Building Up Generations of Architects

It was a summer Friday at Voith &  Mactavish Architects, LLP in Philadelphia, and Daniela Holt Voith ’75 and Sennah Loftus ’00 were recounting that day’s main event: a 90-minute lunch-and-learn session on continuous insulation.

“We have four interns,” says Loftus, “and about halfway through that lunch…”

“They started to fade out,” Voith finishes.

It’s not that the lunch and learns aren’t popular (though insulation may not be the most riveting subject). Nearly everyone at the firm turns out for them — after all, in addition to Loftus, partner and director of interiors, and Voith, who is founding partner and director of design, the firm employs four additional Bi-Co graduates: Isabella Bartenstein ’14, Mariam Mshvidobadze ’22, Robert Douglass HC ’05, and Nina Voith HC ’14. And everybody knows Bi-Co alums are lifelong learners.

And in Voith’s case, educators.

“I taught Sennah, I taught Rob, I’ve taught all my Bi-Co people,” says Voith, who has run the architectural design studio at the College since 1983. “One of the real joys of doing that is seeing people develop and blossom.”

Voith remembers seeing an early proposal for the Growth and Structure of Cities (Cities) program and, as an incoming student interested in architecture and anthropology, becoming the first to sign up for the new major. She almost left Bryn Mawr partway through for a job at a Boston architecture firm, but technical expertise wasn’t enough for her—she wanted the liberal arts education.

“You go to a place as wonderful as Bryn Mawr and it teaches you about how to think about things as much as it teaches you the subject matter,” she says. And there is a lot of thought that goes on behind the scenes in architecture, Loftus points out, whether it’s the acoustical plaster incorporated into the classrooms at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Carey Law School at Silverman Hall that helps regulate sound in the historic and vaulted space, or the river rock atrium and ticker-screens in Lehigh University’s new Business Innovation Building.  

“The Business Innovation Building that we embarked upon had to break molds,” says Georgette Chapman Phillips ’81 (and former College trustee), who was dean of the Lehigh College of Business at the time and is teaching a class entitled “The Legal City” at Bryn Mawr this spring. “It had to be something that Lehigh had never done before … The proposal by Daniela’s firm was creative and innovative.” That both were Bryn Mawr alumnae was just icing on the cake. While celebrating winning a SARA (Society of American Registered Architects) 2023 National Design Award for the building, they videoed Voith, Phillips, and Loftus doing the Anassa Kata. 

In addition to the expansiveness and openness of the space, what most stood out to Phillips about Lehigh’s Business Innovation Building was that it created spaces, such as an entrepreneurship lab, to drive the college’s mission, rather than the other way around.  

“Every project we engage in we consider as a new opportunity to think about a new and better way to do what we are doing,” Voith says. “It’s a constant process of education.”

Growing up in West Mount Airy and going to school in Germantown, as well as on the Main Line and studying with Cities founder and architectural historian Barbara Miller Lane, Voith developed an appreciation for historic architecture. The new dorms she designed for Villanova with Robert A.M. Stern Architects evoke stone buildings at other nearby campuses such as Bryn Mawr. But she also embraces modern design and new technology in a field that is constantly evolving.

“I take context really seriously,” she says. “Whether it’s the architectural context, climatic, social, or  political context, all of those forces come to bear on the creation of a really strong architectural response.”

Architecture was, and still is, a male-dominated field. But Voith was never easily intimidated. While in graduate school at Yale, she decided the architecture school needed a team in the graduate school basketball league, and she was the only woman in the entire league. She also learned the power architects have on job sites, such as approving payments for contractors. She has mentored other women in the field, including her former students. It isn’t always easy, but “I don’t tolerate guys who are trying to control, or subdue, or repress,” she says. “I work best for people who are happy to have a powerful woman on their team.”

Many of her students have gone on to professions in architecture or landscape architecture, but even if they don’t, she says, they may go into preservation, structural engineering, or even become a client — all areas where understanding the design process is an asset. “It’s a broadening of perspective; you understand a little bit more about the world,” she says.

“I continue to teach because Bi-Co students are so engaged, intelligent, and inquisitive."