Katherine Olivia Sessions is remembered for work that changed how the next generation built.
The record lists Katherine Olivia Sessions as American botanist and landscape architect (1857-1940).
Katherine Olivia Sessions was born at San Francisco in 1857. Her recorded nationality is United States. She trained at University of California, Berkeley and San Diego High School.
Industrialisation gave architecture iron, glass and the lift, and with them the problems of the railway station, the factory and the tall city block.
She is recorded as botanist, landscape architect and architect.
Her best-known building is Balboa Park. Of all the arts, architecture is the one whose failures are hardest to remove.
That the work was built in United States shaped it: climate, materials, planning law and who holds the budget all decide what can actually be built.
Katherine Olivia Sessions died in 1940, aged 83. The buildings remain, still in use by people who never knew the name - which is the particular afterlife architecture offers.
Achievements
- Notable work: Balboa Park
- Trained at University of California, Berkeley and San Diego High School
