Pioneering architect Beverly Willis has contributed nearly 60 images of her designs to the Artstor Digital Library — drawings, plans and photographs of projects from the late 1950s to the mid ’90s.

Beverly Willis (b. 1928) is an architect, artist, and author. She is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects (FAIA) and served as the first female President of the California Council of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in 1979. Willis began her career as a painter and multimedia artist and founded Willis Atelier in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1954. In 1966, she established an architectural practice, Willis and Associates, Inc., in San Francisco, California. The firm’s award-winning projects in San Francisco include Union Street Stores (1965), the Margaret Hayward Park Building (1978), and the San Francisco Ballet Building in the City Civic Center (1983). In the early 1970s, Willis’ firm developed CARLA (Computerized Approach to Residential Land Analysis), an application for planning and architectural use. In 1979, CARLA was used to plan, engineer, and design Aliamanu Valley, a residential community of 525 buildings in Honolulu.

In 2002, Beverly Willis founded the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation (BWAF) whose mission is to expand the historical knowledge and recognition of American women architects of the 20th century. Willis is a founding trustee of the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., where The Beverly Willis Library was opened in 2008 to honor Willis’ contributions to the museum.