“The essential function of our profession [design] in our society is to enhance and cultivate communications toward an easier understanding of ideas and complex problems, in the shortest possible time for higher visual and auditory retention of data.”
“To design is to plan and to organize, to order, to relate and to control. In short it embraces all means of opposing disorder and accident. Therefore it signifies a human need and qualifies man’s thinking and doing.”
“For design is about the making of things: things that are memorable and have presence in the world of the mind. It makes demands upon our ability both to consolidate information as knowledge and to deploy it imaginatively to creative purpose in the pursuit of fresh information.”
“To design is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit; it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatize, to persuade, and perhaps even to amuse. To design is to transform prose into poetry.”
Archive of Women in Architecture
The International Archive of Women in Architecture (IAWA), established in 1985, is a joint program of the College of Architecture and Urban Studies and the University Libraries at Virginia Tech. The purpose of the Archive is to document the history of women's contributions to the built environment by collecting, preserving, storing, and making available to researchers the professional papers of women architects, landscape architects, designers, architectural historians and critics, and urban planners, and the records of women's architectural organizations.
The IAWA began by focusing primarily on collecting the papers of those who practiced at a time when there were few women in the field (i.e., before the 1950's). However, the IAWA's goal, to fill serious gaps in the availability of primary research materials for architectural, women's, and social history research, means that it does not exclude any generation.
The IAWA also collects books, biographical information, and published materials as part of its mission to act as a clearinghouse of information about all women in architecture, past and present.