Jane West Clauss
American architect, educator (1907-2003)
Jane West Clauss (September 23, 1907 – January 12, 2003) was an American architect and educator who collaborated on one of the earliest International Style housing developments in the United States.
Biography
Jane Beech West was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1907. Both her father, historian Willis Mason West, and her mother, Elizabeth Sophia (Beech) West, were professors at the University of Minnesota. She attended the University of Minnesota, receiving her B.A. in interior architecture in 1929. She went on to work for about two years in the Paris atelier of Le Corbusier, the first American woman to do so. During her time with Le Corbusier, she worked on the design of his Swiss Dormitory for the City University of Paris.
She married the German architect Alfred Clauss in 1934, and between 1934 and 1945, they lived in Tennessee, where they collaborated on the design of the prewar "Little Switzerland" suburb of split-level houses outside Knoxville, Tennessee. Sponsored by the Tennessee Valley Authority as part of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, it is regarded as one of the earliest examples of the International Style in the United States. Laid out along a ridge of Brown's Mountain six miles southeast of downtown Knoxville, Little Switzerland consists of twenty 120 x 240–foot lots, on which 10 houses were designed by Jane and Alfred.
In 1945, Clauss and her husband settled in Philadelphia, where she took up a position teaching interior architecture at Beaver College (1946-1967).
The public source identifies “Jane West Clauss” as american architect, educator (1907-2003). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Jane, West and Clauss.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q26270172. VIAF identifies the subject as 173778937. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1907, 2003, 1929 and 1934.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jane West Clauss” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.