Annmarie Adams (born 1960) is an architectural historian and university professor. She is the former Chair of the Department of Social Studies of Medicine and is the former Director of the School of Architecture at McGill University. Adams specializes in healthcare architecture and gendered space. At McGill she teaches courses in architectural history and research methods.[1] She is the inaugural holder of the Stevenson Chair in the History and Philosophy of Science, including Medicine. She is a board member of the Society of Architectural Historians and former board member of the Vernacular Architecture Forum.
Career
Adams focused on domestic architecture in the 1990s and turned to hospital environments about 2000. A paper exploring the intentions and experience of women and children in suburban California established research questions to which Adams would return repeatedly.[2] How do buildings express behavioral expectations and do users of houses simply do what they are told? She followed this up with studies of wartime housing in Canada;[3] privacy and girlhood in 19th-century Quebec;[4] and sick children and maternal care.[5] She and colleagues contributed to an award-winning website, Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History, by showcasing the role of a Montreal house in an unsolved double murder.[6] Her more recent works examine Art Deco architecture and hospitals;[7] and the architecture of the Montreal Neurological Institute and neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield.[8] She is currently writing a biography of museum curator and physician Maude Abbott.
She has served in administrative roles including as Curator of the Osler Library and Director of the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (IGSF) at McGill University in 2010-11.[11]
Bibliography
Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1870-1900. 1996. McGill-Queen's University Press. ISBN9780773513860
Contrary to the widely held belief that the home symbolized a refuge and safe haven to Victorians, Adams reveals that middle-class houses were actually considered poisonous and dangerous and explores the involvement of physicians in exposing "unhealthy" architecture and designing improved domestic environments.
"Designing Women": Gender and the Architectural Profession. (co-written with Peta Tancred) 2000. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ISBN9780802082190
Adams and Tancred examine the issue of gender and its relation to the larger dynamics of status and power. They argue that many women architects have reacted with ingenuity to the difficulties they have faced, making major innovations in practice and design.
Medicine by Design: The Architect and the Modern Hospital, 1893-1943. 2008. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN9780816651146
Medicine by Design examines how hospital design influenced the development of twentieth-century medicine and demonstrates the importance of these specialized buildings in the history of architecture.
