Dr. Carter G. Woodson African American Museum issued the following announcement on Mar. 24.
In Honor of National Women's History Month
We Salute ... "Norma Merrick Sklarek"
Lauded for her numerous pioneering achievements as one of the first African American women architects in the United States, Norma Merrick Sklarek (1926–2012) has been called the “Rosa Parks of architecture.” Her intelligence, talent, and tenacity allowed her to overcome racism and sexism and become a prominent architect and a leader in the profession.
Born on April 15, 1926, in Harlem, New York, Sklarek was the only child of Walter Ernest Merrick, a doctor, and Amy Merrick, a seamstress, both of whom had immigrated from Trinidad. She grew up in Harlem and Brooklyn and attended predominately white schools, including Hunter College High School, a selective public school for girls, where she excelled in math and science and showed talent in the fine arts. She had a particularly close relationship with her father, who spent time with her fishing, house painting, and doing carpentry. Her aptitude for math and art prompted her father to suggest architecture as a career.
She attended Barnard College for a year (1944–45), gaining the minimum of one year of liberal arts education that was a prerequisite for admission to the School of Architecture at Columbia University. By her account, architecture school was difficult; many of her classmates were veterans of World War II, some had bachelor’s or master’s degrees, and they collaborated on assignments, whereas she commuted to school and struggled to finish her work on the subway or at home alone. As she said later, “The competition was keen. But I had a stick-to-it attitude and never gave up. She graduated from Columbia in 1950 with a B.Arch., one of two women and the only African American in her class.
After graduating from Columbia, Sklarek faced discrimination in her search for work as an architect, applying to and being rejected by nineteen firms. “They weren’t hiring women or African Americans, and I didn’t know which it was [working against me],” she told a local newspaper in 2004. She took a civil service job as a junior draftsperson in the City of New York’s Department of Public Works. Feeling her talents and skills were underused in the city position, she took the architecture licensing examination in 1954, passing it on her first try and becoming the first licensed African American woman architect in the state of New York. After being registered, she worked for a brief time in an architectural firm, earning the position despite a bad reference from her supervisor at the Department of Public Works. She thought her boss’s negative reference had its roots in discrimination: “It had to be personal. He was not a licensed architect, and I was a young kid—I looked like a teenager—and I was black and a licensed architect. At her new firm, to her disappointment, she was given menial tasks such as designing bathroom layouts
In 1955, Sklarek was offered a position in the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. At SOM, she was given more responsibility on increasingly large-scale projects, and she also taught evening architecture courses at the New York City Community College. During this period, she was a single mother of two children, having been married and divorced twice; her mother cared for her children while Sklarek worked. In 1959, she became the first African American woman member of the American Institute of Architects.
In 1960, after five years at SOM, she relocated and took a job at Gruen Associates in Los Angeles, where one of her sons was living. In 1962, she became the first black woman licensed as an architect in California. Sklarek rose to the position of Gruen’s director of architecture, responsible for hiring and overseeing staff architects and coordinating technical aspects of major projects, including the California Mart, Fox Plaza, Pacific Design Center, San Bernardino City Hall, and the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo.
In 1980, Sklarek was the first African American woman elected to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects for her outstanding contributions to the profession, the first woman in the Los Angeles AIA chapter to be awarded this honor. That same year, she joined the Los Angeles firm Welton Becket Associates as a vice president, where she was responsible for Terminal One at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), a $50 million project that she completed before the start of the 1984 Olympic Games.
Original source can be found here.
Source: Dr. Carter G. Woodson African American Museum
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