Bizios' Residence

Nancy Oates, The Chapel Hill News, July 13-19, 2001

When architect Georgia Bizios designed her own house off N. Boundary Street in 1991, she wasn't looking to break new ground. She'd done enough of that as the first female teacher at the School of Architecture at Tulane University in New Orleans in 1974 and as the first woman to become a full professor at the School of Architecture at N.C. State University's College of Design. Ever the teacher, she gave herself a final exam: build a better house than a developer with the market givens. It had to be designed fast, built in six months and come in on budget.

“It was scary, wondering if I could do it,” Bizios said. “I had a construction loan and borrowed the maximum, so I had to stay on budget and move in within six months or the rate would go up. It was the most challenging, exciting project I've done, because I honestly didn't know if I could do it.”

Her 1,750-square-foot, low-maintenance result aced the exam. Even people she would expect to be jaded by houses—the FedEx driver and the pizza delivery guy—comment on what a nice house she has. As town planners wrestle with infill and urban sprawl, it's a comfort to know that Bizios is guiding the next crop of architects.

Her pioneering work as an educator was recognized in May when she was one of three North Carolinians to be elected to the American Institute of Architects College of Fellows at the organization's convention in Denver, Co. The honor is conferred on architects of longstanding who have made significant contributions to the profession. This year 72 architects were honored. Of the more than 66,000 AIA architects nationwide, fewer than 2,300 have been named to the College of Fellows.

Bizios, 56, was one of only a few women studying architecture in the early 1960s. Born in Greece, she came to the United States immediately after high school, following scholarships to Colby College in Waterville, Maine, the University of Minnesota's School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture in Minneapolis, and graduate school at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Ore., where she and Lucy Davis, who is now an architect and developer in Chapel Hill, were classmates. After Bizios accepted the N.C. State appointment, she bought some land on Rose Lane that Davis was developing. Bizios designed the house and put Davis in charge of building it.

“Women of my generation in the States weren't encouraged to study math and physics,” Bizios said. “There were very few [women studying architecture], so it was very lonely. But being from another culture helped. I didn't fit in anyway, so it didn't bother me that much.”

Bizios may have been lonely, but she was not a loner. In a field in which its stars are reputed to be arrogant and temperamental, Bizios teaches and practices architectural teamwork.

Robert Burns, an AIA Fellow and the director of the School of Architecture at the College of Design, was the department head when N.C. State recruited Bizios as a visiting professor in 1986. She became a full professor two years later. He said that she never sought to become a symbol of female achievement; nevertheless, she has been an inspiration to young women entering a male-dominated profession.

“She's not out there on the barricades, but in a quiet, convincing way, she's made people realize [being an architect] works for women as well as for men,” Burns said. “She's eminently sensible, clear in her statements and quite courageous.”

Those traits served her well in designing her own house—something many architects avoid because their standards are too high, Bizios said.

“We [architects] know what is possible, and we want it all—marble from Italy and faucets from Japan—and we can't afford it,” she said. “I was very realistic about my house. The character is from the configuration of the three-dimensional space rather than exotic trim or materials. Everything came from Fitch Lumber.”

When Bizios designed her own house, she wanted lots of light and flowing spaces. As a student up north, she suffered through the housing options of the region, living in chopped up, dark places with small windows and cramped rooms that held in heat. Teaching and practicing in the South, she worked with a much different climate, taking advantage of tall windows and open spaces that captured breezes and pushed the heat away. Every room in her two-bedroom house has light coming in from at least two sides. Through judicious use of walls and windows, most of the rooms look into an adjacent room, allowing them to borrow space from each other. Though it has two stories plus a finished basement and a screened porch, the house is barely noticeable from the street.

“I can work here the whole day or weekend, and I don't feel cooped up,” she said.

Storage, she admits, is the bane of the small house but needn't be its death knell. When she looks at the stark, minimalist photos in glossy, high-end design magazines, her first thought is, Who lives there?

“I would love to be able to live like that,” she said. “One table, one couch, no stray newspapers, not a book out of place.”

Instead, she has a vase collection she can't pare down and has been known to wander into bookstores, emerging $100 later with books that will inevitably be stacked by a bed, clutter a table or pile up on the stairs.

“We all do it,” she said. “Well-designed houses have to take into account that we're not going to change as a culture. My clients won't change into minimalists overnight.”

She is convinced people don't need much square footage if the space is well placed, well designed and convenient.

“When storage is not good, you have clutter; and if you are missing square footage, you feel your house doesn't work,” she said. “[Architects] have to plan for clutter, so there are places for books, toilet paper, vases.”

While her clients aren't always eager to downsize square footage, they do want to downsize maintenance. Bizios built her own house out of pressure-treated wood to eliminate the need to scrape and paint it, and extended the eaves to make gutters unnecessary—“Who's going to go up there and clean them?” she said—though Chapel Hill building code now requires gutters on new houses.

Her graduate training underscored the notion of designing space that emphasized function over unique style. While she recognizes that shock value has its place in public architecture as a way to create interest and discussion and to attract visitors, other parameters come into play in designing a home.

“I pride myself on houses that fit the site and don't look like they landed there from the moon,” she said.

Bizios believes she is a better architect because she is a teacher. She educates her clients about design, so they can make the necessary compromises between, say, windows with well-framed views and enough wallspace for art and books. The drawback?

“Clients tease me that I give them homework to do,” she said.

After more than 35 years of crafting curricula and preparing lectures, Bizios has scaled back her course load to have more time to develop her solo practice. And she hopes her days of “firsts” are over.

“I've been ‘first woman’ enough; it's tiring,” she said. “For anything I do in my life from now on, I want to be at least the 10th.”