Speaking at San Francisco Main Library

TUESDAY March 5  Main library talking to audience.LOLA 2. Cas and others at Main Library

Writing Women’s Lives

MAIN LIBRARY     All programs at the Library are free.
100 Larkin Street Latino/Hispanic Community Room A lower level

The Art, Music and Recreation Center of the San Francisco Public Library presents:

San Francisco architect and author Wendy Bertrand will read from her newly published memoir, Enamored With Place: As Woman + As Architect, (Eye On Place Press, 2012), and will discuss the importance of women’s voices in documenting social history.
Her memoir chronicles her experiences as a single mother on a mission to thrive, both personally and professionally. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a Bachelor of Architecture (1971) and a Master of Architecture (1972), after study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in France. Bertrand graduated at a time when only 3% of registered architects in the U.S. were female. She practiced architecture mainly with the U.S. Navy. She is a founding member of the Organization of Women Architects and Design Professionals. Her feminist values and concern for social justice have informed her design and management decisions, as well as her vision for the future of the profession.

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Review by Zara Raab: Professional & Domestic Designs

Review by Zara Raab in Professional & Domestic Designs for The Mirror of the Mechanics’ Institute Library:

September 2012 Excerpt:
“The young Bertrand, recently graduated from Berkeley’s architectural degree program, soon begins a long career in government, overseeing architectural projects for the Navy, while all the time single-handedly raising her daughter. So her daughter can attend the French-American Bilingual School in San Francisco, Bertrand buys a charming, weathered “Workers’ Victorian” on a steep hill in San Francisco in 1975, calling it her maisonette. Bertrand is passionate, throwing herself into both her career and maisonette on 27th Street, with its vistas of the Bay and East Bay hills. From the moment she moves in, this house becomes one of two true loves of her life. (The second is a cabin in Gasquet in remote Northern California.) “I slowly engaged in a tenderly curious acquaintance with my living space,” Bertrand writes, “exploring the limitations and opportunities” of the space, as “preening and nesting became an integral part” of her San Francisco life [207]. Bertrand pays attention to her space as she might to a lover or as a mother attends her child. Like any artist, she undertakes the house in large part because she sees its possibilities. “How could I hold on to the house’s century-old character while still making the place contemporary? “What could be done to catch the country feeling in the city—with modesty and elegance?” [210].”

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