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 and triumphs of six leading women who have personified achievement in a primarily male dominated field.
New Angle: Voice
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Podcast Overview
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 and triumphs of six leading women who have personified achievement in a primarily male dominated field.
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Publishing Since
10/6/2021
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Recent Episodes
February 27, 2026
Lutah Maria Riggs Designs the American Riviera
<p dir="ltr">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, <strong>Lutah</strong>.</p> <p dir="ltr">I'm your host, <strong>Alexandra Lange</strong>. Welcome to the latest episode of <strong>New Angle: Voice</strong> on the Ohio-born and California-bred architect <strong>Lutah Maria Riggs</strong>.</p> <p dir="ltr">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 Berkeley by selling newspapers. Like <strong>Julia Morgan</strong> before her, she gained entry to the university's Beaux Arts influenced architecture program – one of only four women in her class. </p> <p dir="ltr">Also like Morgan, she was talented enough to capture the interest and mentorship of the head of the program, John Galen Howard, and a series of other older male architects who helped her launch her career and chaperoned her travel to Mexico, Spain, and other countries whose architecture was highly influential in California in the 1920s. Riggs's most famous public project, the Lobero Theater in downtown Santa Barbara, was directly influenced by a serendipitous stop in Spain.</p> <p dir="ltr">Traveling on her own, Riggs took advantage of the network of women's hotels and clubs available in those days. She was always up for a dance, and was even friends with Martha Graham when the modern dance pioneer spent time in Santa Barbara. </p> <p dir="ltr">Her work has helped define the indoor-outdoor, casual, one-story style that is most identified with southern California today. That has made her houses highly prized for their luxurious materials, swoon-worthy views, and easy living. Unlike many architects who focused on public commissions, many of her houses are still extant, and the real estate agents know what they've got. Zoe Saldana lives in a Lutah today, and architecture enthusiast Ellen DeGeneres has in the past. Riggs – who lived until the 1980s – continues to be one of Santa Barbara's most celebrated architects. </p> <p dir="ltr">Join us on the Gold Coast for <strong>"Lutah Maria Riggs Designs the American Riviera" </strong></p> <p><strong>___<br /></strong></p> <p dir="ltr">Special thanks in this episode to Volker Welter, Melinda Gandara, Gretchen Lieff, Nicole Hernandez, Cristal Clarke, Dawn Ziemer, and Krishnaprana and Vrajaprana at the Vedanta Center in Santa Barbara. </p> <p dir="ltr">The archival recordings of Lutah Maria Riggs are from her collection at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara.</p> <p dir="ltr">This podcast is brought to you by the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation and produced by Brandi Howell. </p> <p><strong> </strong></p> <p dir="ltr"> </p> <p><strong id= "docs-internal-guid-83253b08-7fff-2290-98f7-8db0c5fa215a"><br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /></strong></p>
August 22, 2025
Not Only Survive, but Flourish: The Story of WSPA
<p>Hello, this is <strong>New Angle: Voice</strong>, the podcast about Pioneering Women in American Architecture brought to you by the <strong>Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation</strong>. I’m your new host, <strong>Alexandra Lange</strong>.</p> <p>Our latest episode describes the creation and experience of the <strong>Women’s School of Planning and Architecture</strong>, 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 question, How did architecture meet the feminist movement in the 1970s?</p> <p>WSPA was the brainchild of seven women, <strong>Leslie Kanes Weisman, Phyllis Birkby, Katrin Adam, Bobbie Sue Hood, Ellen Perry Berkeley, Marie Kennedy, and Joan Forrester Sprague</strong>. These women represented a mix of academic, professional, and practical experience. What they wanted to create was an educational curriculum, by women and for women, that freed architecture from the hierarchies of existing schools and practice. </p> <p>At their workshops, held on a succession of college campuses, starting with St. Joseph’s College in Biddeford, Maine, everyone was a student and everyone was a teacher. No one was passive. You could learn woodworking in the morning and feminist theory in the afternoon, and then let loose and make candy houses in the evening. Childcare was free, tuition was minimal, and the locations were scattered throughout the country, making it easy for interested parties to attend.</p> <p>For many of the participants, it was their first experience of being the majority gender in a design classroom or architecture office. Even decades later, they remembered the experience with happy tears. </p> <p>As with many collaborative enterprises with shoestring budgets, WSPA eventually dissipated, but not before giving a generation of women architects the tools (sometimes literally) to imagine a more communitarian world.</p> <p>It sounds like a club I would definitely have liked to be part of. Without further ado, here is “<strong>Not Only Survive, but Flourish: The Story of WSPA</strong>.”</p> <p>__</p> <p dir="ltr">Special thanks in this episode to Leslie Kanes Wisemen, Katrin Adam, Cathy Simon, and Paulett Taggart. And to the Smith College Special Collections, which houses all of the WSPA archives. You can see some incredible photos from this collection, including the Building Charades and Architecture Cakes, on our Instagram page at NewAngleVoice</p> <p dir="ltr">This podcast is brought to you by the <strong>Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation</strong> and produced by <strong>Brandi Howell</strong>. </p> <p dir="ltr">You can find other episodes of New Angle: Voice wherever you find your podcasts. And if you liked this episode, please leave a review and share with a friend. </p> <p> </p>
October 8, 2024
Catherine Bauer Wurster: A Thoroughly Modern Woman
<p dir="ltr">Welcome to New Angle Voice: I’m your bi-coastal architect and host, Cynthia Phifer<br /> Kracauer.</p> <p dir="ltr">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 : <em>Modern Housing</em>. </p> <p dir="ltr">Her glamour and charismatic presence endeared her to trade unionists, labor leaders, and politicians, including five presidents—who she tried to turn to her vision of housing as a worthy responsibility of the government—sexier and leftier during the Depression. Her arguments were a harder sell in the red scare fifties and ran into a dreary deadlock in the suburban sixties, as she later wrote from her west coast stronghold at the University of California, Berkeley. In the Bay Area she developed an academic career that also included a husband, a daughter, and a house on the bay – all surrounded by the nature she quickly grew to love. Her legacy lives on to this day, as even the latest of housing legislation echoes the progressive ideals she was advocating for in her prime. </p> <p dir="ltr">Hear now: <strong>Catherine Bauer Wurster: A Thoroughly Modern Woman</strong>.</p> <p dir="ltr"> </p> <p dir="ltr">Special thanks in this episode to Barbara Penner, Gwendolyn Wright, Sadie Super, Matthew Gordon Lasner, Katelin Penner, and Carol Galante. Archival recordings are from the UC Berkeley Bancroft Library. </p> <p dir="ltr">This podcast is produced by Brandi Howell, with editorial advising from Alexandra Lange.</p> <p dir="ltr"><strong>New Angle Voice</strong> is brought to you by the <strong>Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation</strong>. Funding for this podcast comes from the New York State Council on the Arts.</p> <p dir="ltr">You can find other episodes of New Angle: Voice wherever you find your podcasts. And if you liked this episode, please leave a review and share with a friend. </p> <p dir="ltr"> </p>
15 total episodes available with 1 transcripts
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