There’s no obvious career path for an eighth grade math geek and ballroom dancing champ. Then again, consider the one taken by Barbara Thornton of Brewster Thornton Group Architects LLP.
Thornton grew up in east Tennessee, the daughter of parents from the southeastern coal-mining corner of Kentucky. Her father, an electrical engineer, was the first in the family to go to college. Her mother was the first woman to graduate from the University of Kentucky with a degree in engineering.
By the time she was in eighth grade, Thornton knew she wanted to be an architect. She was good at math and science and was also artistic. “I was very nerdy, and I played keyboard in a rock band. My parents tried to socialize me,” Thornton said. “They insisted I do the cotillion in Oak Ridge.”
Cotillions are choreographed group dances based on social manners, and they are very formal. When Thornton and her partner, a football player, took their first ballroom dancing trip outside the South, it was to compete at New York’s Waldorf Astoria. She was 15 and weighed maybe 100 pounds. “He floated me around the room,” she said. The event was cutthroat, but they won.
Even at that age, though, Thornton realized she wanted to do something that would make a lasting impact. A couple of years later, she applied to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She had good grades but, given MIT’s 10% quota of women in the freshman class, female applicants had to stand out. As it happened, the admissions official who conducted her interview had just started a school dance club. “To this day, I think my ballroom background is why I got in,” Thornton said.
Thornton graduated with a master’s in architecture and an MBA, and became licensed to practice in 1987.
Many architects are notoriously bad businesspeople, she says. And early on in her career, she worked in Florida after the condo market had collapsed. The only surviving firms had principals who made the numbers work, even if they were bad designers. “I swore after one summer I’d learn to be good at business,” she said.
After a stint in Boston, she moved with her husband, illustrator Peter Thornton, to Rhode Island to be closer to his family. In 2000, she joined a firm originally launched by Mary Brewster.
Today, Brewster Thornton Group Architects is a full-service design company with 16 architects and designers. Thornton is one of the partners. (Brewster retired in 2021.)
The firm’s projects range from residential – designing new houses and renovating historic ones – to commercial, including a renovation of the historic Bliss Hall at the University of Rhode Island’s Kingston campus in South Kingstown and repairing the murals in the Statehouse dome.
With its historic buildings, Rhode Island is full of opportunities. One of BTGA’s specialties is helping old buildings live a bit longer, Thornton says. No surprise, one of her favorite projects is the stately Eisenhower House, an 1873 Victorian on the grounds of Fort Adams that for a few years served as President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s summer White House in the late 1950s.
Now owned by the state, and mostly used by government organizations as a summer event space, the building was in need of restoration n 2015. Among the extensive improvements, the firm had fire alarm systems installed that look as if they’d always been there.
“It’s such a great site,” Thornton said. “Our philosophy is the firm should be a good neighbor. No one should be scared of our work.”
She also nods to the transformation of the formerly cold-feeling entrance to the Community College of Rhode Island’s Warwick campus, a classic example of exposed-concrete Brutalist architecture. Its entrance, which opens to a grand staircase, is much friendlier now, she says. The enclosed ramp added in 2020 is a welcome redesign that’s made a huge difference. “It’s not frightening when you walk up to the front door,” she said. “It wasn’t hugely expensive, and pigeons don’t poop on your head anymore.”
Thornton says it’s important to work as a group, and the hardest part of being an architect is practicing alone. “There’s so much to learn and we all back each other up. Somebody’s an expert in building codes, another specializes in [Americans with Disabilities Act] compliance, and someone else’s area is new buildings or old buildings. You can’t know it all,” she said.
Three decades ago, Thornton and her husband bought an 1869 gothic cottage in Providence that had housed freed Blacks. It needed work, with a sink still plumbed into a dry well and a dirt floor basement. It was ripe for renovation, she says.
Now those long-ago updates are ready for new updates, which the couple is tackling.
After work and on weekends, she and her husband are in a church choir and also belong to VoX, an acapella group that performs Christmas carols annually at locations such as Linden Place in Bristol and Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, with proceeds going to charity. It can add up to a long week. Thornton says her day begins around 6:45 a.m. since construction sites usually get working by 7.
“Architecture is a team sport; with the client and the staff, everyone is crucial to a good outcome,” she said. “It’s very fulfilling to create a building that will last a long time.”
