New Angle: Voice

We continue our throw-back to the seventies, and take a deeper dive into the many facets of the women’s movement that impacted the practice of architecture. 

Pushed to the side and rarely credited for her architectural work at Davis Brody,  Phyllis Birkby became a significant figure in extending the lesbian women's movement to architecture during the 1970s. Her environmental fantasy workshops played a crucial role in galvanizing the community, providing a creative and empowering space within a male-dominated profession. 

Growing out of other consciousness raising techniques, freed up in her classes, Phyllis released the rigor of her conventional training to get down on the floor,  and lead the group in sketching their fantasies however outlandish on giant rolls of butcher paper.  She encouraged the women to imagine architecture above, below, and beyond the norm. 

Birkby's work not only contributed to architectural discourse but also fostered a sense of collective identity among lesbian architects, highlighting the intersectionality of gender, sexuality, and professional identity in the field. In her later years, she focused on architecture for people marginalized in other ways – by addiction, by age, and by disability, again imagining spaces of community and support.

Welcome to Beyond Architecture: The Fantasy Worlds of Phyllis Birkby

Special thanks in this episode to Stephen Vider, MC Overholt, Gabrielle Esperdy, Matthew Wagstaffe, Leslie Kanes Weisman and the Smith College Special Collections.  

This podcast is produced by Brandi Howell, with editorial advising from Alexandra Lange. 

New Angle Voice is brought to you by the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation.  Funding for this podcast comes from the New York State Council on the Arts.

That was some party. Even though I didn’t make it to the splashy opening, I did attend the transformational exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, our subject in this episode. A rarely used sculpture gallery was filled with ranks and files of cheap drafting tables, their tops tilted to display what seemed to be pages out of the book, one spread to a table. It overwhelmed with information—but seemed void of the chatter of us working women.  

Welcome to New Angle Voice, I’m your host, Cynthia Kracauer.  In this episode, we revisit the first significant effort to publicly tell the under-told stories of American women in architecture: “Women in American Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective.” On view at the Brooklyn Museum from February-April of 1977, the groundbreaking exhibition and simultaneous book, curated and edited by Susana Torre, clearly defined the state of play for women in the architecture profession. Alienated by the profound hostility expressed by the AIA, women architects found an accepting cohort at the Architectural League of New York. We organized. We canvassed. We raised our consciousnesses. The project team identified subjects so previously obscured as to be unknown, and then with the energy and drive of a furious mob, they broke through and laid the groundwork for scholarship, social change, and recognition of women architects for the next fifty years. Get your consciousness raised: listen to our voices. Here’s “Laying the Groundwork: Women in American Architecture, Spring 1977.”

Special thanks in this episode to Susana Torre, Andrea Merrett, Suzanne Stephens, Cynthia Rock, Deborah Nevins, and Robert AM Stern.

This podcast is produced by Brandi Howell, with editorial advising from Alexandra Lange. Thanks also to production assistants Virginia Eskridge and Aislinn McNamara.

New Angle Voice is brought to you by the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation. Funding for this podcast comes from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Graham Foundation.

We are beginning our third season, and hope that if you have followed our progress, that you will want to continue to support our ongoing efforts to tell women’s stories of challenge, struggle and success. Visit our website to make a contribution. www.bwaf.org.

Sarah Pillsbury, or Sally as she was better known by her peers, and Jean Bodman were both architects who married architects.  As an architect who also married an architect, my perspective may be more inside baseball on the professional side, but utter awe and fascination on the family end.

I’m Cynthia Phifer Kracauer, architect, Executive Director of the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, mother of only two, and your host.   Welcome to our last episode of New Angle Voice 2023. 

It’s hard to look at the early days of TAC—the Architects Collaborative—for a time a world-class firm founded by two husband/wife couples and a handful of their classmates … with Walter Gropius thrown in to give them the gravitas that concealed their youth—without a bit of nostalgia.  Nostalgia for the naïve progressive ideology, nostalgia for that post World War 2 hope that the world could be remade through architecture—after all, Europe was rubble—and utter amazement that the firm fared as well as long as it did.  TAC was admired by women of my generation who saw two women partners with 13 children between them, garnering design awards, winning competitions, and acting on a world stage with far flung offices and impressive civic and institutional work.  For goodness sakes the National American Institute of Architects hired them for their new headquarters!  What could be more iconic.  

Soon after the founding of the firm in 1947, Sarah and Jean wrote an article for House & Garden titled “Architecture, Family Style” which – as their biographer Michael Kubo writes – constituted something of a manifesto for the changing needs of the postwar housewife. But as we all know, sometimes youthful dreams don’t pan out.

In this episode, we revisit the utopian fantasy that the Architects Collaborative built and take a look inside.  “Architecture, Family Style – The Lives and Work of Sarah Harkness and Jean Fletcher".

Special thanks in this episode to Sara Harkness and Joseph Fletcher, Michael Kubo and Amanda Kolson Hurley.  Current Six Moon Hill residents Linda Pagani and Barbara Katzenberg kindly opened their homes and shared their stories.  Long time TAC  partners Perry Neubauer and Gail Flynn were generous with their time as were Andrea Leers and Jane Weinzapfel.  The archival oral history of Sally Harkness comes from her interview with Wendy Cox.  

This podcast is produced by Brandi Howell, with editorial advising from Alexandra Lange.   Thanks also to production assistants Virginia Eskridge and Aislinn McNamara.

New Angle Voice is brought to you by the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation.  Funding for this podcast comes from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Graham Foundation.  

1913 was the year of the grand march for suffrage in Washington DC, the 250,000 marchers and attendees eclipsed the coverage the following day of the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson.  Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, population 4216, had its own march, on the fourth of July. Costumes were di rigeur, with a goodly number of  stately toga clad ladies and a few wild harridans on horseback, along with our intrepid girl in her Cornell cap and gown:  Anna Wagner Keichline… a native Bellefutian. We had to see this for ourselves. 

So I saddled up my 2002 Honda Minivan, and made the five hour drive from New York City west on Route 80 through gently rolling Allegheny mountains to find Bellefonte and interview Nancy Perkins, her grand niece.  Nancy, a designer herself, has become the engine of Anna’s transformation from a local talent to a polymath of invention.  Nancy is dedicated to preserving the work of her aunt.   She has gathered photos, patents, plans and drawings, and even has a “k-brick”, perhaps Anna’s best known invention - a composite form of brick that foreshadows our modern and ubiquitous concrete block.    

Not every architect has the opportunity to build skyscrapers. In Bellefonte, Anna used her talents to improve the lives of her neighbors, by designing their houses and gathering places.  She adopted a gently accommodating architectural style in the shadow of all that high Victorian lacery, and designed sturdy churches, theaters, homes, schools, and recreation facilities in her hometown that still stand well and firmly in their context.

Today, we present her story:  Anna Wagner Keichline: The Legacy of Invention.

Special thanks in this episode to Nancy Perkins, Sarah Lichtman, and Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler.

This podcast is produced by Brandi Howell, with editorial advising from Alexandra Lange.   Thanks also to production assistant Virginia Eskridge.

New Angle Voice is brought to you by the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation.  Funding for this podcast comes from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Graham Foundation. 

I picked up a free glossy real estate magazine with an enticing photograph of summer leisure pursuits under the title Sag Harbor: A Whale of a Good Time. We traveled out there in early spring, collecting voices of preservation, community, celebrity, and long tenured summer families as we searched for Amaza Lee Meredith’s modern architecture. A short bike ride away from the summer haunts of Melville, Steinbeck, Betty Friedan, Spaulding Gray, lived the creator of Azurest North, the Black summer real estate enclave syndicated by Amaza Lee Meredith with her sister Maude Terry. But on the beach we found only Maude’s name enshrined on the commemorative plaque.  

For decades, Amaza and her life-long partner Edna Meade Colson, made an annual migration to enjoy the respite and comfort of their shared northern home.  Hundreds of miles south is their other Azurest—a tidy white International Style house on the edge of the Virginia State University Campus where Meredith and Colson both maintained significant teaching positions, living openly queer lives.  

Together, the homes and communities that Meredith helped establish provided a sense of joy and pleasure to those at a time when this wasn’t always possible.  And her story, as it continues to unfold with time, is a point of inspiration for those who have been lucky enough to discover it.  

In this episode, we explore the intersections of sexuality, modernity, art, architecture, and the faith community that nurtured this pair of lovers.  Amaza and Edna found their home in each other and shared it openly with their church, their colleagues and their students.   Listen to Amaza Lee Meredith:  Love and Home.

Special thanks to writers Jacqueline Taylor and Jessica Lynne, and to Brooke Williams who graciously provided Sag Harbor resident insights, as did advocates and preservationists Georgette Grier-Key, Michael Butler, and Renee Simons.  And to Reverend Grady Powell and Reverend Dr.  George WC Lyons from Gillfield Baptist Church in Petersburg, Virginia. Franklin Johnson-Norwood is the Director of Alumni Relations at Virginia State University, and our excellent tour guide for Azurest South, and to Christina Morris of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. 

New Angle Voice is a presentation of the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation.  This podcast is produced by Brandi Howell, with editorial advising from Alexandra Lange.  Virginia Eskridge provides daily assistance.  

Generous funding for this season has been provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Graham Foundation. 

Take a look at the illustrated Amaza Lee Meredith profile on the Pioneering Women of Architecture website. 

Anyone who writes about American architecture of the mid twentieth and early 21 st century measures their critical achievement with the yardstick drawn by Ada Louise Huxtable. With countless articles for two great daily newspapers, this petite New Yorker had a gigantic influence on our understanding of the work of architects, real estate developers, city bureaucrats, and the city itself, over the course of six decades in print.

General readers are quite accustomed to having their choices in books, films, dance, opera, drama, TV, and music directed and influenced by critics opinions. We find our favorite interpreters, trust their judgements, buy books or tickets. But in the concrete jungle of the city, we are captives, we have no choice to ignore what is built by others to house us, for our work places, our transit systems, our public realm. The ubiquity of mediocre architecture dulls the senses, and yet, when architecture achieves greatness it can exalt the human spirit. Ada Louise Huxtable set out to separate the dull from the great. A few architects tried to argue with her. They never won.

With her impeccable civic values, cultivated aesthetic sensibility and lacerating accuracy she praised and razed. Listen now to The Art We Must Live With: Ada Louise Huxtable and Architecture Criticism.

Special thanks in this episode to the generous architectural critics:  Alexandra Lange, Cathleen McGuigan, Christopher Hawthorne, Julie Iovine, Karrie Jacobs, Christine Cipriani and Paul Goldberger–all achieved their craft following the inimitable example set by Ada Louise.  Historian Meredith Clausen, Wall Street Journal editor Eric Gibson, and the Huxtable archive team of Stuart and Beverly Denenburg, and from the Getty Center:  Maristella Casciato everyone was exceedingly helpful.  

This podcast is produced by Brandi Howell, with editorial advising from Alexandra Lange.   Thanks also production assistant Virginia Eskridge. 

New Angle Voice is brought to you by the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation.  Funding for this podcast comes from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Graham Foundation. 

New Angle: Voice is back! We kick off Season Two with Ray Kaiser Eames. Many know Ray Eames as the small, dirndled woman behind her more famous husband. In this episode, we uncover the talented artist who saw the world full of color, the industrial designer bending plywood in the spare bedroom, and the visionary who treated folk art, cigarette wrappers, flowers, and toys as equally valuable and inspiring. Ray brought the sparkle to the legendary Eames Office, as you’ll discover in this episode “Beauty in the Everyday: The Life and Work of Ray Eames.”

Special thanks in this episode to Pat Kirkham, Lucia Dewey Atwood, Llisa Demetrios, Jeannine Oppewall, Donald Albrecht, Meg McAleer and Tracey Barton at the Library of Congress, and Alexandra Lange. 

This podcast is produced by Brandi Howell, with editorial advising from Alexandra Lange.   Thanks also to Virginia Eskridge, and Amy Auscherman, Director of Archives and Brand Heritage for MillerKnoll.  The archival audio heard in this episode comes from the MillerKnoll archives and the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.  Intro music composed by Emma Jackson.  

New Angle Voice is brought to you by the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation.  Funding for this podcast comes from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Graham Foundation, and MillerKnoll.

With her legendary unerring taste and a total commitment to produce absolute perfection in her self, her work, her products, and how she would be remembered, Florence Knoll is generally recognized as the single most powerful figure in the field of modern design.  

As an architect, Florence was the force behind the seamless integration of furniture, space, textile, art, graphic design into a perfect brand concept:  Total Design.  Her influence transcends the specific disciplines, she was the force integrating them, and in her work at the Knoll Planning Unit, she promulgated the values that still motivate architects and designers today:  solve the program with scale and detailing appropriate to the interior in support of how people behave in the active environment.  

Here she is:  Florence Knoll:  Total Design.

Special thanks in this episode to Paul Makovsky, Bobbye Tigerman, Alexandra Lange,  Dorothy Cosonas, David Bright, Celia Bertoia, Alana Stevens, and Kathy Hiesinger and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  The archival audio of Florence Knoll is provided by the Knoll Archives.  Thank you to Leah Kalotay for your help with this recording.  

This podcast is produced by Brandi Howell, with editorial advising from Alexandra Lange.   New Angle Voice is brought to you by the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, with support from Knoll, a MillerKnoll company and SOM.

Norma Sklarek had many “firsts”.  She was often credited at the start of her career as the first Black Women architect to be licensed in the United States.  That distinction actually goes to Beverly Greene – Norma was the 3rd.   But it didn’t matter.   Young black girls read her name in the likes of Ebony Magazine – a staple publication in every black household at the time –  when she was included in their 1958 article on “Successful Young Architects”.  As more and more discovered her career, she became their role model. Like so many women, then and now, she chose a management path.  Achievement was measurable, ambition was acceptable, and competence over pizazz was a vital and necessary counterpoint to charismatic male designers in firms with large scale complex projects.  As a woman and as an African American, the design path was simply not open to her, and she needed to work, she had two boys to support, and without any shame, she needed to get paid. So her work often fell shadow to the lead designer.  She was the project manager, the woman behind the scenes who made sure things got done…

And yet, despite the groundbreaking achievements of Norma, what is the current state of black women in the field of architecture?  In the 2020 AIA Demographic survey, the association counted 94,000 members.  23,500 of these are women.  There are 691 Black Women architects.  As each Black woman achieves her license, it is a matter of pride to add consecutively to that very small number. It’s a matter of shame that it is still so small.

On today’s episode, Norma Sklarek: An Extreme Bold Hand.

Special thanks to Kate Diamond, Renee Kemp-Rotan, Roberta Washington, Gail Kennard, Michael Enomoto and Gruen Associates, Pat Morton, Jack Travis, Beth Gibb, Alexandra Lange, and Suzanne Mecs.  The archival recording of Norma Sklarek is from the African American Architects of Los Angeles collection at the UCLA Library Center for Oral History Research.

This podcast is produced by Brandi Howell, with editorial advising from Alexandra Lange.   New Angle Voice is brought to you by the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, with support from Knoll, a MillerKnoll company and SOM.

Who hasn't had a burger and fries at a Denny's or Bob's Big Boy?  There are thousands of them, not just in Los Angeles, where they were born, but across the country.  These family restaurants are core to how America defined itself after World War II. Cars, families, space flight, modernism....the new world order.... And who defined that fun and futuristic look?  Our pioneering LA woman architect: Helen Fong.  

She was born in 1927 in Los Angeles Chinatown where her immigrant parents ran a laundry that she often worked at as a child.  The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was still intact, and you can imagine this presented many challenges for Helen as she grew up.  

She went on to create some of LA’s most iconic diners, which are still celebrated by legions of fans.  These landmarks have cemented their place in pop culture.  Strip malls and roadside attractions, driving with the top down, hair blowing in the wind and another day of sunshine.  

Helen’s design work helped create this image, yet many don’t know the story of the woman who they have to thank.  On today’s episode:  Fast Food and Radical Rooflines: Helen Fong Shapes Los Angeles Coffee Shops.

Special thanks in this episode to Hadley Meares, Victor Newlove, Barbara Bestor, Jim Poulos, Annie Chu, Phoebe Yee, Chris Nichols, John English, and Ginny Glass.  

This podcast is produced by Brandi Howell, with editorial advising from Alexandra Lange.   New Angle Voice is brought to you by the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, with support from Knoll, a MillerKnoll company and SOM.