Celebrating Women’s history month!!
Minnesota’s oldest woman architect tells her story
Another woman who shaped the field locally and nationally is Su Blumentals. At 88, Blumentals is the oldest living woman architect in Minnesota. Blumentals started her degree at the university in 1954 when the architecture school was under the deanship of famed architect Ralph Rapson.
“She was told to wear a nice dress because she would be pouring coffee at a faculty event in the School of Architecture,” Fong says. “She takes that opportunity to really network and to talk to all the notables who would be there that evening.”
Blumentals remembers it all too well.
“It was an opportunity to get to talk with these famous architects and planners,” Blumentals says. “The women saw it as demeaning. The guys saw it as standard practice.”
Blumentals graduated in 1959 and worked across the region for seven decades before retiring her license in 2024. She would work with the firm Gingold-Pink and for decades with her husband and fellow architect Janis Blumentals, who died in 2017, at the Brooklyn Center-based firm Blumentals Architecture, Inc.
Her projects include the Mann Southtown Theater, with its sweeping, curved roofline and a prominent marquee, in 1962, which was razed in the 90s, and the Hennepin County Medical Center in 1973, with heavy use of raw concrete, strong geometric forms and minimal ornamentation. She also helped design a series of Lund’s grocery stores, including the first major location in Richfield, where Blumentals has since shopped regularly for decades.
The grocery store that wowed the world
Standing outside what is now the Richfield Lunds & Byerlys, Blumentals stares up at the stone pylon that rises from inside the store entrance and soars through the roof. It’s one of the few elements still visible from the original design.
“It’s nice having a little piece of its original look,” Blumentals says. “It’s picked up immediately from the intersection we’re on.”
Inside, she points to the ceiling — there used to be a mural about the history of food that encircled the entire store. At the time, the store was cutting-edge design for grocers and attracted visitors from around the world, Blumentals recalls as she hunts for green lentils.
“After this store went up, Lunds was named the grocer of the year, and I believe it was by ‘Progressive Grocer’ magazine,” Blumentals says. The 1960s magazine spread is on view in the exhibition, highlighting the “prestige” areas of the grocer, including a pitched wood-beamed ceiling, a “polished-wood alcove for the Food of the World gourmet section” and a “gold foil-lined arch with small chandeliers” at the checkout.
It’s one of her favorite projects. “Gosh, 15-20 years after this was built, there would still be groups of grocers from all around the world that would be coming here on tour, because it was just not normal,” Blumentals says. “It was turning groceries from a necessity into a thing that you love.”
In the exhibition, you’ll also learn that in 1999, Blumentals was also named a fellow by the American Institute of Architects. She was at a design conference in Duluth when she found out.
“I got this call and immediately burst into tears like a baby. It was so exciting.”
Shaking up a board stuck in time
Blumentals received a fellowship for her service to the profession, including her time on the Minnesota Board of AELSLAGID, the state’s regulating board for the fields of architecture, engineering, land surveying, landscape architecture, geoscience and interior design.
Not only was Blumentals the first woman appointed to the board in 1991, she became the first woman board chair a few years later. One of her major accomplishments there was setting board term limits.
“Some of the people, when I entered the board, had been there for 30-some years, and it was a feeling of: It belonged to them,” Blumentals says. “By replacing people that had been there way too long, were totally burned out and really saw helping the professions as secondary, this, in actuality, did really solve the problem.”
The field of architecture still lags in gender parity. As the exhibition outlines, women hold 53 percent of architecture degrees, but only make up 31 percent of practicing architects. Blumentals has advice for women aspiring to be architects.
“Do it!” she says. “If you don’t follow your heart, you always regret what might have been.”
