Power to Move Forward: Frances Halsband on Giving Back, Staying in Touch, and Ethical Behavior
By Julia Gamolina
Frances is a founding partner of Kliment Halsband Architects. Her varied roles as a designer, faculty member, and peer reviewer have provided a unique perspective on the many voices that shape planning and design today. She was the first woman dean at Pratt Institute, as well as the first woman president of AIANY and the Architectural League of NY. She is a former Commissioner of the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission, and has served as an Architectural Advisor to the US Department of State Office of Overseas Building Operations and the Federal Reserve Bank.
Frances received a Bachelor of Arts from Swarthmore College and a Master of Architecture from Columbia University. In her conversation with Julia Gamolina, Frances talks about change that she’s seen in her time in the industry and her new focus, advising those just starting their careers to not plan a career arc and instead to look around at opportunities in front of you.
JG: What first sparked your interest in architecture?
FH: My grandfather was an artist and my mother learned a lot from him. When she didn’t like something in our house she would just get out a paintbrush and paint a mural on the wall. I always thought that everyone did that - that if you didn’t like what you had, that you just went out and changed things. I found out later that apparently it’s not what people do, and in fact, very few people do that!
My first experience of meeting architects was in Woodstock, NY - my parents had a country house there. An art teacher from RPI [Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute] would come down to teach in the Art Students League there [in Woodstock] every summer, and he would bring with him some of his architecture students. I was fifteen or sixteen and surrounded by these glamorous nineteen-year-old men who were all architects.
All men?
Of course. It was a long time ago. We would go out drinking and I would think, “Oh, this is the life!” I got very interested in what they were doing and saw that it was a cool thing to do.
Then when I went to Swarthmore, one of [the architecture students I had met] was in Louis Kahn’s masters class at Penn, just about 10 miles away. I used to go there and charrette for him and build models, hang out and listen to Lou Kahn. That’s what did it.
Pratt Institute Gala and Mary Buckley Dinner honoring Philip Johnson c.1990.
Frances Halsband and Robert Kliment in the 1990s.
What did you study at Swarthmore?
I started as an English major but I realized that if I wanted to hang out at Penn I needed to take fewer courses. I became an Art History honors major, so that I had to be there [at Swarthmore] only two days a week. And the rest of the time I was at Penn, which was incredibly exciting. Kahn was there and [Robert] Venturi, and the whole Philadelphia School, and there were amazing juries where grown-ups in suits would debate important issues. And so again I thought, “That’s what architecture is - sounds good!”
You then actually studied architecture at Columbia. What did you learn both about architecture and about yourself in studying it?
I learned that Columbia was not as good a school as Penn, at that time. Columbia was deep into Team 10 and theoretical issues, and I was more interested in what I had learned about architecture at Penn. But then Aldo Giurgola came from Penn to the Columbia program and suddenly everything changed. I became part of it. I didn’t have a career trajectory, I just looked for the most interesting and most fascinating people and things and attached myself to those things. I think that’s been my method all along.
That’s a good method. What did you first do out of Columbia?
It seemed to me that Mitchell Giurgola was the place to be, so I went there. Robert Kliment was my boss. After three or four years of working for Aldo [Giurgola], we woke up one morning and said, “Wait a minute, we can do this too, we can do this better. Let’s start an office.” So we did!
“Don’t plan a career arc because there’s no such thing. Don’t follow your dreams. Don’t create some cloudlike vision that you’re just going to waste a lot of time on. Instead, stay attached to the people around you and what’s happening right here, and be ready to say yes when something good comes along.”
How long has it been now?
Oh my gosh, that was 1972! We have just started talking about planning for the 50th anniversary of the firm, in 2022, to see what we’ve accomplished.
Congratulations. I imagine it’s been an extraordinary ride. Take me through those 50 years - we have about ten minutes [laughs].
Well, we didn’t have a plan. Robert started [the business] and I continued to work at Mitchell Giurgola for a year so that we would have some money to live on. It took us three years to get up to $0 as an income level! When we would have a meeting with a client, we would call our friends and ask them to sit at the desks [in our studio at Carnegie Hall] and make it look like a real office! Sometimes a would-be client would go around and ask them questions about what they were working on. They would make things up [laughs]. But it worked, it definitely worked.
A couple of our first projects were given to us by friends. We also knew some people in Woodstock who were part of the art gallery scene, so early on we got to design a museum gallery and that won a Progressive Architecture Award. Suddenly, we were in the news and things took off.
Also we were both teaching at Columbia. Jim Polshek was Dean of the school then. Up until that point, the rule at Columbia was that if you were teaching there you could not design architecture for them, because they [Columbia] felt that it needed to be separate. Then Jim reversed that rule. Brilliant! We interviewed and got to renovate an old nursing home that they were turning into a dormitory. Again, that turned out to be pivotal because suddenly we could say that we designed university buildings, because we had done one! Most, if not all, work comes from being able to say to a client, “We’ve done this before.” Once in a while, a client will hire you because you’ve never done one before, but rarely.
Frances’s sketch for the Vassar College Old Observatory, 2009.
I want to say thank you for being open about how you got work - I’ve interviewed a lot of people who are very hesitant to share how they get work! It’s understandable, and I get it, but thank you.
Well, to your frequent question about where people are in their career today, I’m at the point now where I’m not obsessed with asking myself, “What do I need to learn next? What’s the next influence?” I’m much more concerned with younger people in my office, or outside, and how do I share with them what I know, or what I’ve learned, or how we can work together. I think it’s much more of a “giving back” moment.
Is there one lesson over and over that you find yourself sharing the most?
What a good question! Yes - “Just say yes!” Don’t plan a career arc because there’s no such thing. Don’t follow your dreams. Don’t create some cloudlike vision that you’re just going to waste a lot of time on. Instead, stay attached to the people around you and what’s happening right here, and be ready to say yes when something good comes along. It’s much better to look around and see what the opportunities are.
The other thing is really about diversity. I think people feel sorry for themselves because they’re diverse. I was never attracted to the women’s movement when it started - the women architect’s movement - because it was all about, “Such bad things are happening to me because I’m a woman.” I think you have to flip that around and say no! The whole point of diversity is to get a new point of view. If you’re an outsider you know something that insiders don’t know. You see things in a different way than the insiders do, so you should take that seriously and say to yourself, “Yes, I am diverse, now what do I see that no one else sees.”
“...the people I’ve admired most have been college and university presidents who are putting it all together on a vast scale...It’s about translating - people who can take in the whole scene and translate how are we going to move forward.”
How have you seen the industry change in all of these years that you’ve been in practice?
I think there are design fads that come and go, and there are management fads that come and go. The one thing that stays the same is the difference between the small-ish firms and gigantic firms. When I read some of your interviews, for example, people in big firms are focused on politics and how you work your way up the ladder. It’s all very much about corporate management issues. Whereas I think in small firms it’s almost universally about, “What are we doing? What are the projects we’re working on, how are we doing them, and are we doing them well?” That seems to me to be a significant split.
Also I think when we started, when I started - again, not a conscious decision, just a part of something that was happening - the easiest, maybe the only way to get started, if you were a woman, was to be married to your [business] partner. The possibility, at that time, of a woman starting her own firm couldn’t be imagined.
I’ve heard this one before. What would you say have been some of your biggest challenges, given this?
I don’t feel sorry for myself so I don’t have a list of challenges!
What about setbacks?
Oh, endless - jobs you don’t get, endless sources of grief. You put yourself out there and then somebody says, “Oh, no thanks, we’re looking for someone who never did one before, or someone who had done more of them than you have’. So I think there’s a constant drum beat - all the things that go wrong when you’re trying to get a job and it just doesn’t happen.
How do you find the conviction to keep going?
Something comes in over the transom, some other great project, and you just think. “This is it! I’m going to totally immerse myself in this thing.”
FH visits her old school, PS 28 in the Bronx, 2019.
What have been the highlights? What are you most proud of?
I think I’ve done a lot of things outside of the office that are important. Another one of my theories is that if you stay in the office all the time, it’s more and more difficult to relate to anyone or anything in the outside world. I’ve always tried to get out of the office as much as I could. I’ve served on all kinds of boards; I was a Landmarks Commissioner and I’ve been the president of the Architectural League. There are all kinds of ways of translating between what you think you know as an architect and what people are not understanding about what you’re saying, and being able to communicate both ways is absolutely essential.
I think a lot of my peers would ask how they can possibly get out of the office if their job is to produce work? There’s a lot of pressure there, a lot of long hours.
You can always escape to teach! I have yet to see someone who says, “Sorry, you can’t teach.” I think even if you’re joining a Community Board, or volunteering, or showing up at the Architectural League, or joining your block association, I think you have to make the time. If you’re going to just be a machine that makes drawings, you’re going to get farther and farther from your purpose - why are you an architect; what’s it all about?
What about parenthood?
I think our son went with us to a lot more construction sites than he could ever bear! Because he was an only child, we took him to a lot of adult things. I think it was a little easier then than it is now. Parenthood has so many rules right now. There’s all this information about how much time you have to spend with your child. It’s harder than it used to be. I never went to a PTA meeting. I just didn’t do it. But we would spend weekends together. We would try to avoid any professional activity on weekends. You can’t get let yourself be overwhelmed by the parent mafia. Kids grow up, and they’re fine!
If I may touch on this, I don’t think I have interviewed anyone yet who is continuing with the firm, now, very unfortunately, without their partner.
Robert retired in 2013, and he passed away three years ago. We worked together in the beginning, but as time passed we each had our own projects. We would check in with each other a lot, look over each other’s drawings. He was my most demanding and most sympathetic critic! No one can really take his place. I do have four other partners, and we are a terrific team. It is wonderful to work with them and to see what comes next.
“I want to see if we can use the power of Fellows to move the AIA forward in a productive way.”
Who are you admiring now?
In my career, the people I’ve admired most have been college and university presidents who are putting it all together on a vast scale. I’ve had the opportunity to work with some who were absolutely fabulous and inspiring leaders. It’s about translating - people who can take in the whole scene and translate how are we going to move forward. I worked with Ruth Simmons at Brown University for 11 years. She was the first black woman president of an Ivy League institution. Wow. Watching her was just incredible.
What about you, what is the impact that you’d like to have?
I need to tell you what I did last year. There was a moment when there was a lot of angst in the architecture community because people were discovering what Richard Meier and others had been doing. There was a huge hue and cry.
I had been lecturing at a couple of architecture schools. At the end of one lecture a student said, “How do we know where we can go to work? Where are we going to feel safe?” I thought, “What is the answer to that question?” There were a lot of people saying, “Let’s go get Richard Meier, for heaven’s sake, let’s go get Richard Meier.” But that didn’t answer that student’s question. I realized that someone had to do something about the future. I focused on the AIA. The AIA has 90,000 members. 3,000 of them are Fellows, exemplary leaders of the profession.
I got the idea to write to fifty Fellows I knew. I said, “Shouldn’t we create a petition saying we believe that the AIA should change their code of ethics to say that harassment is no good? Shouldn’t we come out and say that we believe in equitable and ethical behavior and we want to do the right thing?”
Within a few weeks I had 600 replies. People were saying, “We want to sign up. We want people to know that we’re doing the right thing.” I went to the AIA convention with my petition, and made a motion from the floor. It passed, 4272 to 13, and the AIA changed the Code of Ethics. I was absolutely amazed - I mean, I thought it was pretty clever of me that I figured this out [laughs]. But really what was amazing was that I found this huge untapped power of Fellows who wanted to be known for doing the right thing and making a stand.
So, I now I am a member of the Executive Committee of the College of Fellows. I’m going to try to mobilize the College of Fellows to take up other important issues, whatever they are. It’s not just “Me Too,” it’s not just women - there are plenty of issues out there. I want to see if we can use the power of Fellows to move the AIA forward in a productive way. I think we can really bring change. That’s my new thing.