Isabel Roberts was a Prairie School figure, member of the architectural design team in the Oak Park Studio of Frank Lloyd Wright and partner with Ida Annah Ryan in the Orlando, Florida architecture firm, "Ryan and Roberts".
21 Facts About Isabel Roberts
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The Isabel Roberts family were active members of the First Presbyterian Church of South Bend, and social and civic groups through which they became friends of Laura Caskey Bowsher.
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Isabel Roberts spent three years in New York City, studying architecture in the atelier Masqueray-Chambers, the first atelier in the United States established to teach the practice of architecture along the French lines of the Ecole des Beaux Arts.
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Isabel Roberts found herself among an impressive roster of future architects who studied with Masqueray, including William Van Alen, who would become the architect of the Chrysler Building.
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Isabel Roberts was among Wright's first employees when he left Louis Sullivan and opened his own studio in Oak Park, Illinois.
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Isabel Roberts has been described by Wright scholars as Frank Lloyd Wright's secretary, bookkeeper or office manager.
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Melenaie Birk says Isabel Roberts was "a bookkeeper and assisted with drafting in Wright's Oak Park studio".
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Isabel Roberts produced some original designs for the leaded art glass windows in the Prairie houses.
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Isabel Roberts is remembered by her extended family, today, as an architect.
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The Isabel Roberts House was designed by Isabel Roberts, per her own statement, even though it has always been attributed to Wright, out of whose studio it emerged.
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Also, according to her own statement, while in Wright's employ, Roberts designed the K C DeRhodes House in South Bend, Indiana, for her South Bend friend, Laura Caskey Bowsher DeRhodes.
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Roberts and her mother Mary moved to St Cloud a decade after the Isabel Roberts House was completed.
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Mary Isabel Roberts was in failing health due to the lingering effects of influenza.
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Mary Isabel Roberts died in St Cloud, Florida, on August 16,1920.
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Once in Florida, Isabel Roberts went into architectural practice with Ida Annah Ryan, who was the first woman in the United States to earn a master's degree in architecture, from MIT.
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Letters of recommendation from John Van Bergen, Hermann V von Holst and Frank Lloyd Wright which accompanied her application make it unmistakably clear that these men who had been her colleagues in Chicago considered Roberts to be an architect.
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Nonetheless, throughout the 1920s, the architectural firm of Ryan and Isabel Roberts created landmark buildings in Central Florida, some of which still stand, today:.
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Additional residential and commercial structures by Ryan and Isabel Roberts continue to be identified as current owners become more aware of the significance of the contributions these women made to the field of architecture.
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Isabel Roberts was a member of the St Cloud Presbyterian Church until she moved from St Cloud to Orlando in the early 1920s, at which time she joined First Presbyterian Church of Orlando.
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Isabel Roberts died in Orlando on December 27,1955 at the age of 84, and was buried in Greenwood Cemetery, Orlando, alongside her mother Mary Roberts and her sister Charlotte Roberts Somerville.
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Isabel Roberts' grave was marked by a commemorative headstone in March, 2016.