Henry Atherton Frost

Henry Atherton Frost
Born	February 1882 Massachusetts
Died	October 1, 1952
Nationality	American
Occupation	Architect, professor
Known for	Founding of the Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture

Henry Atherton Frost (1883–1952) was an American architect and instructor at Harvard University. He was largely responsible for inaugurating and overseeing an early graduate program in architecture and landscape architecture for women that became known as the Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture.

Family background

Henry Atherton Frost was born in Massachusetts on February 1882 to William A. and Myra Ames (Tilton) Frost. His son, Henry A. Frost Jr., would become an architectural designer in the Boston area.

Career

Frost helped to inaugurate one of the earliest combined programs in architecture and landscape architecture for women. The Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture developed as a result of the fact that in 1915 a recent graduate of Radcliffe College, Katherine Brooks, who intended to study landscape architecture at the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture, wanted to begin by taking architectural drafting at Harvard but was refused entry because the school did not admit women. Brooks consulted with the head of Harvard's school of landscape architecture, James Sturgis Pray, who then arranged for Frost, then a young instructor in architecture, to tutor Brooks privately. Somewhat to his surprise, Frost found his unexpected pupil an apt and enthusiastic student, and in an account of the school's founding he wrote: "Teaching a woman what we had always considered strictly a man's job was not the painful ordeal it had promised to be."

Within a year, Frost had four women students and another professor, the landscape architect Bremer Whidden Pond, had come on board. Even though the women followed the same curriculum as their male peers, Harvard students tended to dismiss the school with belittling terms such as the "Little School" and the "Frost and Pond Day Nursery". Word about the informal program spread, and by the 1916–17 academic year, the college was advertising the experimental program and its curriculum as the Cambridge School of Architectural and Landscape Design for Women. The first two women to complete the school's three-year program were Brooks and landscape architect Rose Greely; a later graduate was Eleanor Raymond.

In 1919, the school's name was changed to the Cambridge School of Domestic and Landscape Architecture for Women, a shift that Frost later regretted for its implication that women were only suited to residential (i.e. domestic) architectural design. A problem in the school's early years had been its inability to issue formal degrees, which are required in most states in order to register as a licensed architect. In the 1930s, after Harvard refused to become a formal degree-granting partner for the school, it moved its affiliation to Smith College.

Apart from teaching, Frost had his own solo architectural practice specializing in private residences, with an office in Harvard Square. Shortly after her graduation from the Cambridge School, Eleanor Raymond joined Frost as his partner (she had previously been working for him as a draftsperson while a student at the school). In 1920, the team won a $1000 prize in a competition to design a plan for the University of Buffalo's new undergraduate college. Around the same time, Frost brought Bremer Pond into the partnership.

Frost died Oct. 1, 1952, and is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery.

Further reading

• Anderson, Dorothy May. Women, Design, and the Cambridge School. PDA Publishers Corp., 1980.