by Heather Livingston
Contributing Editor

Summary: Frances Halsband, FAIA, began her career at Mitchell/Giurgola before starting R.M. Kliment & Frances Halsband Architects with partner Robert Kliment, FAIA. She has taught design at numerous universities including Ball State, University of California at Berkeley, Columbia, Harvard, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, North Carolina State, University of Maryland, and the University of Virginia. Halsband has been president of the Architectural League of New York and the New York Chapter of the AIA. She was the dean of the School of Architecture at Pratt Institute and a commissioner of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. She has served on numerous design awards juries and was the chair of the 1999 AIA Committee on Design.

Education: I have a bachelor of arts degree from Swarthmore College and a master of architecture from Columbia.

Favorite place: My little country house in Woodstock, N.Y.

Hobbies: I play the piano in the country so that no one is offended by my playing late at night. I have a fabulous garden in Woodstock, too. To the extent that I get out of the office, which isn’t much, I can be found on weekend days in the garden and weekend nights playing the piano.

Childhood ambition: As a teenager, I thought that I was going to be a concert pianist. I played a lot and was at Juilliard. It came to me one day that I was never really going to be good enough and that it was an isolated and isolating thing to do. When I got to college, I started looking for things that brought me more in contact with a community of peers, which led straight into architecture.

Greatest professional influences: There are probably three or four people on that list. The first person I worked for was Romaldo Giurgola. He had a wonderful way of listening and bringing out the best in everybody and everything. I learned a lot from him. I’ve been in practice for 35 years with Robert Kliment and I think we both learn a lot from each other and continue to challenge each other. I’ve learned a lot about community from getting to know Christian Norberg-Schulz and his work, and I think that we’ve been very lucky in being able to work with clients who are great leaders in their own right and a great influence on your work.

What you do to groom young architects: We try to have a very collaborative atmosphere. I think we work as a team as much as possible, so we really try not to distinguish between young architects and older architects. We’re all trying to work on a problem and solve it together. If there’s something we try to do as a firm, it’s simply to work on things together with everybody bringing their best skills to the table rather than being more hierarchical.

The one quality critical to success: The ability to listen to different voices around you, and then try [to] synthesize what you’ve heard into forms that respond to real aspirations or real needs of your clients. I think also you have to listen to history to see what it’s telling you; listen to the environmental forces on the site, and try to understand what that’s telling you; and then try to make something out of all the information that you can absorb. Using listening in its broadest sense—listening and seeing everything around you—is critical.

On being a woman in architecture: When I entered the profession, it was a time when there were very few women around, so I had it easy in a way because I was the first woman to be dean of the architecture school at Pratt, the first woman to be president of AIA New York, and so on. There were a lot of firsts. People welcomed that, and I had a wonderful time. I think that that welcoming has now spread and it seems to me that women are completely accepted into the profession.

Architecture as profession: I think the wonderful thing about architecture is that long hours are required. In our own practice, we work all the time. That’s why we became architects. We don’t charrette and stay up until the middle of the night, but we’re always involved in understanding the culture and translating the culture. I think architecture is something that you can devote your whole life to, and it rewards you by filling up your life with wonderful things to think about and wonderful things to do. If you go into it as a 9-to-5 job, then I think it’s less rewarding no matter whether you’re young or old, male or female, because then it’s just a job. It seems to me that architecture is closer to being a vocation.

Advice for students: Never spend all of your time in the studio. Never spend all of your time with other architects, because the only way that you can grow and contribute is by translating across the boundaries and understanding architecture in the wider sense of how it affects the community and how you as an architect can contribute to that. If you’re just around other architects, you’re never going to quite get that. I think getting out into roles that help you to understand what an architect is or what architecture is makes you a better architect.