Gannon and Hands

[2][5] Right after graduating in 1894, the two women opened their own architectural practice, Gannon and Hands,[6] and in that same year they won a large commission to design a hospital in San Francisco with a project budget in the neighborhood of $30,000–$40,000.

[2] Calling New York's tenements "a reproach to the humanitarianism of this enlightened century,"[7] they set to work to find better solutions to urban housing for the poor.

One of their model tenements was designed around a central court (for light and air), with balconies for each apartment, front and rear fire escapes, and ash chutes and garbage receptacles for refuse management.

[3] Similarly, philanthropist Sir Sidney Waterlow, who was chairman of the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company in London, called their work "the best plans for single tenements I have ever seen, the most clever and ingenious.

[7] In 1897, Mary Gannon married John Walp Doutrich and that same year the firm moved to a more upscale neighborhood, indicating that it had achieved a degree of success.