Lilian Bridgman


Lilian "Lillie" Belle Bridgman was an American scientist and architect. A childhood accident resulted in a broken leg and contributed to a lifelong impairment that required her to use a crutch. This condition may have changed her focus from helping with outdoor farm work to studying, writing and reading. It did not prevent her from hiking in the Berkeley Hills and the Sierras. After working first as a science teacher and writer, she changed her profession in mid-life and followed her dream of becoming an architect.

First career as a science teacher and writer

Bridgman was originally from Kansas, where she obtained her science degree in 1888 from Kansas State Agricultural College. She was impressed by a textbook by Professor Joseph LeConte of the University of California at Berkeley and decided to study science under him, earning a master's degree in 1893. After graduation, she taught physics and chemistry at several schools in California, including the California School of Mechanical Arts, between 1893 and 1910. She was also a writer, authoring short stories and poems which were published in popular journals.
In 1898, she enrolled for further graduate studies at Cornell University but fell seriously ill and had to drop out. During her recovery, she dreamt of building her own house and was encouraged by her friend, architect Bernard Maybeck, to sketch her ideas. After buying a small property near Blackberry Canyon in Berkeley with an inheritance, she hired an architect, William Knowles, to prepare the construction drawings. The House focuses on natural light and views of the San Francisco Bay. The home's exterior is clad with brown shingles as typical for First Bay Tradition houses. The interior featured local unpainted redwood paneling and built-in window seats that could be transformed into beds for visitors. In 1908 she added a studio on the upper part of the property which would later serve as her architectural office. For many years, Lillian Bridgman lived with her sister, Irene, a nurse, sometimes staying in the studio and renting out the front house to boarders.

Second career as an architect

After this first architectural experience and being frustrated with her low-paying job as a female science teacher, Bridgman started her second career and, at the age of 44, quit her job and enrolled from 1910-1912 at the University of California to study architecture. After having gained practical experience as a draftsperson in the office of Walter Ratcliff Jr., she became a certified architect in California in 1915 and opened her own office in downtown Berkeley in the First National Bank building.
Not uncommon for beginning practitioners, her clients were family members, friends or word-of-mouth referrals, often women of her large circle of friends. She received one of her first major commissions, the Orchard Cottage for Milicent Shinn in Niles, California in 1916. She had met Milicent Shinn, a child psychologist and the first woman to earn a doctorate at UC Berkeley, as the editor of the Overland Monthly and publisher of some of her prose. In an extensive correspondence with Miss Bridgman, Dr. Shinn described her wishes and ideas for a house of her own - to which she referred to as her "old maid's cottage" - after she had shared accommodations with her brother and his family. The two-story house has a large living room on the ground floor with wide windows opening to the rural surroundings, and bedrooms on the second floor. The house was originally located near Alameda Creek on the family property. The remaining four acres of the property is now a park in Fremont, the . The house was moved from the flood plain to its current address at 1119 Mowry Avenue in Fremont.
Lilian Bridgman's architectural work is concentrated in Berkeley with a few exceptions in the nearby Bay Area and a proposal for a housing development with a playground in Junction City, Kansas, where her brother was the city engineer, which was not built.
Her early work is strongly influenced by the philosophy of the Hillside Club of which she was a founding member. The Club promoted a rustic architecture to enhance the natural setting of the North Side of Berkeley. The ideas were published in 1904 by Charles Keeler in a booklet The Simple Home.
After the 1923 Berkeley Fire, Lilian Bridgman was among the architects involved in the rebuilding of Berkeley. She used the Hotel Whitecotton as a meeting place with clients. The Fire led to a change in building materials from shingled walls and cedar shake roofs to the use of stucco and tile roofs which can also be observed in the architecture of Bridgman.
Lilian Bridgman did not only contribute to the environment of Berkeley with her simple and harmonious houses but was also involved in the community and lectured to educate the public about building homes. One example is her lecture Art in House Building in Relation to the Community and to Purposes of a Home which she presented to the College Women’s Club. She was also active in the Association of Collegiate Alumnae and the National Housing Association and served on their national committees.

Bridgman's Work

Some of her houses, a few with built-in furniture, are:
There are more houses, additions, workshops and other accessory buildings shown on architectural drawings and photographs in the Lilian Bridgman papers of the Bancroft Library which could not be located, dated or determined whether they were actually built.
Some of her writings are: