lit a candle 6h agoFunny how you remember where you were. I was reading something about the Pueblo Revival stuff in New Mexico, totally unrelated, and my wife's cousin who went through UNM architecture mentioned Forbes Isais had passed, and I sat there a while because I'd just been thinking about that whole region, Santa Fe, the adobe buildings, how the school shaped so much of that look and feel for decades. Never studied architecture myself, just travel through it, but you hear the name of the first woman dean there in 2010 and you realize how long that took, 2010, that's not that long ago really. Anyway. 76. Edit: her partner Susan Lawton went before her I guess, that got me too.
Their story
Geraldine Forbes Isais was an American architect and architectural educator who became the first woman to serve as dean of the University of New Mexico School of Architecture and Planning and was the founding dean of Woodbury University's San Diego campus. Over a career of more than three decades she…
Geraldine Forbes Isais was an American architect and architectural educator who became the first woman to serve as dean of the University of New Mexico School of Architecture and Planning and was the founding dean of Woodbury University's San Diego campus. Over a career of more than three decades she was one of the most prominent advocates for women and under-represented people in architectural education in the United States.
Raised in Los Angeles, she came to architecture by an unusual route. She earned a bachelor's degree in cultural anthropology at California State University, Fullerton, and did graduate work there in ethnomusicology before a growing love of the built environment led her to a Master of Architecture at Cal Poly Pomona. She often credited a great aunt, a teacher who founded kindergartens across Mexico, with shaping her idea of what an educator and organiser could be.
She practised as a partner in the Los Angeles firm Butler, Forbes, Jubany Architecture from 1988 to 1995, and returned as principal in charge of design at Jubany Architecture from 2001 to 2005. Her teaching began at Rio Hondo College in Whittier and then at Woodbury University in Burbank, where she rose to chair and assistant dean and in 2000 became founding dean of the San Diego campus. She later chaired a program at the University of Colorado before joining UNM in 2005 to direct its architecture program.
In 2003 she became the first Hispanic president of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, despite once being told that a Hispanic woman could never lead it. She was named an ACSA Distinguished Professor in 2006, later served as chancellor of its College of Distinguished Professors, and was the first president of its Women's Leadership Council. Appointed UNM dean in 2010, she steered the school through years of financial strain, involved it in the Innovate ABQ project, secured the gift that created the Predock Center for Design and Research and helped launch the Indigenous Design and Planning Institute. DesignIntelligence named her one of the 25 most admired educators in the country in 2016.
After stepping down as dean in 2019 she retired and endowed two scholarships at UNM, one with her late partner Susan Lawton and one in honour of their son, Gilberto Churchill Forbes. She died on 25 September 2026, aged 76. The school announced her death and remembered her as a mentor whose generosity shaped careers across the country.
Biography adapted from University of New Mexico School of Architecture and Planning, UNM Newsroom and Archinect (September to October 2026).
In their own words
“I followed her into the dean's office, and I have felt her example in it every day: her energy, her generosity with students and faculty, and her insistence that we could disagree and still care for one another.”
Robert Gonzalez, dean of the UNM School of Architecture and Planning, October 2026
Photos
1by People Forever
