Natalie de Blois: To Tell the Truth

Roman Mars:
This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars.

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 accomplish 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 postwar modern skyscraper — Natalie de Blois.

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BUD COLLYER:
WHAT IS YOUR NAME PLEASE?

WOMAN:
MY NAME IS NATALIE DE BLOIS.

BUD COLLYER:
WHAT IS YOUR NAME PLEASE?

WOMAN:
MY NAME IS NATALIE DE BLOIS.

BUD COLLYER:
WHAT IS YOUR NAME PLEASE?

WOMAN:
MY NAME IS NATALIE DE BLOIS.

BUD COLLYER:
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 COLLYER.

Cynthia Kracauer:
Welcome to “New Angle: Voice.” I’m your host, Cynthia Kracauer. On today’s episode, Natalie de Blois, who we just heard in a clip from her 1958 appearance on the popular quiz show “To Tell the Truth.”

Cynthia Kracauer:
Who was Natalie de Blois? She was an architect of great accomplishment, but she came into the field at a time when few women were in the profession. 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.

Cynthia Kracauer:
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.

Cynthia Kracauer:
As an architect, Natalie loved systems, understanding how building components worked 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 de Blois: To Tell the Truth.”

Bud Collyer:
All right, panel, will you follow along with your copies of this affidavit? I, Natalie de Blois, 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 & 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 internet national 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 de Blois.

Betty Blum:
Today is March 12th, 2002. And I’m with Natalie de Blois, 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.

Natalie de Blois:
40.

Betty Blum:
From beginning to end.

Natalie de Blois:
Actually it’s closer to 50.

Betty Blum:
Oh. Okay. 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.

Gabrielle Esperdy:
Natalie De Blois is an under-known architect who practiced in the middle of the 20th century. She was a senior designer at Skidmore, Owings & 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.

Gabrielle Esperdy:
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 de Blois profile in the Pioneering Women of American Architecture Project.

Betty Blum:
You said that you knew you wanted to be an architect when you were 10 or 11 years old.

Natalie de Blois:
How did I know? I liked buildings, houses, and plans. I went to the 1939 World’s Fair.

[IT’S THE DAWN OF A NEW DAY. (SINGING)]

Natalie de Blois:
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. 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.

Betty Blum:
Morris Ketchum’s office. What kind of work did they do?

Natalie de Blois:
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 ’44. We were sort of an intimate group.

Audrey Matlock:
It was a very small firm. Three young people, her and a couple of men who’d hang out together. They would socialize outside of the office.

Natalie de Blois:
One of the fellows used to take me out dancing to hear Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey, and wherever they were playing.

ARCHIVAL CONCERT TAPE
[SWING FANS, COLUMBIA OFFERS YOU BENNY GOODMAN AND HIS ORCHESTRA, COMING TO YOU FROM THE MANHATTAN ROOM IN THE HOTEL PENNSYLVANIA IN NEW YORK CITY.]

Audrey Matlock:
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.”

Natalie de Blois:
Mr. Ketchum asked me to come over to his office, and he told me I would have to leave.

Audrey Matlock:
So the partner of the firm fired her. Fired her! Amazing.

Natalie de Blois:
And Mr. Ketcham complied. This was really the first shock 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 10th 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.

Audrey Matlock:
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 not part of the club. It was a boys club.

Audrey Matlock:
I’m Audrey Matlock. Principal and owner of Audrey Matlock Architect in New York.

Audrey Matlock:
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. 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 went in the bathroom and cried. She took these things very personally because she was so serious about her work and she put everything she had into it. And these kinds of slights were very painful to her.

Audrey Matlock:
I first met Natalie when I was working at Skidmore, Owings & 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?” And I just about … I was 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.

Carol Krinsky:
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 — men were our 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.

Natalie de Blois:
In 56, I had another child. And Gordon told me, “Don’t show up at that opening ceremony if you haven’t had your baby yet.”

Betty Blum:
Why did he say that? Were you an embarrassment to the men?

Natalie de Blois:
Obviously.

Carol Krinsky:
People were somehow embarrassed by pregnant women. What’s embarrassing? I don’t know. Maybe the idea that, “Ahhh, 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.

Carol Krinsky:
My name is Carol Krinsky. I’m a professor of art and architectural history at New York University, where I’ve been teaching since 1965. I wrote a book about Gordon Bunshaft, who was the person who was supervising Natalie de Blois.

Carol Krinsky:
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 charismatic 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.

Carol Krinsky:
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 a Lever House, people went out there literally to see it.

Carol Krinsky:
I remember reading Louis 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.

Audrey Matlock:
Natalie’s contribution to buildings like Lever House, PepsiCo, Union Carbide, those change 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 looks 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.

Audrey Matlock:
One that I’ve come across is 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 stills 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.

Audrey Matlock:
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.

VOICEOVER TAPE
[TWO OF MY GIRLS WENT OFF AND GOT MARRIED. YOU’RE ONE OF THE REPLACEMENTS, IF YOU PASS THE TEST THAT IS. ACCURACY COUNTS, GO.]

Audrey Matlock:
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 and 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 modern urban planning, that Ada Louis Huxtable is the New York Times first architecture critic, and who is bringing conversations about architecture into a popular conversation, it’s really interesting to put her in that moment.

Betty Blum:
One of the things you did do was PepsiCo. That beautiful little building.

Natalie de Blois:
Yeah.

Betty Blum:
It has been called in the literature, almost without exception, as an elegant jewel box.

Natalie de Blois:
PepsiCo hired us. Bob Cutler was the administrative officer. He was a friend of Mr. Steele, who was the president of PepsiCo, who was married to Joan Crawford.

Audrey Matlock:
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 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 a pace in the post war period. And so you have buildings like PepsiCo, Union Carbide, Lever Brothers, who understand that they need an 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.

Betty Blum:
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.

Natalie de Blois:
Well, I divorced my husband, too.

Betty Blum:
Oh, that’s not in my notes. But okay, that really was a banner year for you.

Natalie de Blois:
Yeah.

Betty Blum:
How did you keep all of this in balance? Your family and your profession.

Natalie de Blois:
I didn’t really keep it in balance (laughs). I had continual problems with my husband.

Betty Blum:
Because you were so devoted to your practice?

Natalie de Blois:
No, because he was an alcoholic. And it was difficult.

Robert de Blois:
Our family history, it’s difficult to talk about. She obviously worked incredibly hard. And as a result, she was no housewife.

Robert de Blois:
My name’s Robert de Blois. I’m the son of Natalie de Blois. Natalie, she did not communicate a lot with us. She never talked about her work. When she came home we would have dinner, would listen to the radio. Neither of my parents would talk to us much. My dad usually when he came home… and 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.

Natalie de Blois:
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, Owings & 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 McCury was in charge of the interiors. I worked with Margaret on several jobs. That was a lot of fun.

Margaret McCury:
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. We never left there until midnight when there was a project going. That’s just automatic. You were just there.

Margaret McCury:
I’m Margaret McCury. I’m a partner in Tigerman McCurry Architects. Before that I was at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill for 11 years, and Natalie was there during the time I was. I worked on one project with her, the St. Joe Valley Bank. 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. And that was part of her legacy too. That she was of that ilk.

ARCHIVAL TAPE
[NICE CITY, CHICAGO. SO WE GO TO THE PARK OFTEN FOR JOY AND FOR BEAUTY. AND I’VE NEVER SAW AS MUCH UGLINESS AND STUPIDITY AND BRUTALITY.]

[THERE HAVE BEEN SOME DEMONSTRATIONS AT THIS EARLY HOUR IN DOWNTOWN CHICAGO’S GRANT PARK. WE HEARD A MOMENT AGO THAT TEAR GAS HAS BEEN USED.]

Betty Blum:
The ’60s was quite a defining moment in American history. It was a time of turmoil. The civil rights struggle was at the fore. Women’s lib found its voice. Vietnam, assassinations, student rebels. 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.

Natalie de Blois:
Yeah. It was under attack with my children too.

Betty Blum:
In what way?

Natalie de Blois:
I don’t know. That day of the civil rights movement, there was a picture of Daley walking down the street and my kids trailing him. What were they doing downtown?

Betty Blum:
That was the question, you didn’t have an answer for it.

Natalie de Blois:
I didn’t have an answer.

Robert de Blois:
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.

Betty Blum:
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.

Natalie de Blois:
That’s right.

Gabrielle Esperdy:
Natalie leaves New York and goes to Chicago. Second wave feminism starts to happen. And she backs into a kind of sideline of activism.

Carol Ross Barney:
“Come and meet other female architects regarding coalition, 9:30 AM, January 12th, 1974. Office of Gertrude Lempp Kerbis, 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.

Carol Ross Barney:
I’m Carol Ross Barney. I’m an architect in Chicago. Natalie de Blois 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 & Root. I was there when Natalie and Gertrude Kerbis decided to call women together in Chicago. That was the formation of CWA, Chicago Women in Architecture.

Carol Ross Barney:
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.

Carol Ross Barney:
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, and 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.”

Gabrielle Esperdy:
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. And 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.

Gabrielle Esperdy:
At this point, Susana Torre also had completed her book “Women in American Architecture,” and Natalie was a major figure in that publication. So yes, she and Gertrude Kerbis, they were the leaders of both what was shown, what was exhibited, and spiritually, what we were doing.

Betty Blum:
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.”

Natalie de Blois:
Yeah, 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.

Carol Ross Barney:
We were really good friends at this point when she quit Skidmore.

Audrey Matlock:
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, and fortunes, and the pendulum swings. And if that world changes, then you hop off and hop into another one. She was a pragmatist.

Natalie de Blois:
University of Texas. I went down there and started teaching. I taught for 13 years, 80 to 93.

John Newman:
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.

John Newman:
The University of Texas has this amazing Paul Cray 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.

John Newman:
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 didn’t meet the zoning. There was a lot of that, and she would encourage you to challenge the code.

John Newman:
Natalie was there at the beginning of the postwar 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 hours, and then she would meet Marcel Broyer for drinks. The active New York architects from the ’50s and ’60s would be at Brasserie at nine 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.

Peter Dixon:
My last year of my master’s program, I took Natalie de Blois’ 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.

Peter Dixon:
I’m Peter Dixon. I’m a senior partner at Prophet, 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.

Peter Dixon:
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.

Peter Dixon:
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. The respect that she brought into the classroom, the respect that everyone had for her knowledge was just evident.

Peter Dixon:
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, but 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 and that’s the way it was.

Peter Dixon:
No, I can’t imagine how that is, but I do think the fact that there are people like Natalie in the cannon of architecture, I think there’s a sensitivity that came through when you think about the Pepsi-Cola building, and its refinement and detail. I think about that kind of work, it has a place in architecture and in the cannon that would be less if she had not been around.

Gabrielle Esperdy:
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.

Robert de Blois:
As she got older, she got a little more communicative and 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.

Roman Mars:
More on the life and times of Natalie de Blois, after this.

[BREAK]

Roman Mars:
Here again is “Natalie de Blois: To Tell the Truth” from “New Angle: Voice.”

Gabrielle Esperdy:
To be Natalie’s friend, you could not have a thin skin. She was very blunt. You had to be ready for comments that were like, “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’s 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.

Gabrielle Esperdy:
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. And one time I picked her up at O’Hare, and she was wearing a pair of black pants and 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.” So yeah, she’d stay with us, and then she would rule the roost.

Gabrielle Esperdy:
Everything about Natalie was quite surprising. She was very odd. Just odd. She was wonderfully odd. But 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.

Audrey Matlock:
I remember the last time I saw her was here in New York City. Very, very cold day. And 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.

Gabrielle Esperdy:
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, because there was so much that interested her and that was accessible for her.

Gabrielle Esperdy:
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 was 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. 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.

Robert de Blois:
There was a story once, she was going around giving speeches. After this 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 a 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 Equitable Building, I said, “Oh yeah, by the way, my mother designed that building.”

Robert de Blois:
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.

ARCHIVAL TAPE
[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.]

Cynthia Kracauer:
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 de Blois. 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 seems grotesque.

Liz Watykus:
You’re going to put a 52 story skyscraper into a dumpster. That’s not sustainable. It is the largest on purpose demolition of any building in the world. We can’t do that anymore.

Liz Watykus:
My name is Liz Watykus, and I’m the executive director of Docomomo US.

Liz Watykus:
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.

Liz Watykus:
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. 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.

Liz Watykus:
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 Benson and Natalie de Blois. Everyone talks about Natalie being a designer of skyscrapers. 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.

Julia Murphy:
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.

Julia Murphy:
I started at SOM in 2008, and I think that time is 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 — were 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 grew out of kvetching to saying, “What can we do for ourselves? What do for the office to try to make inroads into this kind of glaring situation?”

Julia Murphy:
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. 10 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 much flexibility, especially for people who might have more complex home situations than I could have ever dreamt of just a mere decade ago.

Robert de Blois:
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 wished things had worked out differently. I do, but things don’t always work out the way you want them to. When I say she was unfeeling, 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.

Gabrielle Esperdy:
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.

Gabrielle Esperdy:
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 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. Having lost her, which was the real gift, but this I think is a gift to all of us.

Robert de Blois:
Modernism. She obviously played a big role in creating it. 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.

Cynthia Kracauer:
Special thanks to Gabrielle Esperdy, Audrey Matlock, Carol Krinsky, Carol Ross Barney, Margaret McCurry, Peter Dixon, John Newman, Liz Watykus, Julia Murphy and Robert de Blois. The archival audio of Natalie de Blois 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.

Cynthia Kracauer:
This podcast is produced by Brandi Howell, with editorial advising from Alexandra Lange. 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.

Cynthia Kracauer:
If you missed our first episode “Finding Julia Morgan,” be sure to give a listen wherever you get your podcasts. And if you liked 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 Kracauer. Thank you for listening.

Roman Mars:
“New Angle: Voice” has four more amazing episodes this season. Go subscribe and listen to them all.

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CREDITS

Roman Mars:
99% Invisible is Delaney Hall, Kurt Kohlstedt, Martín Gonzalez, Swan Real, Emmett FitzGerald, Vivian Le, Joe Rosenberg, Chris Berube, Christopher Johnson, Lasha Madan, Jayson De Leon, Sofia Klatzker, and me, Roman Mars.

We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM 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 @romanmars and the show @99piorg. 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.