Podcast · Arts & Books

New Angle: Voice

by Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation · English · Arts & Books

Beverly Willis is adding her voice to a new podcast featuring discussions about the lives and careers of female pioneers of American Architecture. Going beyond the scholarship of the award-winning website Pioneering Women of American Architecture, our podcast New Angle: Voice details the struggles a

Start from episode 1WhatsApp

New episodes: Now and then
Typical length: 42 min
Latest: 15 Sep 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

15 Sep 2026 · 48 min

The Old Girls' Network: Eleanor Raymond and the Modern House

When we embarked on research for this episode on Eleanor Raymond , we thought we were honoring her pioneering collaborative work on the first solar house in America, the Dover Sun House, built in Massachusetts in 1948. 1948! But as we spoke to relatives, admirers, and three generations of fascinated architecture historians, we found so much more to honor and intrigue about her century-spanning life. Raymond was an enthusiastic student at the first women's college of architecture. She founded an all-women commune behind a very proper Beacon Hill facade. And she designed what was likely the…

Play episodeWhatsApp Download

Earlier episodes 15 most recent

S3 · E5 · 27 Feb 2026 · 42 min
Lutah Maria Riggs Designs the American Riviera
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 Ohio-born and California-bred architect Lutah Maria Riggs . Riggs was on track to be a teacher, one of few professions to welcome women in the early 20th century, when she won a scholarship to…
S3 · E4 · 22 Aug 2025 · 28 min
Not Only Survive, but Flourish: The Story of WSPA
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 of episodes, including previous ones on the fantasy environments of architect Phyllis Birkby and the first exhibition on Women in American Architecture at the Brooklyn Museum, that ask and answer the…
S3 · E3 · 8 Oct 2024 · 46 min
Catherine Bauer Wurster: A Thoroughly Modern Woman
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 International Style: Gropius, Mies, Corb, Oud, May…with her lover, Lewis Mumford—culminating in the publication of her 1934 classic : Modern Housing . Her glamour and charismatic presence endeared her to…
S3 · E2 · 27 Jun 2024 · 45 min
Beyond Architecture: The Fantasy Worlds of Phyllis Birkby
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…
S3 · E1 · 9 Apr 2024 · 26 min
Laying the Groundwork: Women in American Architecture, Spring 1977
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…
S2 · E5 · 20 Dec 2023 · 44 min
Architecture, Family Style – The Lives and Work of Sarah Harkness and Jean Fletcher
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…
S2 · E4 · 14 Aug 2023 · 27 min
Anna Wagner Keichline: The Legacy of Invention
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…
S2 · E3 · 31 May 2023 · 43 min
Amaza Lee Meredith: Love and Home
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…
S2 · E2 · 19 Apr 2023 · 45 min
The Art We Must Live With: Ada Louise Huxtable and Architecture Criticism
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…
S2 · E1 · 8 Mar 2023 · 40 min
Ray Eames: Beauty in the Everyday
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…
S1 · E5 · 14 Mar 2022 · 37 min
Florence Knoll: Total Design
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…
S1 · E4 · 14 Mar 2022 · 39 min
Norma Sklarek: An Extremely Bold Hand
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…
S1 · E3 · 14 Mar 2022 · 31 min
Fast Food and Radical Rooflines: Helen Fong Shapes Los Angeles Coffee Shops
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…
S1 · E2 · 15 Feb 2022 · 48 min
Natalie de Blois – To Tell The Truth
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 future generation of architects. As an architect, Natalie loved systems – understanding how things worked.…
S1 · E1 · 6 Oct 2021 · 41 min
Finding Julia Morgan
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, Justin Hoover, Amy Hart and Jim Parks, the women of the Monday Club of San Luis Obispo, Laura Sorvetti, Mark Wilson, and Aislinn McNamara. The archival audio of Sara Holmes Boutelle is from Boutelle's…

About New Angle: Voice

New Angle: Voice is a English arts & books podcast from Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation
Language: English
Category: Arts & Books
New episodes: Now and then
Typical length: 42 min
Latest episode: 15 Sep 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1589782338
Rights: Copyright Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation

RSS feed Apple Podcasts

More English arts & books

Take it with you

The Melo app keeps playing with the screen off, works in the car and on your watch, wakes you to your station, and browses the whole catalogue offline. Free, no ads, no account.