From the Miami Herald (registration required):
For Sarita Mishkin de Darer, being a pioneer comes naturally. In the 50s in Venezuela it was unheard of for a woman to work, let alone go into such an “unfeminine” field as architecture.
She braved criticism and discrimination. A professor told her she could not be an architect with long fingernails and others chastised her for wearing pants to a work site.
The Venezuelan-born architect also shocked her family by not going into the family textile business. “I guess I was the black sheep, they thought I was crazy,” she says, laughing. She was sent to the Highland Manor boarding school in New Jersey. There a book by Ayn Rand changed her life.
“I read The Fountainhead when I was about 12, then that summer I went to Europe with my mother. The Louvre and all the art I saw affected me profoundly,” she recalls.
Today Sarita Darer, her husband, Oscar, and son, Eduardo, are the Darer Group, a design, finance and construction team now working on several condominium projects in Miami.
Sarita’s parents accepted her refusal to go into their textile business. ‘But only because I lied and told them I would study pharmacy which was `acceptable’ for a girl,” she says. Again, she broke the rules by graduating from high school at 15, then went on to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
“A year later I sent my grades and confessed I was majoring in architecture, but they didn’t understand because in Venezuela most plans were done by engineers,” she recalls. She graduated at age 20, worked one summer in New York, then returned to Venezuela to work at the Centro Simon Bolivar government agency.
