Beverly Willis

Beverly Willis (February 17, 1928 – October 1, 2023) was an American architect who played a major role in the development of many architectural concepts and practices that influenced the design of American cities and architecture.

Willis' achievements in the development of new technologies in architecture, urban planning, public policy and her leadership activities on behalf of architects are well known.

Her best-known built-work is the San Francisco Ballet Building in San Francisco, California.

She was a co-founder of the National Building Museum, in Washington, D.C., and founder of the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, a non-profit organization working to change the culture for women in the building industry through research and education.

Beverly Willis was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, daughter of Margaret Elizabeth Porter, a nurse, and Ralph William Willis, an oil industry entrepreneur and an agriculturalist.

Willis' brother, Ralph Gerald Willis (1930–1999), served in the United States Army and later retired to the Fiji Islands.

During World War II, at age 15, Willis learned to fly a single-engine propeller plane in order to qualify for the Women's Air Service.

Willis then moved with her mother, now divorced, to Portland, Oregon, where Willis graduated from high school.

Willis studied engineering at Oregon State University from 1946 to 1948.

She graduated from the University of Hawaiʻi in 1954 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with honors.

After graduating from the University of Hawaiʻi, Willis founded the Willis Atelier in Waikiki, where she continued the mural and fresco work begun in college under the training of Jean Charlot.

In Charlot's studio, Willis was introduced to the geometric and organic connections between art and nature, analyzing plants, buds, and flowers to discover nature's intrinsic geometry.

This understanding of the relationship between geometry, nature, and beauty would later influence her humanistic design approach to architecture.

In 1956, Willis pioneered a technique for sand cast mural panels, including a panel used in the Shell Bar at the Royal Hawaiian Hilton.

The Shell Bar, also designed by Willis, became a backdrop in the television series Hawaiian Eye.

In 1958, Willis opened a design office in San Francisco, California.

Her early career as a multi-media artist, in Honolulu, Hawaii, led to her work in retail store design, for which she was nationally recognized.

In the late 1960s, when suburban expansion was booming, Willis combined her retail experience with large-scale housing, that later evolved into designs for institutions, urban planning and development.

She is best known for her innovative approaches to new and varied building uses, including: the San Francisco Ballet Building, the first building in the US designed exclusively for the used of a Ballet company and school; the Union Street Stores, that some historians describe as an initial contribution to the advancement of the Modern adaptive re-use of historical buildings movement; and the Manhattan Village Academy, a New York City Department of Education high school that was a prototype for new teaching concepts embodied in small or charter schools.

Willis's innovations were based on extensive research and the resulting architectural designs were developed from specific, often new, building functions, giving each building an individualized appearance.

Among Willis's most notable achievements was the in-house development and coding of the computer program, Computerized Approach to Residential Land Analysis, called CARLA, in 1970.

In 1974, Willis & Associates, Inc., was awarded an architectural and engineering contract for the design and plan of the Aliamanu Valley Community for Military Housing in Honolulu, Hawaii.

The project was a $110 million family-housing complex of 11,500 inhabitants, residing in 525 buildings on a 524-acre site.

Though CARLA had been previously employed successfully, Willis' firm faced a greater challenge presented by the Aliamanu site, located on a non-active volcanic crater floor in a one hundred year old flood plain of clay.

Through the use of CARLA's analyses, Willis' plan for Aliamanu projected earth-moving for the project at 40% less than the previous firm's plans, causing less destruction to the environment and lowering overall construction costs.

Resulting from their technical achievements in the development of the proprietary computerized approach to residential land analysis known as CARLA, in 1976, Beverly Willis & Associates was awarded a federal building commission from the General Services Administration (GSA) in Washington, D.C., representing the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

Though never built as a result of federal policy shifts in the regulation of computer data privacy, the project was conceived by the IRS as a prototype design that would be site-adapted for nine subsequent buildings in IRS regions across the country as part of an $800 million program.

Among Willis' other notable design achievements are the Union Street Stores, recognized as one of the pioneering projects in historic preservation and adaptive reuse projects in both San Francisco and the United States, and the Manhattan Village Academy in New York City.

At the time of its completion in 1984, the San Francisco Ballet Association Building was the first building in the United States to be designed and constructed exclusively for the use of a major ballet institution.

The building, located within San Francisco's Civic Center District, went to serve as a model for the design of future American ballet companies and schools.

In 1995, Willis founded the Architecture Research Institute to study the future development of global cities.

In 1997, the National Building Museum published her book, "Invisible Images– The Silent Language of Architecture."

Realizing that women's significant and distinguished contributions to architecture were not included in the historical narrative of architecture – and understanding that the future is based on the past – she founded the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, in 2002, with the mission of changing architecture culture through research and education.

Willis and Associates Architects was created and dedicated with the task of providing insurance and risk management solutions to architects and engineers.

It was developed over 39 years ago and has served over 500 design firms around North America.

Beverly Willis' architecture is rooted in a humanistic design approach that is reflected in the individualistic, functional plans of her buildings.

Willis' work extends from the belief that design can influence human behavior and that the spatial concepts of form, function, proportion, texture, and color visually communicate with the senses.

At the core of Willis' concept of a humanistic design is her belief that form follows function and a Vitruvian understanding of the relationship between design, nature, and proportion as expressed in De architectura.

Her architecture portfolio spans diverse scales, from retail spaces to residences, commercial structures, and cultural facilities.

One of her most notable design achievements, the San Francisco Ballet Building, was without precedent in the United States.