In her 2016 book, Where Are the Women Architects? author Despina Stratigakos dedicates a chapter to ‘Unforgetting Women Architects: A Confrontation with History and Wikipedia.’ In this extensive work, Stratigakos, a writer, historian, and professor of architecture at the University at Buffalo, elucidates the challenges faced by women in the architectural profession. She explicitly identifies the problematic ideologies and methods employed to silence them; not only in the past but also those that persist and currently oppress women architects.

Stratigakos places the issue of silencing professional women in a historical context, spanning centuries. She highlights Hatshepsut, a successful pharaoh and renowned builder of Egypt, who had been previously erased of any public knowledge. Her co-regent, Thutmose III, historically disconnected Hatshepsut from her accomplishments by removing her from any writing and sculptural references following her passing.

“Until recently, historians assumed that there were no female practitioners before the mid-twentieth century, so they did not bother to look for them.”

Despina Stratigakos

Stratigakos argues that most historical references we have regarding women’s work were written following the monograph format. This sexist approach to recording history rejects women by ensuring an exclusive narrative between the ‘master’ and its apprentice. Consequently, many professional women were explicitly forgotten due to the collaborative nature of their work. Women architects, often working with their patterns, were even erased from their work. Their contributions, although completely irrelevant to their husbands, were inherently celebrated as his and not her success. The author illustrates Denise Scott Brown’s experience in 1991 when her work in collaboration with her husband received the Pritzker Prize solely under Robert Venturi’s name. The profession of architecture, in denying her proper recognition, perpetuates an archaic, male-dominated narrative reminiscent of Hatshepsut’s Egyptian period. I concur with the author’s argument that it is dangerous to diminish the contributions of women architects only based on limited available references or the collaborative nature of the work. This issue of selective silencing only exacerbates moving into our current digital era.

Those archaic ideologies have digitally adapted, utilizing their subjective hierarchy in databases and influencing the perception of architecture as a ‘male-dominated’ practice.  Stratigakos uses a personal experience of this digital suppression and editorial hassling of women’s work. Her experience with Wikipedia exemplified how women are denied agency in writing about their work. She mentions a male editor who initially rejected her historical research on Thekla Schild – “she was only the second woman in Germany to earn an architecture degree” – and only ‘accepted’ Schild’s digital presence once another male editor stepped in. More than ever, Stratigakos urges professionals and the public to question these editors’ judgements and technologies on their possible inherent biases.

In this chapter,  Stratigakos encourages users to utilize the Internet’s democratic nature by editing online databases. Our study of history changed when we used written documentation, and it is undergoing another transformation with knowledge now encrypted in digital databases. If a holistic approach to studying history is not incorporated into this transition from the physical into the digital realm, women architects’ contributions will remain hidden – whether it is due to a lack of ‘trending’ keywords, rendering them inherently not ‘googleable’ or an exclusive paywall only accessible to niche academic researchers.