Prominent painter and landscape architect Roberta Ardis Wightman had a long and distinguished 60+ year career in the Pacific Northwest. An only child, she was born in Chicago to Drs. Hugo W. and Grace S. Wightman on March 26, 1912. She attended the best schools and was exposed to fine arts at an early age. Her mother was an early advocate of the then newly-formed Montessori School program, and Wightman excelled under this focused environment. After high school she decided to study painting in Taos, New Mexico. Under the tutelage of avant-garde artist Emil Bisttram, she became associated with the top modernists of the time.

She then took courses at Oberlin College in Ohio, Middlebury College in Vermont (1931-1933), and finally at Harvard (in summer 1936) before she received a bachelor’s degree in Landscape Architecture from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1938. Upon graduation, Wightman took a job with the Springfield Water, Light & Power Co. overseeing a 4,000-acre reclamation project in Springfield, Illinois (1938-1944).

For reasons unknown, in 1945 she moved to Seattle and initially took a job working with landscape architect Edwin Grohs & Associates. Together they worked on the University of Washington Arboretum.

With experience at hand, Wightman decided to open her own firm in 1948. Over the course of her 50-year career she worked with a variety of clients on numerous projects. Early projects included St. Barnabus Church on Bainbridge Island (1948); Lawrence & Hazen Architectural Office in Seattle (1953); George Hazen House (1954, AIA/ST Home of the Month – July 1954); the H.F. Nilsen House (1954, with Lawrence & Hazen, AIA/ST Home of the Month – November 1956); the Church of the Epiphany in Seattle (1959); the Georgia Pacific Plywood Co. Headquarters in Olympia (1953, with NBBJ, featured in Progressive Architecture Magazine – June 1953); and the Susan J. Henry Memorial Library on Capitol Hill (1956, with NBBJ, featured in Progressive Architecture Magazine – Feb 1956). Her notoriety is shown through real estate advertisements which called out landscaping work had been done by Roberta Wightman.

Wightman was a frequent lecturer at local and regional garden clubs, as well as at university sponsored lectures. She was heavily involved in the formation of the Washington Society of Landscape Architects in 1946 and became their first Secretary-Treasurer, and later President (1951), and then their Public Relations Chair (1954). She also has the distinction of being the first President of the Pacific Northwest Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects (1959).

Later projects included a “Fashion in Design” vignette garden (1961, with Robert Chittock); the Herbert Schoenfeld House on Mercer Island (1961); the “Horizon Home” model house in Marine Hills (1962, Parade of Homes); the Brighton Place Apartments (1968, with Kenneth Koehler); the Frontier Homes Development (1968) in Arlington; the Herbert Crockett House (1973, with Robert Chittock); and Liberty Bay Park in Bremerton (1974, with Kenneth Koehler).

Among her most treasured projects was a longtime partnership with Northwest Hospital in Seattle. Wightman served as their landscape architect for over 30 years, and designed the landscaping for the original construction in 1959-1960 and a later expansion in 1980.

Wightman retired in 2000 and passed away in Seattle on July 2, 2010. Her collection of nearly 700 drawings (from 1938 to 1994), and oral interview, are found at the University of Washington Special Collections.

– Michael C Houser