“Can you name five female architects?”

That question was posed repeatedly and pointedly by Beverly Willis, an architect who helped women break through her field’s glass ceiling by running her own accomplished firm in San Francisco and creating a foundation in New York for promoting women’s contributions to the industry.

She died Oct. 1 at 95 at her home in Branford, Conn., where she was in hospice care, her spouse, Wanda Bubriski, said. The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.

In San Francisco, Willis, who got her start as a designer in Hawaii, created several destination buildings. She won acclaim for her 1965 conversion of three Victorian homes into a retail and restaurant complex — an early example of finding a modern purpose for a historic building, a practice now known as adaptive reuse. In 1983 she completed the San Francisco Ballet Building, recognized at the time as the first building in the United States designed exclusively for a major ballet school.

As one of the few prominent women in her field, Willis, who spent the following decades in New York, made it her mission to recognize the work of her female predecessors and contemporaries.

She celebrated the achievements of Emily Warren Roebling, who spent years helping with the planning and building of the Brooklyn Bridge after her husband, Washington Roebling, the bridge’s chief engineer, fell sick and was bedridden. She championed the work of landscape designer M. Betty Sprout, who, in the 1930s and ’40s in Manhattan, shaped the plantings for Bryant Park, the Conservatory Garden in Central Park and City Hall Park, among other major projects. And she recognized the work of little- known 20th-century female architects, as well as more established ones who worked into the 21st century as well, like Zaha Hadid, Annabelle Selldorf and Elizabeth Diller.

Willis said she created the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation in 2002 out of frustration at seeing women largely absent from architectural history textbooks. When she asked people to name five female architects, a favorite question of hers, most could not come up with more than two or three. As she said in her 2018 short film “Unknown New York: The City That Women Built,” “I knew that women had planned, designed, built or developed all types of construction in Manhattan, yet their works — their blood, sweat and tears — were either blatantly shunned, labeled as anonymous or credited to someone else.”

Willis was born Feb. 17, 1928, in Tulsa, Okla. By 1934, her parents had divorced and her father’s business had gone under. He soon disappeared from her life. Her mother, unable to provide for Beverly and her younger brother placed them in an orphanage for six years.

According to “Invisible Images: The Silent Language of Architecture” (1995), written with architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, under the “crushing weight of unfeeling institutions” she established a fierce independence as a means of survival. By the time she was 17, she had “worked in a welding shop, learning to rivet, to wire equipment and to practice woodworking.”

Willis studied engineering at Oregon State University, and after studying and living for a while in San Francisco, she transferred to the University of Hawaii and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree there in 1954.

While in Hawaii, she studied fresco painting under painter and muralist Jean Charlot. Most memorably, she designed the Shell Bar of the Hawaiian Village Hotel on Waikiki Beach, embedding Pacific Ocean seashells into the bar and tabletops — an early example of how nature inspired her work.

She returned to San Francisco in 1958 to open a design office, which handled furniture projects, office interiors and the occasional supermarket remodeling. Most ambitiously, she was asked to convert three Victorian homes on Union Street into a retail and restaurant complex.

An imaginative writer and thinker steeped in classic mythology and contemporary psychology, Willis understood with this project just how much preserving details from the past — wrought-iron rails, gaslights and gingerbread cornices included — could appeal to a modern consumer.

The Union Street Shops project, completed in 1965, is considered one of the earliest success stories in the adaptive-reuse field; historian Clare Lorenz noted that “it foreshadowed national efforts to restore old buildings in city centers.”

Despite the acclaim this project received, Willis found herself unable to apply for a state license as an architect because she had never worked under another architect. She considered suing but turned instead to Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye, a friend from her time there, who put in a call to Gov. Pat Brown of California. Three days later, she received the documentation needed to sit for the exams. She obtained her license in 1966 and became head of the California chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 1979.

Overseeing several large-scale residential projects in the 1970s, Willis found a new ally: computers. In order to better analyze proposed developments in terms of environmental impact, considering factors like housing density, building types and costs, she worked with Eric Teicholz and Jochen Eigen to develop the Computerized Approach to Residential Land Analysis, or CARLA.

She used this program in 1973 to site 98 apartments on a bluff in Pacifica, Calif., and in 1979 to design the Aliamanu Valley Community for Military Family Housing, consisting of 525 buildings set in the crater of an extinct volcano on Oahu.

It was in 1983 that Willis completed her most recognizable project: the San Francisco Ballet Building, known for its elegant proportions and powerful use of curved glass in the balconies and lobby, evoking the folds of theatrical curtains.

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