Obituary: Eleanor Morris, pioneering feminist, town planner and academic

Eleanor Morris was Scotland Convenor of the Royal Town Planning Institute from 1986-1987, being the first woman to hold that position, and published numerous articles and books on town planning.

Eleanor Kenner Smith was born at Washington DC, USA. Her father, Lawrence M C Smith was an Assistant Attorney General under President Franklin D Roosevelt and a Chairman of the Philadelphia Board of Trade. Her mother, Eleanor Houston Smith was a conservationist and founder of the Schuylkill Valley Nature Center (now the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education) in Philadelphia and, with her husband, a founder of Wolfe’s Neck Woods State Park and the Wolfe’s Neck Farm Foundation (now the Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture & the Environment) in Freeport, Maine.

Eleanor attended National Cathedral School and later, when her family moved to Philadelphia, Germantown Friends School. She was accepted to Radcliffe (the female part of Harvard University) at the age of 16. She graduated in 1956 with a degree in Architectural Sciences, cum Laude. She was taught by Walter Gropius (who then headed the architectural department at Harvard), Jacqueline Tyrwhitt and Serge Chermayeff amongst other luminaries.

After graduating, Eleanor did a Master’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia where she met her husband to be, James S Morris, who was studying at ‘Penn’ on a Fulbright Scholarship from the Edinburgh College of Art, under Ian McHarg. After her one-year Master’s she went to London and studied at the University of London. She lived with Lucy Norton, OBE who introduced her to a wide variety of people in academic and literary circles.

Eleanor returned to Philadelphia for her marriage to James in 1959 in Philadelphia. They moved back to Scotland and settled in Edinburgh where her husband (along with Robert Steadman) had a growing architectural practice, initially designing modern houses.

Eleanor was introduced to Robert Matthew, a leading proponent of modernism and the founder of both RMJM and the new department of Architecture at Edinburgh University. She was immediately offered a position at Edinburgh University in the Architecture Department and received tenure at a very young age.

She completed her PhD on the benefits of ‘pocket parks’ in dense inner urban areas and was a Senior Lecturer from 1997 to 2017, teaching the introductory survey course on Town Planning.

In 1965 Eleanor was elected an associate member of the Royal Town Planning Institute and became the first female Scotland Convenor in 1986. She was on the Executive Committee of the National Trust for Scotland from 1995 to 2001 and the Buildings Committee from 1995 to 2005. She published ‘British Town Planning and Urban Design: Principles and Policies’ in 1997, which charted the development of British Town planning from historical times to the twenty first century.

In the years after her retirement from Edinburgh University, she worked for The Commonwealth Human Ecology Council (CHEC), which promoted sustainable development throughout the Commonwealth and much enjoyed working with Zena Daysh, the founder of CHEC.

Eleanor was deeply committed to good design at the larger scale of cities and communities but also at the more detailed architectural scale. She, along with her husband, James Morris, built and designed a modernist house in the countryside south of Edinburgh. The home was inspired by Philip Johnson (whom her husband had worked for).

The ‘Glass house’, as it came to be known, caused some controversy in the conservative Midlothian countryside as it removed an older David Bryce designed mansion on the site. It was unusual in that it used large panes of tinted glass, glue-laminated timber beams and had a double height conservatory with indoor swimming pool at one end. The shock of the new, in time however, became an admired addition to the canon of Scottish domestic architecture.

She is survived by two sons (Malcolm and Houston) and a daughter (Alexandra).

Her funeral was held at Old St David’s Episcopal Church in Radnor, Pennsylvania on October 14. There will be a Memorial Service in Edinburgh in the New Year.

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