Elizabeth Ayer graduated in 1921 as both the fourth student to get a Bachelor of Architecture in UW’s history, in addition to being the department’s first female graduate. By this time, several other women had followed her lead and enrolled in the architecture department, treading the path paved by Ayer.
Ayer’s influence was tremendous not only on Edwin Ivey’s firm but on Seattle’s architecture as a whole. The city’s neighborhoods are still full of quiet examples of her charming, stately work—for example, the tri-gabled Findlay and Sigrid Nelson House (1941) on the west edge of Queen Anne Hill and the tile-roofed, Mediterranean Revival A. W. Leonard house (1924) on Capitol Hill, just west of Lake View Cemetery, among dozens of others. Check out this (partial) list of her work; they’re all over the place. Literally.
Ayer and Ivey designed their small studio at Olive and Bellevue in the 1920s. It spent a couple of years with this hot-pink paint job as tequila bar The Saint.
The male professors at UW didn’t make things easy for Ayer—at the time, the department didn’t even have a ladies’ restroom—and she was told by prospective clients that they would never hire a woman. In 1918, about halfway through her degree, she worked for Andrew Willatsen, a former student of Frank Lloyd Wright, but her tenure there was brief, possibly owing to the fact that Willatsen publicly vowed never to hire a woman on his staff and had generally low confidence in the professional abilities of women in the architecture field.
Ayer designed “Schafer Castle” (1938-1939) for Albert and Helen Schafer. Now, it’s a wedding venue known as “Chateau Schafer.”
Elizabeth Ayer began her architecture career in 1918, while still a student at the University of Washington, with a job at the offices of prominent local architect Edwin Ivey. This started Ayer’s illustrious practice—which included becoming not only the first (registered) woman architect in Seattle, but in Washington State.
Despite facing pretty much constant undermining during her university studies, Ayer was a star pupil, already receiving nationwide accolades by her second year of study. Seattle historian David A. Rash described her time at UW: