Jane Drew

Jane Drew (born March 24, 1911, Thornton Heath, Surrey, Eng.—died July 27, 1996, Cotherstone, Durham) was a British architect who, with her husband, Maxwell Fry, was a forerunner in the field of modern tropical building and town planning. She paid great attention to the harmony of design with the environment, a characteristic that made her one of Great Britain’s best-loved architects.

Drew, a graduate of the Architectural Association School, London, and a member of the Modern Architectural Research Group, did specialist studies on kitchen planning for the British Commercial Gas Corporation (1941–43). It was through the Modern Architectural Research Group that Drew met Fry. From 1944 to 1946 she was assistant town-planning adviser to the resident minister for the British West African colonies.

In 1946 Drew and Fry, who had married four years earlier, formed the firm of Fry, Drew and Partners in London, concentrating on large-scale planning for tropical countries. The University of Ibadan (1953–59), Nigeria, is one of the many tropical buildings they designed. Their books Village Housing in the Tropics (1947; with Harry L. Ford) and Tropical Architecture in the Humid Zone (1956) are considered standard works.

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In 1951 the Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier invited Drew and Fry to join him on the project to build Chandigarh, the new capital city of the state of Punjab (from 1966 joint capital of Punjab and Haryana) in India. Fry and Drew utilized the sun-sheltering properties of canopies and deep recesses in their houses.

Among Drew’s best-known works are the Institute of Contemporary Arts (1964), London; the School for the Deaf (1968), Herne Hill, London; and the Open University (1969–77), Milton Keynes, Eng. She was the first woman to serve on the Council of the Royal Institute of British Architects and was a lifelong fellow. In 1996 she was created Dame of the British Empire.