New Angle: Voice

Today Montecito and Santa Barbara are associated with a number of women identifiable by a single name, from Gwyneth to Oprah to Meghan. But the look of the houses in those oceanfront cities – stucco arches, red tile floors, exposed beams — can be attributed to a woman architect also known by one name, Lutah . I'm your host, Alexandra Lange . Welcome to the latest episode of New Angle: Voice on the...

Hello, this is New Angle: Voice , the podcast about Pioneering Women in American Architecture brought to you by the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation . I'm your new host, Alexandra Lange . Our latest episode describes the creation and experience of the Women's School of Planning and Architecture , popularly known as WSPA, which ran for four summers from 1974 to 1979.   It completes a trilogy...

Welcome to New Angle Voice: I'm your bi-coastal architect and host, Cynthia Phifer Kracauer. Catherine Bauer's life divided into two names and two geographies:  her urban east coast youth, and her Bay Area soft landing.  She hobnobbed with the bohemian elite of the interwar years….brilliantly charming the pants off of the big architect names of the Weimar Republic, Paris cafe society, and the Inte...

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 play...

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 v...

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, mot...

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 int...

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 Melvil...

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...

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 in...

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 perfec...

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...

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:...

Natalie de Blois (1921–2013) contributed to some of the most iconic modernist works for corporate America, all while raising four children.  After leaving this significant mark on post-war Park Avenue, she transferred to the SOM Chicago office, where she became actively involved in the architecture feminist movement and was one of the leaders in the newly formed Chicago Women in Architecture advoc...

Welcome to New Angle: Voice. Episode 1 takes us on an earthquaking tour from San Francisco to Paris and back, with Julia Morgan (1872-1957), the first woman to attend the architecture program at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and the first woman to receive the AIA Gold Medal. Special thanks in this episode to Brandi Howell, Alexandra Lange, Julia Donoho, Karen McNeill, Victoria Kastner, Karen Fiene, Jus...