Joan Goody FAIA (2002)
A Rich Life Moasic
Back to WID Award of Excellence recipients.
Biography
A Brooklyn native, Goody studied history at Cornell and architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. After marrying architect and MIT professor Marvin Goody, she joined his firm in 1970 and became a partner in 1978. Marvin Goody died in 1990 and Joan later married poet and editor Peter Davison.
Full Biography
Joan Goody FAIA
Partner, Goody Clancy
Women in Design Award of Excellence, 2002 winner
Joan Goody’s values, shaped by her earliest experience in New York’s Ethical Culture School and later at Cornell and Harvard Graduate School of Design, permeated her architecture and civic involvement. She championed humanistic qualities in design and believed ardently in the ability of architecture to contribute to civility. For many years, she chaired the Boston Civic Design Commission, which reviews the design of proposed new buildings. As Andrea Leers wrote In The Architect’s Newspaper, Joan “was well known for the her breadth of knowledge, her forthrightness, and her eloquence.” She was a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and in 2005 she received the annual Award of Honor for lifetime achievement from the Boston Society of Architects. She taught architectural design at Harvard in the 1970s. In the last decade of her life, she was the president of Boston’s Saturday Club, a group that meets monthly for lunch and discussion.
As a senior member of Goody Clancy, the design firm founded by her first husband, Marvin Goody, Joan was involved in a rich variety of projects: Harbor Point, where she transformed a dismal public housing project in South Boston into a mixed-income neighborhood; a federal courthouse in Wheeling, WV, where she mixed modern and traditional motifs; the Salomon Center for Teaching at Brown University; and Heaton Court, a small, affordable housing cluster in Stockbridge, MA.
