User:Jumanah Shaheen/sandbox

Life
Marilyn Lois Reynolds was born in Christchurch on 29th August, 1927, and passed away on Monday 31st August, 2015 at the age of 88. At Marilyn Reynolds’ funeral, Julia Gatley gave the following tribute. Marilyn was interested in drawing houses when she was young and her school’s collection of the Architectural Review helped improve her knowledge of buildings, what architects do, and how they design buildings. The nuns at her school did not approve of Marilyn’s interest in architecture and they warned her parents that architecture was not a great future for a girl.

Education
It was not easy in the 1940s for women to study architecture, but Marilyn joined Auckland Architecture School in 1945 straight after finishing high school in Wellington. After World War ll, more females were accepted to study architecture at Auckland University. Most females in the architecture school struggled as they were not treated well by staff, who used abusive language like, “you can either be a woman or an architect – you can't be both”, nor were male students supportive of their female colleagues. She found studying architecture difficult and failed parts of the courses in the second year of architecture school. Marilyn ended up not finishing her degree. She worked as a draughtsperson for Crichton, McKay and Haughton when she returned to Wellington in 1948. There were 30 men and only four women in her year group.

On 3 April 1946, Bill Wilson hosted a gathering at his and wife Phyl's Mt Eden flat for the reading of a document he had written, identified as the constitution of the Architectural Group, and its signing by interested peers. Those who turned up were Marilyn Hart, Bruce Rotherham, Bill Toomath and Allan Wild, and together with Wilson they signed the document. Toomath added Barbara Parker's name at the bottom of the page in her absence, on the assumption that she would want to be included and would sign later. Rotherham identified Barry Marshall as another who wanted to be there that evening but could not be, because he, like Parker, was at a concert. The Architectural Group is often considered to comprise the five signatories to the constitution, plus Parker, whose name was recorded, but not Marshall, whose name went unrecorded.

Career in London
Marilyn met her tutor, Ian Reynolds, when she was studying at the architecture school. They fell in love and she decided to travel with him in 1949 to England where they married. Marilyn worked for an architect in London then she worked for the City Architect in Coventry, helping with rebuilding the war-destroyed city in 1951-1952. Marilyn stated that getting an architecture job in England was easy as nobody cared whether she had completed her architectural degree or not.

Career in New Zealand
Both Marilyn and Ian returned to Wellington in 1953 to settle down and start a family. The Reynolds family moved to Auckland when Ian became a partner in an architectural firm, which was renamed Kingston, Reynolds, Thom and Allardice (KRTA). Marilyn stated that: “So you see the whole thing of me as an individual stopped very quickly … But marrying an architect is a tremendous convenience in the sense that you are both interested in the same thing … My interests were sublimated into my husband’s interests … All those things were going on and I never felt I was not part of it although I was not actually doing anything in it formally.” In the 1970s, Marilyn started to work for the architectural community and became a member of one of a series of government-supported committees looking at building and environment and she was also involved in a group that studied people living in low-cost housing after her six children grew up. She took a different path than practice architecture as she became a writer, with six books to her name. The long-term influence of the Group’s ideas can be seen in her published work, particularly the notions related to low-cost housing and how different people need different types of housing.

List of Publications
1-Woman’s World: Houses and Suburbs, 1976.

2-Living with 50 Architects: A New Zealand Perspective, 1980.

3-Housing Choices for the Elderly, 1981.

4-Practical Planning for Retirement, 1984.

5-New Zealand Houses Today, 1988.

6-Looking Ahead: Housing Choices for Retirement, 1991.