The Creative Coolidge Family

Rob Coolidge is a second-generation architect: both his mother and father were well-credentialed architects. His father, a nephew of President Calvin Coolidge, taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Yale School of Architecture alongside Louis Kahn. His mother was in the first class of female architects at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and worked for Marcel Breuer.

Creativity of course is genetic: Rob’s sister Martha Coolidge is an award-winning director of both big screen movies (“Valley Girl”, “Rambling Rose”, “The Prince and Me”) and television movies (“Introducing Dorothy Dandridge”, “Sex in the City”, “If These Walls Could Talk II”.) She became the first woman president of the Directors Guild of America (Filmography, marthacoolidge.com).

Another sister, Lucy Coolidge, is a Yale-educated composer of music and was a student of the famed Nadia Boulanger, the first woman to conduct American symphony orchestras and the principal teacher of such luminaries as Aaron Copeland, Quincy Jones and Philip Glass. Her work has been showcased in several ASCAP and BMI workshops in New York.

A brother, David Coolidge, has joined the architects of the family: he is a construction project manager who earned his Bachelors of Architecture degree at the Boston Architectural Center at night while working as a full-time carpenter. The Coolidge family are indeed inventive, visionary yet practical creators.