Mary Otis Stevens, AIA
MARY OTIS STEVENS, AIA, is an architect, author, scholar, and societal activist centered in Cambridge MA. Born in New York City but raised upstate in a rural farm community, she graduated from Smith College with a BA degree in Philosophy & Art History. She spent the following decade exploring possible careers before entering MIT’s School of Architecture & Planning. Among her teachers and mentors were Kevin Lynch, Eero Saarinen, György Kepes, Lawrence Anderson, and Buckminster Fuller, who was also a family friend.
Working briefly under Walter Gropius at The Architects' Collaborative (TAC), Stevens formed a multi-faceted architectural practice with MIT faculty member Thomas McNulty. Most known for a series of all-concrete houses, especially their curvilinear, communal experiment in Lincoln MA that manifested sketches of “Movement and Hesitation” and “Freedom within a Limited Environment” from their book, World of Variation. In 1968 Stevens and McNulty founded iPress to publish architectural, urbanist, and societal concepts.
“Think globally— Practice locally” led Stevens to establishing Design Guild (DG) in 1974. A multi-disciplinary firm committed to sustainable and socially responsible developments, its mission statement— “to preserve the past while building new, and to build new what will be worth preserving in the future”— guided professional teams in selecting projects, most in the public domain, that were long term and process, not product oriented.
Receiving two successive Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1975-1978) for her scholarly pursuit of “Vernacular traditions in American architecture” led Stevens to her long-term involvement with the Boston Architectural Center. (BAC), founded in 1899 with the mission to provide professional instruction in the practice of architecture to those unable to attend university sponsored architectural schools.
A member of the Boston Society of Architects since 1973, Stevens served on its Board, co-founding Architects for Social Responsibility (ASR) to promote sustainable architecture and urban planning. Associating with other professional societies, ASR sponsored public educational programs on environmental issues, organized design Charrettes dealing with the adaptive re-use of demobilized military bases like Fort Devens & similar public facilities. ASR published numerous handbooks on sustainable architectural practice & urban planning that were distributed to other AIA chapters and the interested public.
Besides co-authoring World of Variation with Thomas McNulty, Mary Otis Stevens has written articles for professional and literary journals here and abroad. Further information on Design Guild and i Press is available from her MIT Museum archives.