Eleanor Raymond

Eleanor Agnes Raymond (March 4, 1887 – July 24, 1989) was an American architect and historian of architecture and design. During a professional career spanning some sixty years of practice, mainly in residential housing, Raymond explored the use of innovative materials and building systems. Much of her work was commissioned by women from her social group in Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts. One client called her “an architect who combines a respect for tradition with a disrespect for its limitations”. The author of a monograph on her life praised her work for its "subtle simplicity without succumbing to architectural exhibitionism". Raymond undertook one of her most ambitious works, the Dover Sun House, for example, fuses the stark International-Style rectilinear forms of the exterior with an interior rich in traditional built-in cupboards, decorative wood trim, and antique hardware. The Rachel Raymond House was a manifestation of a Northeastern regional modernism that predates by six years the Gropius House in Lincoln, Massachusetts, which is often singled out as the "first" manifestation of an American regional modernism. Raymond designed the Dover Sun House in 1948 in Dover, Massachusetts. The Dover Sun House was an "all-solar house" and had a bank of glass plate heat collectors. It used Telkes' phase-change system to collect and store solar energy. The project was funded by philanthropist and sculptor Amelia Peabody, and built on her property in Dover, Massachusetts.

Raymond supervised Sarah Pillsbury Harkness, later a founder of The Architects Collaborative, when Harkness was a student at the Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. The project was the design of the Pillsbury Summer House in Duxbury, Massachusetts. The house, built in 1938, is still in use as a private home and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2004.

Raymond was a member of the American Institute of Architects, and in 1961 was elected a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects. Parker Plywood House (1941, 1945–1946) Hammond Compound (1941–1942) Peabody Sun-Heated House (1948) Dover Sun House (1948) Pope House (1949–1950) Meyer House (1958) Nichols Factory Addition (1959–1960) Damon House (1961) Baxter-Ward Antique Shop (1970) Peabody Westville Sporthaus (1972) Smith House (1973)