Amaza Lee Meredith Residence

History

Amaza Lee Meredith (1895-1984) was born and raised in Lynchburg, Virginia, the daughter of a Black mother and a white father and the youngest of four children. In the 1890s, her father, a skilled carpenter, built them a large house on the edge of the city. It is unclear if her father lived with them – interracial coupling would remain illegal in Virginia until 1967 – but he did spend time there. (Her parents eventually married in 1902, likely doing so by traveling to Washington, D.C., where their union was legal.) Meredith’s father taught her his craft, modelmaking, and how to draw blueprints. He, however, discouraged her interest in an architecture career, perhaps knowing the hardships she would face because of her race and gender.

Meredith’s mother pushed her to pursue her education. In 1915, after graduating at the top of her high school class, Meredith enrolled at Virginia Normal and Industrial Institute (VNII) in Petersburg that summer and met Edna Meade Colson (1888-1985), one of her teachers. Historian Jacqueline Taylor notes in Suffragette City, “Meredith fell in love with learning and with her instructor. Colson made it clear that she reciprocated her student’s romantic feelings, and they began a sporadic but long-term love affair.” Sporadic because Meredith was often away from Petersburg to further her teaching credentials, though they kept in touch through frequent letters.

Colson, a staunch advocate for improving educational opportunities for African Americans in the Jim Crow era, encouraged Meredith to go north to continue her professional development. In 1926, she enrolled at Colson’s alma mater, Teachers College, Columbia University. Meredith moved into the large rowhouse at 416 West 146th Street in the Sugar Hill section of Harlem, where her sister, Maude Terry, a Brooklyn schoolteacher, and her family had recently taken up residence. Meredith stayed here until 1930 and again from 1934 to 1935, while she obtained her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine arts, respectively. Her coursework included home decoration and interior design.

Meredith’s exposure to art and culture in the city in the late 1920s and early 1930s had a profound influence on her, personally and professionally. Her letters to Colson reveal that both were drawn to the city’s newest fashions, and Meredith began wearing trousers – a non-traditional garment for women at the time – that would later define her style. Living in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance also impacted her, and she visited at least one of its central hubs, the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library. Meredith also frequented the theater as well as exhibitions organized by the Architectural League, the American Union of Decorative Artists and Craftsmen, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). In 1932, she attended MoMA’s highly influential “Modern Architecture: International Exhibition,” where the term “International Style” was coined.

Meredith returned to her Virginia alma mater (known today as Virginia State University, or VSU) to begin her teaching career in 1930, in between her studies at Teachers College. Her experiences in New York helped inform her teaching, and she also incorporated exhibition catalogues that she collected there into her course syllabi. After receiving her Master’s degree from Teachers College in 1935, she founded VSU’s Fine Arts Department, which she led until her retirement in 1958.

Denied the opportunity to become a professional architect because of her race and gender, Meredith nevertheless designed several residences. Her best known, Azurest South, was built on land she and Colson had purchased directly across from the Petersburg campus. Completed in 1939, the house, built in the Modernist tradition, was among the country’s earliest structures to be designed by a Black woman. As Taylor notes, in an era when homeownership was rare among African Americans, in large part because of discriminatory housing policies, “…it was bold for a black woman to build and own her own house, and this boldness was made manifest in the house’s style.” Taylor continues, “Azurest reflects the radical European modernist work she encountered studying in New York, particularly the architecture of Le Corbusier, which was featured prominently” at MoMA’s 1932 exhibition. (Meredith willed her half of Azurest South to VSU’s Alumni Association, which bought Colson’s half after her death.)

In 1947, Meredith, her sister Maude Terry, and others developed Azurest North in Sag Harbor on Long Island as a summer destination for middle-class African Americans. Meredith designed two residences there, including her family’s cottage; she and Colson shared a small bedroom, in which Meredith kept her drafting table. Azurest South was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1993 (National Historic Landmark status pending) and Azurest North was listed as part of the Sag Harbor Hills, Azurest, and Ninevah Beach Subdivisions (SANS) Historic District in 2019.

Entry by Amanda Davis, project manager (March 2023).

NOTE: Names above in bold indicate LGBT people.