Joan was my cousin, a great role model, a great architect and author of several books on architecture, writing her first when she was still in her 20s.
Joan was 18 years older than me. My first memories of her were that she looked like a fashion model and she was really smart -- and really nice too. Fluently bilingual, Joan did one year of her undergrad university studies in France and was a graduate student in Architecture at Harvard at that time in the late 1950s. (This was all very impressive to me as a young girl -- actually it still is.) She went on to become a professor of Architecture at Harvard and a founding partner of Goody Clancy in Boston in the early 1960s, with a very successful career designing major projects. This was before the women’s movement; it was still pretty rare for women to become architects
Joan had a special interest in the context of architecture and how it related to people, and as an adult I found it fascinating to discuss this with her. The people who use the buildings was always very important to her.
I last saw Joan last October, at her house where she’d lived the past 45 years, a converted 19th century fire station on River Street, in the Beacon Hill neighbourhood in Boston. She was 73, looked about 50, still very active in her profession, and I had every reason to believe she’d be around into her 90s as both her parents did. So I was surprised as well as saddened to learn that she became very ill this Summer. She died at home in Boston the day after Labour Day, September 8th, 2009.
I miss Joan, but she lives on. I know this can be a trite phrase but she does live on in me and in others that she has been an inspiration to.
As an architect, she also lives on with a legacy of buildings that people in Boston and many other cities use each day, buildings she designed with the end-user, the people, in mind, and because of that she has had a positive effect on many people's lives. Even if they didn’t know her personally. And I was very fortunate that I did.
