SPEAKER_15: Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at iXcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters iXcel.com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything. Your products, content you create, and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace.com slash invisible for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Since 2002, the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation has worked to remedy the egregious omission of women from the popular history of architecture. They accomplished this through original research, creating websites, making short films, and now producing audio documentaries. Their podcast, New Angle Voice, highlights the lives and careers of the pioneering women of American architecture. And we're delighted to present this story about one of the driving forces in the design of the post-war modern skyscraper, Natalie DeBlois.
SPEAKER_05: What is your name, please? My name is Natalie DeBlois.
SPEAKER_05: What is your name, please? My name is Natalie DeBlois.
SPEAKER_05: What is your name, please? My name is Natalie DeBlois.
SPEAKER_05: Two of these people are imposters. Only one of them is real and is the only one sworn to tell the truth. And here is our host, Bud Collier. Welcome to New Angle Voice. I'm your host, Cynthia Krakauer.
SPEAKER_12: On today's episode, Natalie DeBlois, who we just heard in a clip from her 1958 appearance on the popular quiz show, To Tell the Truth. Who was Natalie DeBlois? She was an architect of great accomplishment. She was a team of promise-making criminologists and neuro 586's Dr. to tell the truth. Who was Natalie DeBlois? She was an architect of great accomplishment. But she came into the field at a time when few women were in the profession.
SPEAKER_12: Men were returning from war, the economy was booming, but women? They were often relegated to jobs within the pink collar sector and the secretarial pool. This is the world that Natalie entered. During her early days at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, she had four children and managed to retain her job. This might seem like an obvious fact by today's standards, but we have to remember, job security for new mothers couldn't be assumed for women during this time. It's thought that Natalie was the first woman at the firm to be given maternity leave. But it was not an easy road, and as her son reflected, she was no housewife. While she was helping build the modern skyline of Park Avenue, the life she returned home to at night was not as glamorous. It was hard, and she often struggled, proving once again that it's hard for women to balance a successful professional career and raise a family. It was then, and still is today. As an architect, Natalie loved systems, understanding how building components work together. For her, it wasn't just pretty buildings. She challenged the codes and questioned existing technologies. She handled design challenges with an elegant simplicity that belied their complexity. And like the buildings she designed, there was a certain complexity to Natalie herself. She was a woman of resilient beauty, inspiring yet distant, ahead of her time. Often overshadowed by her male counterparts, we hope to shed light on her life's work and her legacy in this episode, Natalie DeBlois, To Tell the Truth.
SPEAKER_04: All right, panel, will you follow along with your copies of this affidavit? I, Natalie DeBlois, am a registered architect and member of the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects. I am employed as a senior designer and an associate in the architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, and have worked as a senior designer on buildings both here and abroad, including two American consulates in Germany and one of the Hilton chain of international hotels. I am currently working as a senior designer on the new Block Square 50-story high Union Carbide building, now under construction in New York. I am married and the mother of four children, signed Natalie DeBlois.
SPEAKER_09: Today is March 12, 2002, and I'm with Natalie DuBois in her home in West Hartford, Connecticut. We are here together to document in Natalie's own words highlights of her remarkable 40-plus years career. 40. Yeah, from beginning to end.
SPEAKER_08: Actually, it's closer to 50. Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_09: Much of this career has passed without the recognition it was due. This oral history is intended to shed light on what is not yet public information. Fill gaps in the historical record and set the record straight.
SPEAKER_18: Natalie DuBois is an underknown architect who practiced in the middle of the 20th century. She was a senior designer at Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill. She contributed to many of the buildings that established what we now think of as the iconic image of American modern architecture in the middle of the 20th century. I'm Gabrielle Esperdy. I am an architectural and urban historian. I'm a professor of architecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, and I am the author of the Natalie DuBois profile in the Pioneering Women of American Architecture Project.
SPEAKER_09: You said that you knew you wanted to be an architect when you were 10 or 11 years old.
SPEAKER_08: How did I know? I liked buildings and houses and plants. I went to the 1939 World's Fair.
SPEAKER_04: It's the dawn of a new day.
SPEAKER_08: I saw modern buildings, and that impressed me enormously. My father made it clear to me that architecture was a profession where there were only very few women, and he cut out articles in the newspapers and showed me these things. But that had no effect on me. I had other things to worry about. Making these decisions that I had to make was a difficult thing for me, but I made them. Little by little, I got to know more about what was going on in the architectural world.
SPEAKER_09: Morris Ketchum's office, what kind of work did they do?
SPEAKER_08: Morris Ketchum had done two spectacular modern shops. They were some of the earliest modern architecture that was built in New York City. I was just so pleased that I was offered a job at Ketchum's because they were modern architects, and that really pleased me. That was important. I started working right after college that winter of January 1944. We were sort of an intimate group. It was a very small firm, three young people, her and a couple of men, would hang out together.
SPEAKER_03: It was socialized outside of the office.
SPEAKER_08: One of the fellows used to take me out dancing to hear Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey and wherever they were playing.
SPEAKER_05: Columbia offers you Benny Goodman and his orchestra, coming to you from the Manhattan
SPEAKER_03: Room in the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City. At some point, one of the guys was enamored with Natalie and upset that she was not acknowledging his advances. And he went to the partner of the firm and told him this and said, I can't work with her. She has to leave because she won't accept my advances.
SPEAKER_08: Mr. Ketchum asked me to come over to his office and he told me I would have to leave.
SPEAKER_03: So the partner of the firm fired her. Fired her. Amazing. And Mr. Ketchum complied.
SPEAKER_08: This was really the first shot of what happened in the outside world with women. He wrote me this letter and said, due to circumstances beyond his control, she has to leave. He said, I'll call up Louis Skidmore, who's down on the ninth or tenth floor and see if he has a place for us. So he picked up the phone and called up Louis Skidmore and said he was going to send somebody down to see him.
SPEAKER_03: He made that contact and that's how she ended up at Skidmore. So they did hire her. And then I think even at Skidmore, there were stories that she told about just being, you know, not part of the club. You know, it was a boys club. I'm Audrey Matlock, principal and owner of Audrey Matlock Architect in New York. She never thought about it really. I think she thought about the work. She was only interested in the work, so she wasn't looking for advancement or accolades. There were instances where the male partners and clients were having a meeting and she was in the meeting because she had all the information because she was the one actually doing the work. And then when it was time for lunch, they were going to some men's club or other. And Louis Skidmore looks at her and says, hey, make sure you're back here at two when we're back from lunch. And they walked out without her. And she said she just, you know, went in the bathroom and cried. And she took these things very personally because she was so serious about her work and she put everything she had into it. And so these kinds of slights were very painful to her. I first met Natalie when I was working at Skidmore, Owens & Merrill back in the late 80s. Natalie was invited to come and give a lecture. I had been alerted beforehand that I definitely had to make an effort to get to know her. After her talk, I introduced myself to her and she stepped back from me, looked me head to toe and said, oh, are you in interiors? I was just about crestfallen. No, how can you say that? No, no, no. I'm an architect. Anyway, we struck up a conversation and hit it off. And that kind of started our friendship.
SPEAKER_16: Speaking as a person somewhat younger than she is, but as a person who entered the job market in the 60s, which is different from her experience, it was probably worse. Then were the bosses and we did what we were told. We knew who the boss was. We knew what the situation was. And I imagine she did too. In 56, I had another child and Gordon told me, don't show up at that opening ceremony
SPEAKER_08: if you haven't had your baby yet. Why did he say that?
SPEAKER_09: Were you an embarrassment to the men? Obviously.
SPEAKER_16: People were somehow embarrassed by pregnant women. What's embarrassing? I don't know. Maybe the idea that you had sex with somebody. Men just didn't think very hard. She had an eminent position in the firm because she was a senior designer or whatever they called it. So clearly everybody respected her ability, but it didn't mean that they wanted to hear her speak at a meeting. I don't know whether they did. I don't know whether she spoke up, but it wouldn't have meant that they were deeply interested in hearing what this girl had to say. And we were known as girls for a very long time. And I'm sure they spoke of her as a girl, even if she was 50 years old. It was just the way people spoke. My name is Carol Krinsky. I'm a professor of art and architectural history at New York University, where I have been teaching since 1965. I wrote a book about Gordon Bunshaft, who was the person who was supervising Natalie DeBois. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill was established between the two world wars by Louis Skidmore and Nathaniel Owings. After the Second World War, they got the commission to do Lever House. I think that put Skidmore, Owings & Merrill on the map. These young modern hotshots, they all read Le Corbusier. And so they wanted these pristine, prismatic buildings. And then they looked at Mies van der Rohe, who had actually come to the USA. They knew that Mies was building in glass in Chicago before some of these buildings went up in New York. And they didn't want to look as if their buildings were being left behind. So we get what we get. It's sort of anti the interwar generation of modernists and charging forward. We're younger, we're more progressive and so forth. And you can persuade corporate officials that they need a new style of architecture. And then other people jump on the bandwagon. The first one was, of course, Lever House on Park Avenue. And it was a shock to everyone. I can remember the brick-faced buildings that were there with limestone on the lower levels. There were one or two left and a kind of nothing looking tan brick above. They were apartment hotels. They were real hotels. They were apartment houses of a normal kind. And they were office buildings. And they were boring. All of a sudden, Lever House appeared green with a lot of light around it. Oh my goodness, what's up there? Trees? Oh, once everybody saw Lever House, people went out there literally to see it. I remember reading Lewis Mumford, he wrote for The New Yorker, and he said taxi drivers would divert their customers to see this amazing new building. So it's not very surprising that when Union Carbide planned to move to Park Avenue, they too wanted a glass building. And then when Pepsi-Cola moved, and then when speculative office promoters moved to Park Avenue and got sites, they also wanted glass buildings. So we got what we have now.
SPEAKER_18: Natalie's contribution to buildings like Lever House, PepsiCo, Union Carbide, those changed the face of Park Avenue in a way that we simply don't understand it now. When we walk up and down Park Avenue today, we don't have a sense of how much it changed our image of the urban landscape. Because now we see one tower after another after another. And it looked very different, certainly immediately after the war. The Lever House, it really was a revelation to people. It's why Park Avenue was featured in all of these movies. One that I've come across called The Best of Everything. It's a 20th Century Fox picture from 1959. It's about a bunch of young career gals who come to New York to make their way. And one of the main characters ends up getting a job in the Seagram building, but the Lever House is always in the background. In fact, the one thing I discovered that I hadn't realized is that one of Cindy Sherman's most famous photographs of her movie still series, she is playing the main character in this movie. In fact, I realized, oh, that's the Cindy Sherman picture and the Lever House is in the background. It is interesting to think about Natalie's work in New York in the 50s and 60s participating in the design of these now iconic corporate office towers as a woman. Obviously, there were a lot of women in all of those buildings. They were just in the secretarial pool. Two of my girls went off and got married.
SPEAKER_16: You're one of the replacements. If you pass the test, that is. Accuracy counts.
SPEAKER_18: Go. They were in these administrative positions, not occupying the corner office as it were. And it's interesting to think about Natalie herself not occupying the corner office of SOM. There is a certain irony in Natalie's role as a woman at that moment, but it's also important to note it is a moment when women were beginning to more explicitly assert an influence on the built environment. If you think that Natalie is working on these buildings at exactly the same moment that Jane Jacobs is challenging notions of modernist urban planning, that Ada Louise Huxtable is the New York Times first architecture critic and who is bringing conversations about architecture into a popular conversation. It's really kind of interesting to put her in that moment.
SPEAKER_09: One of the things you did do was Pepsi Cola. Oh yeah. That beautiful little building. It has been called in the literature almost without exception as an elegant jewel box. Pepsi Cola hired us.
SPEAKER_08: Bob Cutler was the administrative officer. He was a friend of Mr. Steele who was the president of Pepsi Cola, was married to Joan Crawford.
SPEAKER_18: The dynamics of the changing economy after World War II, the boom in the construction of corporate office towers. It's important to note that that kind of separation of the front office and the administrative arm of any given corporation had already been separated from the manufacturing sites. That had already happened before World War II, but it certainly continues apace in the post-war period. And so you have buildings like PepsiCo, Union Carbide, Lever Brothers who understand that they need a kind of administrative corporate presence in the commercial heart of the country. And so yeah, those corporate towers really do become a symbol of the transformation of the American economy.
SPEAKER_09: By 1961, let's take stock for just a minute, you had four young children and a career at SOM, New York, but you moved to Chicago.
SPEAKER_08: Well, I divorced my husband too.
SPEAKER_09: Oh, that's not in my notes, but okay, that really was a banner year for you.
SPEAKER_09: How did you keep all of this in balance, your family and your profession?
SPEAKER_08: I didn't really keep it in balance. I had continual problems with my husband.
SPEAKER_09: Because you were so devoted to your practice?
SPEAKER_08: No, because he was an alcoholic and it was difficult.
SPEAKER_17: Our family history, it's difficult to talk about. She obviously worked incredibly hard and as a result, she was no housewife. My name's Robert DeBlois. I'm the son of Natalie DeBlois. Natalie, she did not communicate a lot with us. She never talked about her work. When she came home, we would have dinner, we'd listen to the radio. Neither of my parents would talk to us much. My dad, usually when he came home, he was an alcoholic. There were a couple of very intense traumatic incidents that happened. It was about the time of their divorce. And after that, the next thing I know, we had moved out of the house.
SPEAKER_08: My former husband remarried and was living in Chicago and his new wife wanted to help take care of the children. I visited in Chicago and I stopped in the office of Skidmore, Mr. Merrill. Bruce Graham said he'd like me to come work there and he said, we'll make you an associate partner. So I told Gordon and Gordon told me, if you want to go to the Chicago office, that's fine. But I want to tell you three things. One is, you'll never get along with Bruce Graham, two, you'll never be made a partner. Basically, his theory was there's not going to be any women partners ever. And thirdly, he said, you can always come back to New York if you'd like to. So I decided to go. So that's why I picked up my kids, moved my family to Chicago and I started working for Bruce. The first project I worked on was the Equitable Building. We also worked on a bank building for St. Joseph Valley Bank. Margaret McCurry was in charge of the interiors. I worked with Margaret on several jobs. That was a lot of fun.
SPEAKER_06: Some women were ahead of their times and Natalie would certainly be one of them. Amazing to raise four boys and do the demands of Skidmore. I mean, we never left there until midnight when there was a project going. That was just automatic. You were just there. I'm Margaret McCurry. I'm a partner in Tigerman McCurry Architects. Before that, I was at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill for 11 years. And Natalie was there during the time I was. I worked on one project with her, the St. Joseph Valley Bank.
SPEAKER_06: Well, she was part of the SOM tradition. The 11 years I spent there was like being in graduate school, really. I learned proportion and detailing and things that were, I think, important in creating spaces that are harmonious and beautiful. That was part of her legacy, too, that she was of that ilk.
SPEAKER_02: My city, Chicago. So we go to the park often for joy and for beauty. And tonight, I never saw as much ugliness and stupidity and brutality. There have been some demonstrations at this early hour in downtown Chicago's Grant Park.
SPEAKER_04: We heard a moment ago that tear gas has been used.
SPEAKER_00: The 60s was quite a defining moment in American history.
SPEAKER_09: It was a time of turmoil. The civil rights struggle was at the fore. Women's Lib found its voice. Vietnam, assassinations, student revolts. You must have been in Chicago in 1968 when the Democratic Convention was there and then the Chicago Seven trials that followed. The status quo was under attack from every quarter. It was under attack with my children, too.
SPEAKER_09: In what way?
SPEAKER_08: I don't know. That day of the civil rights movement, there was a picture of Daley walking down the street
SPEAKER_08: and my kids trailing him. Why? That was a question you didn't have an answer for.
SPEAKER_17: Chicago in the 60s was just a strange and difficult time. I would go out in the park and I wasn't involved in any of it, but I was observing all of it. And as far as Natalie is concerned, she was obviously aware of this, but we never talked about it.
SPEAKER_09: With all of this turmoil going on in the 60s, it seems to me that it began to bear some fruit in the 70s in the women's movement. And you were very much apparent in promoting the status of women architects. That's right.
SPEAKER_18: Natalie leaves New York and goes to Chicago. Second wave feminism starts to happen and she backs into a kind of sideline of activism.
SPEAKER_07: Come and meet other female architects regarding Coalition. 930 a.m. January 12, 1974. Office of Gertrude Lemke-Kirbys, 664 North Michigan, Chicago, Illinois. All invited. Gertrude sent out a postcard. It invited all women architects to a meeting at her office. It was basically a room. Maybe it was 15 by 15. I'm Carol Ross Barney. I'm an architect in Chicago. Natalie DeBlois was my friend and my mentor. I've been practicing in Chicago my entire career. I came here after I graduated from the University of Illinois in Urbana in 1971. I started working for Holabird and Root. I was there when Natalie and Gertrude Kirbys decided to cope women together in Chicago. That was the formation of CWA, Chicago Women in Architecture. I first met her at that first meeting. I had been working at Holabird for a while. There were no other women, so I went. I was really curious. There were probably less than two dozen, maybe a dozen women at this meeting. I actually knew nothing about Natalie when she walked into the room. She walked in with a small group. It couldn't have been more than two or three women. And she was impressive. She was a very impressive person, always. Very handsome, kind of mysterious.
SPEAKER_18: She didn't realize how important it was to have a social and political network of women until all of these architects got together and just started sharing their stories. It was almost as if, I don't want to be too dramatic, but it was like almost the dam broke and she started to realize, wow, it was really tough what we did and wow, that really happened to me.
SPEAKER_07: There was a question about here we are all alone in these jobs. Where do we go? And so it was a real eye-opener for me. We had a call to action and it was to create equality and make women's work better known. We started an organization out of that discussion. We decided that we wanted to make the work of women architects better known. So we started planning an exhibit and it basically uncovered what Chicago women were doing then. Architecture shows were really popular then and so we thought we were doing a great service. At this point, Susanna Torre also had completed her book, Women in American Architecture, and Natalie was a major figure in that publication. So yes, I mean, she and Gertrude Karabis, they were the leaders of both what was shown, what was exhibited, and spiritually what we were doing.
SPEAKER_09: Well I have seen a lot of informal papers calling people to meetings and often it would be penciled up in the corner, Supper at Natalie's.
SPEAKER_08: I remember Carol Barning was 25 and I was 50. I remember her climbing up the stairs and she'd always come to the meetings. And there were a group of us that were very, very close and it was very meaningful.
SPEAKER_07: We were really good friends at this point when she quit Skidmore.
SPEAKER_06: Unfortunately I think after both of us left, she saw some of the other partners moving into postmodernism and that would not have been her thing at all. Tides change in fortunes and the pendulum swings and if that world changes then you hop off and hop into another one. You know, she was a pragmatist. University of Texas, I went down there and started teaching.
SPEAKER_08: I taught for 13 years, 80 to 93.
SPEAKER_14: My name is John Newman. I'm an architect. I went to the University of Texas at Austin and I had Natalie as a professor there. That was in 1983. The University of Texas has this amazing Paul Kray design architecture building. At the time that I took studio from Natalie, the architecture building was under renovation. So we were in an abandoned elementary school. Wood frame building with 14 foot ceilings and toilets that were about 10 inches tall. You could spray paint on the floor and nobody cared because they were going to tear it down next year anyway. The studio was messy. Nothing was precious and it was a really great workshop environment. You could just fuss around and make stuff and tear stuff up and put it back together. She would talk to you about really technical issues about how that doesn't meet the code or that doesn't meet the program or that doesn't meet the zoning. There was a lot of that and she would encourage you to challenge the code. Natalie was sort of there at the beginning of the post-war modernizations of New York City zoning and building codes. She talked about riding her bike around New York City after work, going up to the code committee meetings and she would go work on building code for a couple of hours and then she would meet Marcel Breuer for drinks. The active New York architects from the 50s and 60s would be at Brosery at 9 o'clock in the evening and she would drop in and it would be all these people and that's just who she hung out with at the end of the day.
SPEAKER_12:
SPEAKER_13: My last year of my master's program I took Natalie Dubois tall building studio at UT. As I was coming through the program that was the studio I wanted to go see every year because it was spectacular. The idea of shaping the vertical world of our urban life was just fascinating to me. I'm Peter Dixon. I'm a senior partner at Profit, a branding and innovation firm. I'm this firm's chief creative officer and had the good fortune of being Natalie's student at the University of Texas in 1986 in her tall building studio. Natalie was always available for a conversation about practice and working. She actually was again instrumental in getting me connected to my first internship in New York City and then moved to SOM where Natalie had made her fame and fortune and became part of this UT group of architects working at SOM. She was the only woman in the room many times and I think it toughened her up. She had to earn her respect and I think it carried through the rest of her time. You know, the respect that she brought into the classroom, the respect that everyone had for her knowledge was just evident. You know, to see her she was slight physically but she was wiry and she was tough. She was very direct and she didn't try to sugarcoat it. Judgmental in a good way as any critic should be. Usefully judgmental. There was heart below it all. The fact that she was doing such important, powerful, iconic work and always be seen as the woman carrying Gordon's bag, so to speak, must have been tough. I don't think she has resentment about that. I think she just had this idea of resignation. That's the way it was. No, I can't imagine how that is but I do think the fact that there are people like Natalie in the canon of architecture. I think there's a sensitivity that came through, you think about the Pepsi-Cola building and its refinement and detail. I think about that kind of work has a place in architecture and in the canon that would be less if she had not been around.
SPEAKER_03: She talked about her students incessantly. At Skidmore I was in charge of doing all the hiring of the designers for a number of years, most of the time that I was there. And a lot of UT Austin kids came through looking for jobs and they were great. I loved these kids and they'd all been taught by Natalie. She was tough but she was thorough, she was demanding and people loved her. She was idolized.
SPEAKER_17: As she got older she got a little more communicative. She would talk about her seminar, her classes there and her students who she loved. The things that happened to her when the Skidmore thing kind of fell apart, she was never made a partner. She didn't hold a grudge, she just went down and started her life over again. And it turned out to be an incredible experience for her.
SPEAKER_15: More on the life and times of Natalie DeBlois after this. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need.
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SPEAKER_07: To be Natalie's friend, you could not have a thin skin. She was very blunt. We had to be ready for comments that were like, you know, I think you should do this or this isn't that good or whatever. But I found her quite devoted as a friend. And I know there was a group of us who did. She thought mentoring women and Chicago women in architecture were among the most important things she did. They were always important to her. I don't know why she became my friend, why she picked me, but I'm glad she did. It was really an important friendship. My kids hated her because she'd tell them what to do too. She used to come into the house and she'd tell them what to do. One time I picked her up at O'Hare and she was wearing a pair of black pants and a raincoat. I remember this distinctly because I said, where's your luggage? And she opened up the raincoat and she had a toothbrush in the inside pocket. She said, here. And so, yeah, so she'd stay with us and then she would rule the roost. Everything about Natalie was quite surprising. She was very odd. She was just odd, just wonderfully odd. But you know, to accomplish what she did, I think you would have to be that extraordinary. How do you describe people who are just so different? Her attitude, what she would tolerate, what she wouldn't tolerate, what she saw. She had great eyes. I'd take her out to a job site I was working on at some point. She'd see stuff about my work that I hadn't seen. And it was just really great.
SPEAKER_03: I remember the last time I saw her was here in New York City. Very, very cold day. She had her woolen tights on and her dress and her beautiful tweed coat. And we walked around and looked at buildings in the cold afternoon, stopped in for a glass of wine every once in a while, and then went on to look at some more buildings.
SPEAKER_07: After her sister died and her house was sold and she wasn't teaching anymore, she moved back to Chicago. She took the Great Books course at the University of Chicago. She continued to take French courses. She called the Chicago Public Library her club. But she'd be all over the city. I think that's why she came back here, is because there was so much that interested her and that was accessible for her. She slowed down a bit and eventually she bought a different apartment in the Mies van der Rohe building in Hyde Park. And that's where she was until she died. She's still super active, but her health started to get a little bit dicier. She fell one winter and broke her hip. That slowed her down somewhat, but she did recover. I mean, she eventually was running around again. She was 90 already. And she received a diagnosis. This time it was uterine cancer. She took some chemo and she took some therapies, but then she decided it just wasn't worth it. And so Patrick, her son, moved into her apartment and cared for her. And that's where she died, July 2013. It wasn't unexpected, but I wasn't ready for it.
SPEAKER_17: There was a story once. She was going around giving speeches. After the speech, a student came up to her and said, I'm from Chicago. And when I was a high school student in Chicago, I was taking the bus one day and we were going across the Chicago River and this kid came up to me and told me that his mother designed that building. And this woman said, yeah, and that's when I decided I wanted to be an architect, that a woman could be an architect. And I remember that incident. I saw this girl on the bus and just started chatting to her. And as we went by the Ecuador building, I said, oh yeah, by the way, my mother designed that building. I take great pride and I would always talk about actually both my parents. It's like Natalie had two sides. Well, not two sides, she had a million sides. Along with the bad, inspiration isn't exactly the word, but just awe at her accomplishment. I've never lost that. I'm always amazed that I knew these people or that somehow I came from them.
SPEAKER_00: I now open the public hearing on this application in early 2018, JP Morgan announced they would take advantage of the East Midtown rezoning project passed in 2017 by rebuilding their headquarters at 270 Park Avenue.
SPEAKER_18: 270 Park, formerly the Union Carbide building, which of course had been occupied by JP Morgan Chase. It's always fascinating to watch buildings being demolished. But in that case, it was just sort of horrifying again for complex reasons. There were many debates about the importance of its preservation because it was designed by Natalie DeBlois. To me, the most egregious dimension of its demolition was that it was unnecessary. And in 2020, as we like to say, the greenest building is the one that's standing. The idea of taking down a building of that scale only to replace it with something that is even bigger, it just, it seems grotesque. You're going to put a 52-story skyscraper into a dumpster that's not sustainable.
SPEAKER_10: It is the largest on-purpose demolition of any building in the world. We can't do that anymore. My name is Liz White-Takus and I'm the executive director of Docomomo US. At the end of the Bloomberg administration, he gave what we all said was a gift to the developers, which was to rezone East Midtown. Developers could transfer air rights, not just to adjacent properties, but throughout the district and build taller buildings. When we found out that Chase wanted to tear down a 52-story skyscraper, Docomomo really stepped into action. The Landmarks Preservation Commission said that it was eligible to be a landmark. We went to Landmarks and said, okay, now is the time. Like you've said, this is significant. Let's landmark this building and protect it. And the response we received was they did not believe that there was enough support. And I think one of the other responses from Landmarks that really irked preservationists was that Landmarks had already designated a number of buildings by SOM on Park Avenue and that Natalie had another building, the Pepsi-Cola building on Park Avenue, and that was already designated. So what? We don't need another building designed by Gordon Bunshaf and Natalie DeBois. Everyone talks about Natalie being a designer of skyscrapers. I mean, Pepsi-Cola is wonderful. It's a jewel box. It's 10 stories. We're talking about a 52-story skyscraper. And the suggestion from Landmarks that we need to preserve buildings like an architectural petting zoo is just ridiculous. And if there was one building to tell people a story of Natalie in New York City and her work with SOM, I really think it was 270 Park Avenue.
SPEAKER_11: My name is Julia Murphy. I'm a principal at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and I was part of a group of women who in 2008 started the SOM Women's Initiative. I started at SOM in 2008, and I think that time was interesting because there had been women partners in the past at the firm. It was a time when there were no women partners. That was a little shocking to me, I think. And together with a number of colleagues who were probably in the same level of seniority, we were all young in our careers, we're complaining at a bar about how we thought that there was a gender imbalance in the leadership. And we decided to revive a group that actually had been led by one of the notable women partners, Marilyn Taylor, who had left the firm to be the dean of the University of Pennsylvania. And it really kind of grew out of kvetching to saying, what can we do for ourselves? What can we do for the office to try to make inroads into this kind of glaring situation? The idea that there had been women who were exceptional here in our own microcosm of the history of modern architecture was certainly something that was notable, remarkable, and I think a point of inspiration. I think about our workplace. Ten years ago, it seemed like a great idea to give women with young children laptops because they might have to go home and they might need to work later and they shouldn't be penalized for that. Now we're in a place where currently we come to the office two days a week and in the future we think we're going to be here three days a week. So so much flexibility, especially for people who might have more complex home situations than I could have ever dreamt of just a mere decade ago.
SPEAKER_17: To me, obviously, her professional life and her personal life were separate. And I know what it's like to work a full-time job. It's really hard to come home from that and relate to your children in a deep and meaningful way. I believe she was aware of the effect our lives had on us, though she wouldn't let it affect her professional life. I think she felt she'd pushed things that worked out differently. I do, but you know, things don't always work out the way you want them to. When I say she was unfeeling, I mean, we didn't talk about feelings and stuff like that, but I certainly believe she had them and just didn't know how to express them as well as some people do or as some people want to.
SPEAKER_03: She was very persistent, but I think her persistence was admirable. She is what I call a real architect, not an architect that makes cool forms on the computer, not an architect that sees everything through the lens of theory, but an architect who wants to build, wants to build well and wants to learn and build more and build better and to do everything. The thing that makes me happiest is to see that she's now being recognized for her real role. Young people are learning about her in a very different way. We didn't even learn about her, to be honest. I mean, I learned about her because I knew some people at Skidmore who really admired her and they told me about her. I'm just so glad that she now is someone to look up to for men and women and that her true accomplishments are being known. And I think that's only going to grow. That is the thing I'm happiest about. I mean, having lost her, which was the real gift. But this, I think, is a gift to all of us.
SPEAKER_17: Modernism. She obviously played a big role in creating it. You know, you can talk about Mies. You can talk about Bauhaus. And she obviously played a very big role in disseminating it and making it accessible to everybody. When I see pictures of the Lever House or Connecticut General, she didn't set out to build something beautiful. She set out to build something that worked. And because of her aesthetic qualities, she made something beautiful. To me, that was the great essence of Natalie. Her practicality somehow meshed with some aesthetic that was amazing.
SPEAKER_12: Special thanks to Gabriel Esperdie, Audrey Matlock, Carol Krinsky, Carol Ross Barney, Margaret McCurry, Peter Dixon, John Newman, Liz Witekas, Julia Murphy, and Robert DeBlois. The archival audio of Natalie DeBlois, interviewed by Betty Blum, is from the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago Architects' oral history project. Thank you to Nathaniel Parks, director of the Art Institute of Chicago Archives, for your help with this recording. This podcast is produced by Brandy Howell with editorial advising from Alexandra Lang. Special thanks to Matt Alvarez and Iowa Public Radio for their production assistance. New Angle Voice is brought to you by the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation with support from Miller Knoll and SOM. If you missed our first episode, Finding Julia Morgan, be sure to give a listen wherever you find your podcasts. And if you like this episode, please leave a review and share with a friend. We will be back in March with more exciting episodes, so stay tuned for more. Until then, I'm your host, Cynthia Krakauer. Thank you for listening.
SPEAKER_15: New Angle Voice has four more amazing episodes this season. Go subscribe and listen to them all. Ninety-nine percent invisible is Delaney Hall, Kurt Kolstad, Martin Gonzalez, Swan Rial, Emmett Fitzgerald, Vivian Lay, Joe Rosenberg, Chris Berube, Christopher Johnson, Masha Medan, Jason De Leon, Sofia Klatsker, and me, Roman Mars. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family. Now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me, at Roman Mars, on the show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram and Reddit too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love, as well as every past episode of 99pi at 99pi.org.
SPEAKER_01: I'm Chris Berube.
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SPEAKER_07: Taking care of.
