Cynthia Kracauer
“I think it's hard to conceptualize or to quantify, in the short term, the massive impact that architecture has on our lives. “
WomenWhoBuild meet Cynthia Phifer Kracauer,
Cynthia is the executive director of the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation and a highly respected leader in the promotion of women in architecture, engineering, and construction. Her work actively supports women in AEC through Beverly Willis Architecture Founation’s BEVY Leadership Awards that recognize the accomplishments of today’s outstanding women, Industry Leaders Roundtable, popular New Angle:Voice historical documentary series, and Emerging Leaders program, among other action-driven initiatives.
Prior to joining BWAF, Cynthia spent a decade as the Managing Director of the American Institute of Architects New York Chapter, Center for Architecture, where she created Archtober, the New York City month-long festival of architecture and design. An early pioneer of co-education in the 1970’s, Cynthia graduated from Princeton University, receiving both a magna cum laude, and Masters of Architecture.
I start every interview with having you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about how you landed in this field?
My name is Cynthia Kracauer, I’m an architect and Executive Director of the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation. I decided to become an architect when I was an undergraduate at Princeton in the 1970’s. I was in an early class of women admitted to Princeton. In my freshman year, I took Architecture 101 and Geology 101. And it turned out that I loved them both. I had never given a whole lot of thought to the world of architecture, even though with my crafty and imaginative nature as a child, I had been doing it for a long time without really understanding it. I was about 9 or 10 years old and already started building small houses out of my father's shirt cardboards.
I would say I had an interesting professional career as an architect. I taught at the University of Virginia, New Jersey Institute of Technology, and Princeton. I worked for a number of years for Phillip Johnson, which was my first big project. I was the project architect for a 65-story office building in Houston, TX.
Working for Phillip Johnson was an extraordinary experience and I always look back on it quite fondly. There's a lot of uncertainty from a social and political perspective about Philip Johnson, but as a young architect working in the office and working on these major skyscrapers, it didn't matter too much that he might have had a storied past. He had great clients, great projects, and he was incredibly generous, and supportive of the women in his office, which was a distinct contrast to many of the other offices at the time.
I left Johnson's office to have a baby and cobbled together a little practice of my own, which I ran for about 6 years. About the time my son was three I decided that I wanted to go back and work on bigger buildings, so I moved back to New York City and I worked for a major firm for 15 years. At one point, I decided that I wanted to be more in a public service and decided to take an opportunity with the Center for Architecture as the managing director. I worked on more than 200 exhibitions over the 10 years. It was a wonderful, intense experience. During my time we really turned the center into a cultural institution and moved away from the professional development focus a little bit towards a more outward public-facing focus. At about the 10-year mark it seemed that it was time for me to move on and do something else and an opportunity landed in my lap. While I was at the Center for Architecture, I had worked with the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation on their initial “Built by Women” exhibition and they were looking for an executive director. I took the opportunity, thinking I would be there for a year or two but have now been here for seven.
You had mentioned that you were in an early class of females admitted as freshmen to Princeton. Can you tell me a little bit about that experience?
I always tell the same stories about this. I was a kid from Los Angeles, I went to public school, my father had been in the service. It was a kind of politically difficult time for military children. I was something of a fish out of water in an Ivy League school. I was just so happy to be there that anything that would be considered horrendous behavior now really did not adversely impact my impression of the institution. I could give you a couple of classic stories, the first one is that in 1971, the Firestone Library, which is the main library of the university, hadn't quite gotten to equalizing the availability of women's bathrooms. So, in the beginning the women had to use the bathroom that was labeled staff. There were still things they were trying to figure out, having added several hundred women to their enrollment.
What would you say was your biggest take away from the University? Something that you still utilize to this day in your career.
The friendships and relationships with fellow students and faculty members. Princeton is unique in its ability to create this very fierce loyalty. It has a legendary alumni engagement. That is a huge component from a personal and from a career development standpoint. It always opens doors, it's a way of making other kinds of connections. Aside from the natural development of personal connections with faculty and classmates, there is a real value in developing a network. I'm not really a good networker, I love a good research project. My current favorite research project is related to the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation’s podcast, New Angle: Voice. It documents the lives and legacies of under-recognized women in the history of architecture and design. One of the things that I'm very interested in is looking back at these historic women that we feature in our website, Pioneering Women of American Architecture, and coming to an understanding of these professional women that were such early trailblazers in the fullness of their lives.
Tell us about the experience of building your career while raising a family?
It was very difficult. I think every woman is different. I have a friend who had a baby, she stayed home for I think 3 weeks and came right back to work. I was quite surprised with how enchanted I was with having a baby. I fell in love with my baby and I found it very difficult to hand her off. My mother was sort of a very young bride she had me when she was very young and so the modeling of motherhood for me was very traditional and so I was constantly torn between my own ambitions and the desire to have a life of my own which meant going back to work.
Can you tell us a little bit about your time at AIA and what that role was like?
There was a staff of about 20. The center had been open for about to two or three years, and it had been this major undertaking for fundraising to create its own little culture institution. It was incredibly ambitious, and we envisioned this facility as not just a clubhouse for the architects but an actual public facing cultural institution. I managed the place, I hired and fired people. I did the sort of usual stuff that the managing directors do. I worked to cultivate the staff, systems, and relationship to the public that would raise the profile of architecture in the public imagination and educate people in the industry as to the value of design. You just have to sort of look at the pay scale for being an architect, that while architects themselves are highly valued and quite respected, they're just not paid very well when you compare them say for example to lawyers. Given that you spend the same amount of time getting educated, same amount of time working, I feel like the rigor of architecture is very similar. This pull over of this kind of artistic genius I think adversely affects the business communities desire to pay architects properly, and also when you think about it, I mean there is this food chain right. In real estate, there's a food chain, there's people that make money and people that spend money. Architects are in charge of spending money. I think it's hard to conceptualize or to quantify, in the short term, the massive impact that architecture has on our lives.
Let’s talk a little bit about your current role at the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation. The Foundation is a staple of our industry. Can you give us a little insight on what your responsibilities are, what your day-to-day is, and what you see for the future of the foundation?
We have a staff of two, me and my assistant, along with a development consultant. Currently our team runs three active websites, we commission scholarship, we have this wonderful podcast, we do professional development programming for women, we work on a program called Emerging Leaders, and we have the Industry Leaders Roundtable, and occasionally, when there's an important issue that relate to the industry, we mobilize with other organizations and provide an audience and programming support for very specific issues. Our whole approach is meant to be accessible and supportive of women in the industry.
How do you tackle all of these initiatives with a staff of two?
Well, I don't do everything all at once. Everything has seasonality, right now we are in a heavy podcast season. We launched the second season of New Angle: Voice in March for Women's History Month, starting with Ray Eames’ story, followed by Ada Louise Huxtable, and Amaza Lee Meredith, with more to come. I find this work to be so important in the advancement of women. There are a lot of struggles ahead, there’s a lot of work to do. We're certainly working on it and we welcome every and anybody else that wants to pitch in and help because it’s essential that the culture of the industry has to change. I find that it's not the profession that has to change, because the profession is a mirror of the culture. I think it goes back to the community aspect that we spoke about; we are trying to build a community of women which allows for greater strength and a better understanding of one another and I think those are the resources that we need. I think there is so much good being done just through the initiatives that are being done now, just in the same way I think the community that I was able to tap into coming out of school may not have been the same one that women were able to tap in two years ago. I think 20 years from now it's going to be an even greater community and even more resources available and with that, hopefully, it shifts even more.
If you had one piece of advice to give to your younger self, when you were just either going into school or just starting out in your career, what would that piece of advice be?
A piece of advice for myself would be to lighten up. I think when I was younger, there was an intensity there about me that may have been of off-putting. I would have been well served make more friends in the industry and being little bit more sociable. I think nowadays people know and understand much better than I did the value of different kinds of relationships and cultivating different kinds of relationships. That you can have wonderful professional relationships, that they can be instrumental in your success, and you shouldn't be afraid of that. I would also encourage you to do something outside of the profession, cultivate other interests because you never know who you might meet that may give you your next job.