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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 advocacy group.  Later, she finished her career as a professor at UT Austin, where she trained a...

A podcast about Pioneering Women of American Architecture