Victorine du Pont Homsey


Victorine du Pont, was an American architect. She was a principal in Victorine & Samuel Homsey. She was elected a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 1967, the first woman architect from Delaware and only the eighth woman nationwide to achieve that honor.

Life

She was born in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, to Antoine Biderman du Pont, Jr., and Mary Ethel du Pont. The Du Ponts were an old and well-to-do family; her great-grandfather was the industrialist Alfred V. du Pont. She attended Wellesley College, where she earned her undergraduate degree in 1923. She went on to get her certificate in architecture in 1925 from the Cambridge School of Domestic and Landscape Architecture for Women ; ten years later, after the school became affiliated with Smith College, she was awarded the M. Arch degree.
After leaving the Cambridge School, she worked as a draftsperson at the firm of Allen and Collens in Boston, and there she met Samuel Homsey, whom she married in 1929.
Victorine and Samuel moved to Wilmington, Delaware, and in 1935, they opened a firm known as Victorine & Samuel Homsey. They are thought to have been the first Delaware architects to work in the International Style, and one of their early house designs was chosen by New York's Museum of Modern Art to represent International Style in a 1938 Paris exhibition. In general, however, their style was more eclectic, and in part because they began their careers during the Great Depression, they felt it was important for architects to work on developing ways to work economically and with new materials. In 1950, one of their house designs for small sites was included in a "Five-Star" series developed by Better Homes and Gardens magazines, the working drawings and specifications for which could be bought by mail for $5.