women's Building would be subjected to vandalism and arson less than a decade after its conception (only photo prints in poor quality exist remain).
    She spent her final years at the Winthrop Convalescent Nursing Home, where she died of pneumonia after suffering a stroke.

Credit: BoyWiththeGreenHair


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    For 2024, as of last weekly ranking, Out of 2 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2023, Out of 2 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 12 Votes: 58.33% Annoying
    In 2020, Out of 3 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2019, Out of 17 Votes: 47.06% Annoying