Architecture, Family Style – The Lives and Work of Sarah Harkness and Jean Fletcher

New Angle: Voice

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.