12/06/2020 Alice Constance Austin | Pioneering Women of American Architecture

Pioneering Woman
of American Architecture

Alice Constance Austin

March 24, 1862 – December 17, 1955

BIRTHPLACE

Chicago, Illinois
EDUCATION

unknown
MAJOR PROJECTS

House for herself and her parents, 2607 Puesta Del

Sol Road, Santa Barbara, Calif., circa 1888

Ideal city design for Llano del Rio Colony, near

Palmdale, Calif., circa 1916

FURTHER INFORMATION

Walter Millsap papers, The Paul Kagan Utopian

Communities Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library, Yale University

Alice Constance Austin, Diary and Photographs, Yale

Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare

https://pioneeringwomen.bwaf.org/alice-constance-austin/ 1/10
12/06/2020 Alice Constance Austin | Pioneering Women of American Architecture

Book and Manuscript Library. Diary covers 1873–

1882

The Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif., holds

records for the Llano del Rio Colony and the papers
of its founder, Job Harriman

SPONSORED BY

Jill Lerner, FAIA

By Dolores Hayden, Yale University

A
lice Constance Austin (1862–1955) was a self-taught designer,
feminist, and socialist. Her unrealized plans for the cooperative
colony of Llano del Rio, California, included kitchenless houses with
cooked food delivery and other innovative features intended to
improve the lives of women. In 1935, she expanded upon these ideas
in a pamphlet, The Next Step: How to Plan for Beauty, Comfort, and
Peace with Great Savings Effected by the Reduction of Waste. 1
1 Subtitle as printed on cover of some editions; a di erent subtitle appears on the title page: Decentralization . .
. How It Will Assure Comfort for the Family— Reduce Expense— and Provide for Future Development.

Sketches of an ideal city from a patent application, Alice

Constance Austin, inventor. Yale Collection of Western
Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

https://pioneeringwomen.bwaf.org/alice-constance-austin/ 2/10
12/06/2020 Alice Constance Austin | Pioneering Women of American Architecture

EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION

Austin was born in 1862 in Chicago, Illinois, the only daughter of Joseph Burns Austin
and Sarah Leavitt Austin. Her father was involved with railroads and mining. She had
two older brothers, William Lawrence Austin and Cecil Kent Austin, and her rst
cousin on her mother’s side was Cecelia Beaux, the artist. 2
2 Birthdate and family information from “Joseph Burns Austin” family tree on Ancestry.com (accessed
September 24, 2014). Alice Constance Austin’s date of birth is given there as March 24, 1862. No birth
certi cate was found for that date in Chicago. Her birth year was con rmed in U.S. Census of 1900 and 1910.
The death certi cate on le in Los Angeles County gives her birth date as March 24, 1862. Father listed
occupation as mining in 1900 Census.

The family traveled widely in the United States and Europe—England, Belgium,
Germany, France, Italy. Little is known about her education, but she gave her
occupation as “teacher” on some occasions, and friends suggested she had a gift for
languages. 3
3 Her occupation is “schoolteacher” in the 1900 Census; “none” in 1910. In the 1908 city directory of Santa
Barbara, she is secretary pro-tem of the Santa Barbara Society of Natural History. In a 1922 voter registration
list, she is “dsgnr & bldr.” at 501 Buena Vista Street in Los Angeles. In the 1930 Census, at age 68, she is listed
as “teacher, private school,” living in Los Angeles as a lodger with the family of Robert K. Williams, a former
Llano colonist, next-door to Walter Millsap, also a former colonist. Millsap’s papers, part of the Kagan
Collection at the Beinecke Library at Yale, include “Alice Constance Austin” and “Constance Austin’s Housing
Concept” (WA-MSS S-1737) as well as photographs of plans and patent applications. Sharon Culver-Rease
showed the author photographs of Austin’s travel journal headed “Alice Constance Austin. Lyons January 9th,
1873,” covering 1873 to 1882, now owned by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

She was not trained as an architect, although a Llano colonist suggested she was
inspired by Pullman, Illinois, and by workers’ housing she saw in Europe. Her interest
in Ebenezer Howard suggests she may have lived for a time in England.

Axonometric drawing of two houses showing

underground tunnels from Austin, The Next Step (1935)

CAREER

Austin designed a house for herself and her parents in Mission Canyon, Santa Barbara,
in 1888. Her best-known project is an unbuilt design from 1915 to 1917 for an ideal
socialist city. In her plans for the cooperative colony of Llano del Rio, located north of
https://pioneeringwomen.bwaf.org/alice-constance-austin/ 3/10
12/06/2020 Alice Constance Austin | Pioneering Women of American Architecture

Los Angeles near Palmdale, California, and in The Next Step, Austin articulated an
imaginative vision of life in a socialist, feminist society. 4
4 Alice Constance Austin, “The Socialist City,” series of articles, The Western Comrade, 4–5, 1916–17; Austin, The
Next Step: How to Plan for Beauty, Comfort, and Peace with Great Savings E ected by the Reduction of Waste (Los
Angeles: The Institute Press, 1935).

Drawing on the communitarian socialist tradition in the United States, the Garden
City movement in England, and the feminist consciousness of her time, she proposed
a city of kitchenless houses. She believed that dwellings without kitchens would free
women from the drudgery of unpaid domestic work and that the substantial
economies achieved in residential construction of this kind would permit the
development of extensive public facilities, including community kitchens and
kindergartens.

Around 1915, Austin started to develop her plans for an ideal city. Job Harriman, a
prominent Los Angeles lawyer and Socialist Party member who was the organizer of
Llano del Rio, served as Eugene Debs’s running mate on the Socialist presidential
ticket in 1900, and he waged a strong campaign for mayor of Los Angeles in 1911. After
he lost that election, Harriman called upon his supporters, chie y workers, farmers,
and small businessmen, to build a cooperative colony in the Antelope Valley. Most of
the community’s actual buildings were rough structures of wood or adobe, but
Harriman invited Austin to visit the colony to present her ideas—in the form of
drawings, models, and articles—to several hundred residents who wanted something
better than the land speculator’s Los Angeles they had left behind. She told them:
“The Socialist City should be beautiful, of course; it should be constructed on a
de nite plan . . . thus illustrating in a concrete way the solidarity of the community; it
should emphasize the fundamental principle of equal opportunity for all; and it should
be the last word in the application of scienti c discovery to everyday life, putting
every labor saving device at the service of every citizen.” 5
5 Alice Constance Austin, “Building a Socialist City,” The Western Comrade 4, no. 6 (October 1916): 17.

The colony hired a draftsperson to draw up her plans for a circular city of ten
thousand people inscribed within one square mile of land.

https://pioneeringwomen.bwaf.org/alice-constance-austin/ 4/10
12/06/2020 Alice Constance Austin | Pioneering Women of American Architecture

Plan of courtyard house from Austin, The Next Step (1935)

Criticizing the “suburban residence street where a Moorish palace elbows a pseudo-
French castle, which frowns upon a Swiss chalet,” Austin proposed courtyard houses
of concrete construction. 6
6 Ibid.

Built in rows, these houses would express “the solidarity of the community” and
emphasize the equal access to housing that a socialist town government could
support. Austin allowed for personal preferences in the decoration of her houses,
providing renderings of alternative schemes. She also set aside land for future
architects’ experiments (how many utopians are this thoughtful?) as well as land for
those colonists who wished to build conventional single-family dwellings.

Austin’s designs emphasized economy of labor, materials, and space. She criticized
the waste of time, strength, and money, which traditional houses with kitchens
required, and the “hatefully monotonous” drudgery of preparing 1,095 meals a year
and cleaning up after each one. 7
7 Alice Constance Austin, “The Socialist City,” The Western Comrade 5, no. 2 (June 1917): 14.

In her plans, hot meals in special containers would arrive from the central kitchens to
be eaten on the dining patio; dirty dishes would then be returned to the central
kitchens. In the other areas of the house, she provided built-in furniture and rollaway
beds to eliminate dusting and sweeping in dif cult spots, heated tile oors to replace
dusty carpets, and windows with decorated frames to do away with what she called
that “household scourge,” the curtain. Her af nity with the Arts and Crafts movement
is apparent in her hope that producing these window frames, “delicately carved in low
relief on wood or stone, or painted in subdued designs,” could become the basis of a
craft industry at Llano, along with the construction of furniture in local workshops. 8
8 Ibid.

https://pioneeringwomen.bwaf.org/alice-constance-austin/ 5/10
12/06/2020 Alice Constance Austin | Pioneering Women of American Architecture

Plan of part of a proposed garden city, from Austin, The

Next Step (1935)

Each kitchenless house would be connected to a central kitchen (serving one

thousand people and staffed by paid workers, both women and men) through a
complex underground network of tunnels. Railway cars from the center of the city
would bring cooked food, laundry, and other deliveries to connection points, or
“hubs,” from which small electric cars could be dispatched to the basement of each
house. The centers would also include kindergartens. Although this elaborate physical
and social infrastructure was obviously going to be very expensive, Austin argued for
the economic and aesthetic advantages of placing all gas, water, electric, and
telephone lines underground in the same tunnels as the residential delivery system.
She also believed that eliminating all business traf c from the center would produce a
more restful city. Residents could access the center on foot. Public delivery systems
could handle all their needs, and goods coming to the city could arrive by air at a
centrally located air-freight landing pad. Private automobiles—yes, every family was
to have one—would be used chie y for trips outside of this town of ten thousand
souls, perhaps to neighboring towns built on the same plan. 9
9 For a full account of the Llano design, see Dolores Hayden, Seven American Utopias: The Architecture of
Communitarian Socialism 1790–1975 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1976), 288–317.

She also suggested that the circular road around the town could be used for
automobile races.

https://pioneeringwomen.bwaf.org/alice-constance-austin/ 6/10
12/06/2020 Alice Constance Austin | Pioneering Women of American Architecture

Sketches of an ideal city from a patent application, Alice

Constance Austin, inventor. Yale Collection of Western
Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Austin’s houses were never constructed by the Llano del Rio colony. Austin, Job
Harriman, and the colonists encountered many disappointments at Llano: they were
tricked by a land speculator; their proposed irrigation system failed; and some of the
colonists nally relocated to Louisiana, where the colony survived until 1938. Austin
stayed in southern California, re ned her plans, tried to patent some of her ideas, and
waited until 1935 to publish them as The Next Step. She was seventy-three. By then,
planning for the Greenbelt Towns was part of the New Deal, and perhaps she thought
cooperative communities were viable once again.

Austin was part of an American and British movement for material feminism, activist
women who called for “a grand domestic revolution.” Melusina Fay Peirce of
Cambridge, Massachusetts, rst argued the need for community kitchens, laundries,
and bakeries in 1868. She and Marie Stevens Howland of Hammonton, New Jersey,
developed the complementary idea of kitchenless houses and child care centers. 10
10 For Peirce, Howland, and their material feminist followers whose ideas were central to Austin’s designs, see
Dolores Hayden The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes Neighborhoods
https://pioneeringwomen.bwaf.org/alice-constance-austin/ 7/10
12/06/2020 Alice Constance Austin | Pioneering Women of American Architecture
Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods,
and Cities (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981).

Beginning in the late 1880s, plans for cities of kitchenless houses abounded in futurist
ction such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000 to 1887, a book that Job
Harriman admired and possibly the reason he invited Austin to Llano. 11
11 Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1887; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967).

In Chicago, Austin might have seen the model of kitchenless row houses designed by
Mary Coleman Stuckert displayed in the Women’s Building at the 1893 World’s
Columbian Exposition. In 1898, Charlotte Perkins Gilman voiced her support in
Women and Economics: “We are going to lose our kitchens!” 12
12 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics (1898; New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966), 245, 267, 269;
also see Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “What Diantha Did,” ction serialized in The Forerunner I, no. 1 (November
1909) to I, no. 14 (December 1910); Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Professional Housekeeping,” California Outlook,
June 21, 1913; Rob Wagner, “A Unique Mélange of Red and Black,” The Western Comrade I, no. 1 (October
1913): 235–36.

Gilman had an impact on Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City movement in England,

where several kitchenless projects were constructed at Letchworth, Welwyn, and
Hampstead around 1910. 13
13 Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution, 230–37.

A comparison of Ebenezer Howard’s diagrammatic plan for a Garden City with

Austin’s diagram for Llano shows Howard’s undeniable in uence on her basic layout,
but while his kitchenless dwellings were built as small enclaves within larger cities of
conventional homes, she took this idea much further, creating an entire city of homes
without kitchens and adding the necessary infrastructure. 14
14 Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1887; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967).

This leap to urban scale was Austin’s major achievement. In her con dent
presentation, one sees the optimism of the suffragist era when feminists believed that
far-reaching and drastic changes in women’s situation would result from winning the
vote so long denied them. Because nurturing work—whether done by women or by
men—still poses spatial and economic challenges for contemporary societies, Austin’s
city can be read as a set of questions for the future, as well as a feminist socialist
utopia from America’s past. Recently, young artists in California have celebrated the
colony’s hundredth anniversary with a series of projects titled “Squaring the Circle:
Llano del Rio Centennial,” including one called “The Next Step.” 15
15 https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/squaring-the-circle-llano-del-rio-centennial

The author would like to acknowledge Sharon Culver-Reese, Diane Favro, and Geneva
Morris for their help with sources for this essay.
https://pioneeringwomen.bwaf.org/alice-constance-austin/ 8/10
12/06/2020 Alice Constance Austin | Pioneering Women of American Architecture

Bibliography

WORKS BY AUSTIN

Series of eight articles, “Building a Socialist City,” The

Western Comrade 4, nos. 2–3 (June–July 1916): 25;
“Building a Socialist City,” 4, no. 6 (October 1916): 17;
“Building a Socialist City,” 4, no. 7 (November 1916):
12–13; “The Socialist City,” 4, no. 9 (January 1917):
26; “The Socialist City,” 4, no. 10 (February 1917): 19;
“The Socialist City” 4, no. 11 (March 1917): 14; “The
Socialist City,” 4, no. 12 (April 1917): 25–6; “The
Socialist City” 5, no. 2 (June 1917): 14.

The Next Step: How to Plan for Beauty, Comfort, and

Peace with Great Savings E ected by the Reduction of
Waste. Los Angeles: The Institute Press, 1935.

WORKS ABOUT AUSTIN

Hayden, Dolores. The Grand Domestic Revolution: A

History of Feminist Designs for American Homes,
Neighborhoods, and Cities. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1981, 242–48.

Hayden, Dolores. “Llano del Rio: Building a Desert

Community.” Arts + Architecture 2, no. 4 (Winter
1984): 34–37.

Hayden, Dolores. Seven American Utopias: The

Architecture of Communitarian Socialism 1790–1975.
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1976, 288–317.

Hayden, Dolores. “Two Utopian Feminists and Their

Campaigns for Kitchenless Houses.” Signs: A Journal of
Women in Culture and Society 4, no. 2 (Winter 1978):
274–90.

Florence Knoll Bassett

https://pioneeringwomen.bwaf.org/alice-constance-austin/ 9/10
12/06/2020 Alice Constance Austin | Pioneering Women of American Architecture

Edited by Mary McLeod and Victoria Rosner

Credits
© 2020 Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation

https://pioneeringwomen.bwaf.org/alice-constance-austin/ 10/10