Judith Chafee papers

Judith Chafee was born in Chicago on August 18, 1932. Following her father's death and her mother's remarriage, Chafee's family settled in Tucson when she was a small child. Chafee loved this region for its intense light and heat, arroyos, cacti, wildlife, and diverse cultures. When she was not in school, Chafee enjoyed playing in the surrounding desert and getting her hands dirty. She helped make adobe bricks for the workmen who built additions to her family's sprawling but functional and modern adobe home.

After spending her high school years in a private school in Chicago, Chafee attended Bennington College in Vermont, where she majored in art and became a gifted designer. One of her earlies works was a very modern-looking swivel chair, which she would patent in the early 1960s. In 1956, she enrolled in the Yale School of Art and Architecture, and was the only woman in her class. Competitive and talented, she held her own and was recognized for her prize-winning work early on.

Chafee graduated from Yale and worked for several modernist architects on the East Coast, including Paul M. Rudolph, Eero Saarinen, and Edward Larrabee Barnes. In 1966, she opened her own private firm and moved back to Tucson three years later, settling in the El Presidio Historic District on the northern edge of downtown. In 1973, she began teaching architecture at the University of Arizona remaining there through the 1990s.

Chafee designed very few public buildings during her career. The homes that she designed—including Viewpoint, the Ramada house, the Blackwell House, and the Rieveschl House, among others—were for homeowners who were her private clients. Chafee, a heavy smoker, contracted emphysema by the 1990s and eventually needed the assistance of an oxygen tank to breathe. She passed away on November 5, 1998.