Feminist Practices

Interdisciplinary Approaches to Women in Architecture

Lori A. Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317135630
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Arquitectura general

Women continue to be extremely under-represented in the architectural profession. Despite equal numbers of male and female students entering architectural studies, there is at least 17-25% attrition of female students and not all remaining become practicing architects. In both the academic and the professional fields of architecture, positions of power and authority are almost entirely male, and as such, the profession is defined by a heterosexual, Eurasian male perspective. This book argues that it is vital for all architectural students and practitioners to be exposed to a diversity of contemporary architectural practices, as this might provide a first step into broadening awareness and transforming architectural engagement. It considers the relationships between feminist methodologies and the various approaches toward design and their impact upon our understanding and relationship to the built environment. In doing so, this collection challenges two conventional ideas: firstly, the definition of architecture and secondly, what constitutes a feminist practice. This collection of up-and-coming female architects and designers use a wide range of local and global examples of their work to question different aspects of these two conventional ideas. While focusing on feminist perspectives, the book offers insights into many different issues, concerns and interpretations of architecture, proposing through these types of engagement, architecture can become more culturally, politically and environmentally relevant. This 'next generation' of architects claim feminism as their own and through doing so, help define what feminism means and how it is evolving in the 21st century.

1

Introduction

Lori A. Brown

First conceived as a traveling exhibition and series of public talks, Feminist Practices: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Women in Architecture focuses on various forms of architectural investigations employing a range of feminist methods of design research and practice by women designers, architects and architectural historians. The primary goal of the project is to raise awareness for those both within and outside the profession about ways feminist methodologies impact design and our relationship to the built environment.

The genesis of this project was years in the making, stemming from my observations as both a practitioner and an academic. While practicing in New York after graduate school, it became very clear in the larger firms where I first worked that there were far fewer women and minorities in positions of power, if any at all. Yes, there may have been some but not in a similar proportion as I had encountered in graduate school. As I began to teach ten years ago, I became disturbed by the observation that the ratio of female to male students in the undergraduate program was basically 50 percent in the first year but by the fifth year there were 17 percent less female students remaining. For minority students, the statistics are far worse. African American and Latino students currently comprise at best 6 percent to 11 percent respectively of the student body.¹ What was and is happening? As Leslie Kanes Weisman has written in her article “Diversity by Design: Feminist Reflections on the Future of Architectural Education and Practice:”

How can an architectural education that continues to define professional expertise in relation to the history of white, heterosexual, Euro-American male consciousness prepare students to function as effective professionals in pluralistic communities? How will students be sensitized to “difference” when they are encouraged to suppress their own gender, race, and class identities in the process of becoming “professional”?²

It was unclear to me what was causing the attrition of our female and minority students. Clearly the students may be experiencing something similar in school as I was experiencing both in the profession and academia: architecture was not diverse enough nor was the demographic changing quickly enough and offering a much needed support or mentoring network.

Academia became a parallel experience to my prior professional life. One particular set of experiences has stayed with me and directly impacts how I began to frame the feminist practices project. During the beginning of my third year teaching at Syracuse University’s School of Architecture, an ongoing conversation developed with two female second-year undergraduate design students in my studio while independently I was struggling with similar experiences of the gender disparities they had begun to notice. One young woman had started a women’s issues column in our then student-produced newsletter Trace and an excerpt from one of her articles summarizes some of the student’s concerns which I also shared:

The proportion of female faculty is … an issue. Only 9 of the 34 SOA faculty are women.. A third year student recently observed that she has never had a female studio professor, and probably never will. Currently, the second and first year studios have a 50/50 gender representation of faculty, but after that it’s hard to find female undergraduate studio professors. Though faculty do rotate teaching assignments annually, one would hope there could be more evenly distributed representation of gender throughout all of the five years of [our] architectural education. Additional female faculty would provide positive role models to women and help foster an environment of support and inclusion leading to greater retention of women not only in school but also once they enter the professional realm.

Her article also cited recent numbers from the National Center of Educational Statistics further illustrating the lack of women in architectural academic institutions: only 20.56 percent of all faculty members in accredited architectural schools were women and only 15.89 percent of these were tenured. Even as this book is being finished, Woodbury University’s School of Architecture recently posted an open call for an exhibition titled “13.3%” in response to Suzanne Stephens’ 2006 Architectural Record article “Not Only Zaha: What is it like to be a female architect with a solely owned firm in the U.S. today?” where she cites only 13.3% of members in the American Institute of Architects, a national organization for architects, are women. The exhibition website states “13.3% is an exasperated reply to those who say: ‘there are no women making architecture.’”

During that Fall 2003 semester, these same two students in my studio began Women In Design (WID), an organization for students in all design disciplines at Syracuse University. At their request I became their faculty advisor. Female and male students became active members in WID and the organization was comprised from a diverse range of disciplines including visual and performing arts, fashion, industrial and interior design, as well as architecture. One of WID’s primary interests focused on establishing a voice for issues surrounding women in the design professions and creating a public forum for such issues to be debated and discussed. In addition, WID students hosted a series of regularly scheduled public events including brown bag lectures with emerging women in various design disciplines, an after school design mentor program at a local elementary school with exhibitions of their students’ work culminating the end of every semester, and an exhibition showcasing a wide range of student design work hosted in the School of Architecture’s public atrium.

Over the course of the next several years, I researched various other events and publications addressing the influences between women and design. I would like to highlight two particular events directly impacting the organizational ideas for the Feminist Practices exhibit and what would later become this book. These two events became pivotal in helping to position Feminist Practices in conjunction with earlier influences of feminist theory in architecture and design discourse.

The first project was both an exhibit and book titled Women in American Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective edited by Susana Torre. Originally begun in 1973 and published in 1977, this project catalogued and created public exposure for women designers and architects in the United States. The book’s foreword by Marita O’Hare states the importance of this book is that it writes history as “… one [not] dominated by key figures who epitomize the architecture of a time and place … [but one where] … a picture of the diversity in architectural practice and concern that characterize the energy and innovation of American architecture [emerge].”³ Explicit in the framing of this history, the project connects social and historical trends in order to foreground women’s careers, unlike their male counterparts careers “…have always been linked to the opportunities and expectations of women in the larger society.”⁴ These constrictions are ever changing rather than “absolute cultural models.”⁵

Torre’s fearless discussion about pressures on female designers and the circumstances around their educational and support networks that previously went publicly unspoken and unacknowledged is critical to the rewriting of architectural history. This new history is not one obsessed with the star architect system but one more accurately and realistically including women, their design work, and the influence their work has had on the larger architectural profession and built environment.

Building upon Torre’s project, the second event informing the Feminist Practices project was the 1984 exhibition and catalog by the Boston Society of Architects Women in Architecture Committee. In conjunction with the centennial of the first woman elected to the American Institute of Architects 27 years after the AIA’s founding in 1857 and “…in response to a growing concern that the professional visibility of women architects was not increasing in proportion to their numbers,” the BSA Women in Architecture created an exhibit showcasing the work of women practicing in New England.⁶

In her catalog essay for the show, Judith Wolin, a former Head of Architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design, opined that the exhibit showcased the architectural competency of the women architects and their

…vernacular building practice, attentive to its context of historical buildings, and compliant with the conservative taste of an affluent New England clientele … [y]et the price of respectability (and survival) can also be glimpsed in the show, through the small number of projects that venture outside the constraints imposed by the pressures of the private home, condominium, and office park market. One senses an undercurrent of stifled inventiveness behind the presentation of professional accomplishment.⁷

Wolin’s critique urged me to question what exactly is the ‘professionalism’ of the discipline in the 21st century and to push beyond this, questioning what is architecture’s role or more importantly what could architecture’s role be? What influences have feminism brought to the discipline and what are possibilities for its future? Currently, architects are only involved in 2 to 5 percent of all construction.⁸ What role does architecture really provide for the general public when 85 percent of the global household wealth is owned by 10 percent of the adults in the world?⁹ What do architects contribute to this other 90 percent? And how is academia preparing students to work within these parameters and for this demographic?

Constructing the Feminist Practices Framework

When considering the Feminist Practices exhibit and later book, I was interested in how one can more broadly define architecture and what relationships can be made between feminist methodologies and their various approaches toward design. How might feminist approaches impact our understanding and relationship to the built environment? If feminism, as feminist activist bell hooks posits, “…is defined in such a way call[ing] attention to the diversity of women’s social and political reality, … compelled to examine systems of domination and our role in their maintenance and perpetuation…”,¹⁰ we as designers begin from a place questioning normative design relations and their expected outcomes.

Designing through feminist critiques questions whose voice the designer ultimately represents, whose vision is being created, and what the products produced need to be. In other words, if the “star” architect, who as students we were all taught to emulate, is no longer the working model, then what sorts of models should replace it? What kind of engagement with the project, the client, or community partner is possible and how might this relationship inform the design process and eventual outcome? How does architecture benefit from these types of relationships? What are other possible ways the architect can design with and through civic engagement? What are broader spatial implications of this type of approach?

The book’s contributors present possible models both implicitly and explicitly. The contributors work towards making visible the invisible power dynamics at play. The included projects and essays help to re-conceptualize power and create different value systems¹¹ for design. For example, several contributors are designing opportunities for community economic partnerships to reinvigorate stagnant neighborhoods’ economies and designing spaces for diverse communities to come together and engage with one another, while others promote awareness at the scale of the body.

Feminist does not necessitate the project to be female focused; nor be gender specific. As Gillian Rose, a feminist geographer, quotes Teresa de Lauretis:

[t]he subject of feminism is thus constituted ‘not by sexual difference alone, but rather across languages and cultural representations; a subject engendered in the experiencing of race and class, as well as sexual, relations; a subject, therefore, not unified but rather multiple, and not so much divided as contradicted’.¹²

She further writes:

…[t]here is a sense that there are other possibilities beyond the discursive status quo. There is a notion of things that are not representable in masculinist discourse, but which women themselves may sense if not articulate. Feminist critique depends on a desire for something else¹³ […] and [t]he subject of feminism insists that spaces are extraordinarily complex … Its multidimensionality refers to complicated and never self-evident matrix of historical, social, sexual, racial and class positions which women occupy, and its geometry is one strung out between paradoxical sites. These feminist maps are multiple and intersecting, provisional and shifting, and they require ‘ever more intricate skills in cartography’.¹⁴

As Rose clearly articulates, feminist methodologies are nuanced and multivalent. They approach problems from varied points of view, can seem unstable and unclear. Yet, feminist approaches are latent with the possibility of discovering far more than one assumes or anticipates.

PRACTICE

What do I mean by practice? As defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, practice is “the actual application or use of an idea, belief, or method, as opposed to the theory or principles of it; activity or action considered as being the realization of or in contrast to theory.” If one considers action and activity more specifically, this type of practice broadens the applications and engagements of architecture in our contemporary world. Therefore practice as referred to in this project requires an investigation of an idea, belief, or method and an application of this investigation. Roberta Feldman expands upon this idea describing a practice as activist as one where “architects leav[e] the office, engaging a community, and seeking a need for design in that community, rather than passively waiting for clients to come to them...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Critical Spatial Practices: Setting Out a Feminist Approach to some Modes and what Matters in Architecture
• 3 Inventing Feminist Practices: Women and Building in Fin-de-Siècle Berlin
• Part I Feminist Practices in Design
• Part II Feminist Practices in Pedagogy
• Part III Feminist Practices in Design Research
• Part IV Feminist Practices in Communities
• Index