An architect dedicated to city and four decades of students

Shirley Vernon, 80, an architect and educator, died of heart disease Sunday, Feb. 27, at her home in Center City.

Ms. Vernon started building when she was the only girl in a model-airplane club at Bala Junior High School. In 1975, she told The Inquirer that she initially had wanted to be an aeronautical engineer.

"When I found out that they build only parts of airplanes," she said, "I switched my attention to buildings."

After graduating from Lower Merion High School, Ms. Vernon earned a bachelor's degree in architecture from Pennsylvania State University in 1953. She received the Outstanding Student Medal from the American Institute of Architects and was the second woman from Penn State elected to the national engineering honor society, Tau Beta Pi.

She joined the architectural firm of Vincent G. Kling in Philadelphia after graduating. Among her projects there were the U.S. Embassy office building in Quito, Ecuador, which received a gold medal from that city; the Union Carbide Technical Center in Tarrytown, N.Y.; and the Franklin Institute Research Laboratories in Center City.

In the 1950s and '60s, the Kling firm did mostly large commercial buildings, but Ms. Vernon preferred laboratories, she said. She liked the challenge of planning "how you get people in and out, how you get air in and out. They're no-nonsense buildings yet very intricate."

Ms. Vernon, who liked working and living in urban areas, bought a trinity on Delancey Street in the 1960s. She invited friends over to smash the mirrored wall painted with a jungle scene installed by former owners, then scraped and painted and built cabinets, furniture, drawing boards, and shelves. She described her home as "eclectic" and "architecturally clean."

In 1968, Ms. Vernon established a solo practice, doing mostly residential work and small commercial work, including shops in New Hope and State College, Pa.

She joined Ballinger Co., an architectural and engineering firm in Philadelphia, in 1974. The next year, she was named its design manager.

Ms. Vernon left Ballinger in 1976 to work on her own again. Her clients included the Philadelphia Department of Recreation, the University of Pennsylvania, Rosemont College, and Philadelphia Health Services Inc.

While working as an architect, she taught at Drexel University from 1957 to 1987. Initially, she was an adjunct professor in the department of architecture. She later taught design fundamentals and urban planning in the department of civil engineering.

In 1986, she joined the faculty at Moore College of Art and Design as a professor in the department of interior design. After retiring in 1996, she remained a department consultant.

Ms. Vernon was a past vice president of the Philadelphia chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

In her retirement, she became fascinated with tracing her family history, said a friend, Katharine Kriebel.

Ms. Vernon taught herself to decipher medieval Latin documents. She traveled to England and to France, where she visited archives in her ancestral town of Vernon. Her research led her to family records from well before the Norman conquest of England in 1066.

Ms. Vernon was assiduous about keeping up friendships with former schoolmates and her neighbors, Kriebel said. Recently, she and her neighbors had been lobbying the city to take action against the owners of a nearby abandoned house.

Ms. Vernon is survived by a nephew and a niece.

A memorial service will be held at Trinity Memorial Church, 2212 Spruce St., at a date to be announced.