Dolores Hayden

DOLORES HAYDEN is Professor of Architecture, Urbanism, and American Studies at Yale University. An urban historian and architect, she has written extensively about the history of American urban landscapes and the politics of design.

Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000, was published by Pantheon Books in 2003. Hayden is also the author of A Field Guide to Sprawl (with aerial photographs by Jim Wark, published by W.W. Norton, 2004) which has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, CNN and The Diane Rehm Show.

Her early books include Seven American Utopias: The Architecture of Communitarian Socialism, 1790-1975 (MIT Press, 1976) and The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (MIT Press, 1981). They established her reputation as a scholar interested in the history of social movements and their impact on the built environment.

Redesigning the American Dream: Gender, Housing, and Family Life (W.W. Norton, 1984, rev. and expanded ed., 2002) followed as an exploration of the housing needs of women, tracing the United States experience in contrast to other societies including England, France, Sweden, and the Soviet Union.

As founder and president of The Power of Place, a non-profit arts and humanities group based in Los Angeles from 1984 to 1991, Hayden laid out a downtown itinerary to celebrate the historic landscape of the center of the city and its ethnic diversity. Under her direction, collaborative projects on an African American midwife's homestead, a Latina garment workers' union headquarters, and Japanese-American flower fields engaged citizens, historians, artists, and designers in examining and commemorating the working lives of ordinary citizens. The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (The MIT Press, 1995), documents her Los Angeles work.

She has received numerous awards, including an American Library Association Notable Book Award, an award for Excellence in Design Research from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Paul Davidoff Award for an outstanding book in Urban Planning from the ACSP, and the Diana Donald Award for feminist scholarship from the American Planning Association. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, and received Rockefeller, NEH, NEA, Whitney Humanities Center, and ACLS/Ford Fellowships as well. For the most recent work, she has received grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Since 1973, Hayden has held academic appointments in architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, and American Studies in a teaching career that has spanned MIT, UC Berkeley, and UCLA as well as Yale. She was educated at Mount Holyoke College, Cambridge University, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she received her professional degree in architecture.

Hayden is also an award-winning poet whose work can be found in numerous literary journals including The Yale Review, Southwest Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry Northwest, Verse Daily, Witness, and Michigan Quarterly Review. Her collection, American Yard, was runner up for the best book award from the New England Poetry Club. She has been a featured reader at the New Haven Festival of Arts and Ideas,on the radio program, Poetry Connecticut, and in many local libraries as well as university venues. In 2008 she gave the Yale Phi Beta Kappa poem.

She is the widow of sociologist and novelist Peter H. Marris, and has a twenty-year-old daughter, Laura Hayden Marris.

Office: School of Architecture, Yale University, P.O. Box 208242, 180York St., New Haven CT 06520-8242. Phone: 203-432-4782.
E-mail: dolores.hayden@yale.edu