In the book chapter “Female Regulation of the Healthy Home,” Annmarie Adams provides an insightful analysis into the multifaceted role of Victorian women in shaping domestic and public spheres through their contribution to household management and health standards. Adams interweaves the concept of domestic science with the cultural narrative of the era, showcasing women’s strategic utilization of their specialized knowledge to influence public health discourse and architectural innovation. This book chapter traces the transformation of home management into a science that paralleled the industrial era’s ethos of efficiency and systematization, positioning the domestic domain as pivotal to societal welfare.

Adams invokes the authoritative voice of Phyllis Browne to demonstrate the period’s conviction that systematic housekeeping was not merely a domestic chore but a critical determinant of public health. Browne’s comparisons between household management and machinery underscore the mechanistic view of domestic work, emphasizing the severe sociological repercussions —disease and moral decline—stemming from women’s negligence.

The narrative reveals a progressive enlargement of women’s roles within the confines o domestic science, transcending the private realm. Women’s burgeoning expertise led them to critique architectural designs, assume positions as health inspectors, and vocalize sanitary guidance. However, Adams portrays a paradoxical empowerment, where women, heralded as custodians of health, concurrently bore the stigma of potential sources of contagion, thus reinforcing the ambiguous portrayal of women as both protectors and threats to public health.

A contrast compelling emerges between English and American women’s societal roles. In England, women’s involvement was largely limited to identifying problems rather than implementing solutions. Their expertise in detecting unsanitary conditions was recognized, yet the power to enact change, especially in architectural design, remained elusive. Oppositely, on the other side of the Atlantic, American women were actively encouraged to reconfigure their homes to better serve their needs. Adams cites American authors like Helen Dodd and E.G. Gardner, who armed women with the tools and confidence to alter their homes according to principles of sanitation and personal need, allowing a more progressive approach to women’s influence on domestic architecture.

The chapter culminates by capturing the duality of the Victorian era’s perception of women: acknowledged for their specialized domestic prowess yet constrained within societal parameters. This period represents a precursor to the modern understanding of gender roles in domestic and public arenas, with women delicately balancing their celebrated expertise against the confinement of traditional roles. This annotation highlights the key themes and insights from Adams’ work, encapsulating the delicate balance Victorian women maintained between their roles as custodians of the home and agents of social change.

Gwendolyn Wright explores the historical challenges women face in the field of architecture. She highlights how architectural practice is influenced by rigid sexual stereotypes and how women tend to have segregated roles in the periphery. She dissects the experiences of women from discriminatory hiring, salary, and advancement opportunities to double standards like discrediting domestic architecture and interiors as professional even though women are discouraged from doing anything else.

The chapter investigates the origins of these challenges and then sheds light on the different roles of women in architecture including exceptional women, anonymous designers, adjuncts, and reformers. In particular, the author highlights the contributions of Catharine Beecher and Julia Morgan as exceptional women. We get a glimpse of their determination to navigate the constraints of societal and professional barriers and significantly contribute to the built form theoretically and technically. Catharine Beecher had no architectural training yet challenged traditional spatial organization and proposed innovations for domestic environments. While Julia Morgan was the first woman to attend l’École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, commissioned to design an estimated 800 buildings and a trailblazer of user-oriented design. Many other women who were completely unaffiliated or working on the fringes of the profession also impacted key movements and helped alter the design discourse.

In summary, despite being relegated to supporting roles, Wright examines the pivotal roles women play in shaping the trajectory of American architecture in the educational and professional sphere. This chapter provides a historical account of the perseverance and efforts of women to achieve gender equity in the profession

Kate Wagner writes an article following the accusations of architect David Adjaye for sexual assault and harassment, in July of this year. She provides a powerful and timely critique of the architectural industry, shedding light on the deeply rooted issues of misogyny, racial discrimination, and abuse of power within the profession of architecture. This passage also touches upon the broader issues of workplace exploitation and the need for reform in this industry.

The exposé on Adjaye’s alleged misconduct was shocking, given his prominent status in the field. Perceived as a “starchitect”, Adjaye’s case illustrates the disturbing reality that even individuals held up as icons of progress can perpetuate systemic injustices. A status like this creates an unhealthy power dynamic, making it even more difficult for victims to come forward.

The discussion of tokenism and the additional layer of protection it can offer to architects of colour like Adjaye is a critical insight into the complexities of race and power within the profession. The fact that all three victims were Black women underscores the intersectionality of the challenges they faced. The fear of reinforcing stereotypes and prejudices adds another layer of difficulty for those who want to speak out against abuse.

Wagner points out the pervasive misogyny in architecture, in terms of workplace harassment, discrimination, the significant gender pay gap, and a lack of representation. The statistics presented are a stark reminder that despite advances in many fields, architecture still has a long way to go in achieving gender equality.

The article also exposes the tendency for worker precarity within the field of architecture. The long hours, unpaid internships, and intense dedication to projects create an environment ripe for exploitation within this industry.

In conclusion, this article serves as a powerful wake-up call for the architectural industry. It highlights the urgent need for structural reform, cultural change, and solidarity among workers to create a safer, more inclusive, and equitable environment. The allegations against Adjaye should not be viewed in isolation but as a catalyst for meaningful change within the field. Architects and stakeholders must work together to ensure that such acts of abuse and exploitation never happen again, and that architecture becomes a field that truly values and supports all its practitioners.

Abigail Van Slyck’s exploration of the library interior is a compelling description of the importance of women and women’s labour on the architectural interior and the structural barriers that continue to keep women’s narratives out of history. In On the Inside: Preserving Women’s History in American Libraries, Van Slyck advocates for preserving the interior and exterior of historic libraries. The historical library, devoid of its original interior, is also devoid of the complex story or women’s library work. As Van Slyck points out, the preservation of the architectural interior often conflicts with contemporary means of preservation. Strategies that keep historic buildings in use often involve the complete transformation of the interior. It is interesting that the work of the male architects, wrapped up in the exterior, can be preserved with little enough impact on the contemporary moment, while the work of the female librarian is too intrusive to exist without being explicitly historical. Van Slyck suggests that the charging desk, a central element of women’s library work, could be reimagined within the interior as a compact exhibition, a way to visualise the labour of female librarians and give visitors insight into the experience of the historical library. Even if a historic library took on a new use, this would be a relatively compact way to maintain an essential element of the library’s interior. Still, Van Slyck’s suggestion remains framed as an exhibition, something inherently more unstable than a building. Van Slyck ends the chapter by reiterating the importance of rethinking the practice of historic preservation, pointing back to the ease with which traditional preservation projects erase women. Thinking again about the difference between the simultaneous impermanence and loudness of a proposed charging desk exhibition, with the permanence and the almost invisible inevitability of preserved exteriors, it becomes clear that the struggle to maintain women in the historical record is a struggle to reimagine how we understand feminized labour completely. As Van Slyck points out, preserving the interior is part of a project to remember not just historical design but a more complete, even experiential picture of the past. Again, this highlights the need for a reimagining of what history means. It is not only about not erasing women’s labour but creating a version of history that understands the issues specific to women’s labour and experience as critical elements of the historical record.

Abigail Van Slyck examines the gendered implications of “the tendency to sacrifice the historic interior” in the name of “emphasizing the integrity of the architectural shell” through the preservation of historic early 20^th century American libraries. The text examines how these preservation projects facilitate the erasure of traces of women’s labour in library spaces. Van Slyck begins by contrasting the perceived value of exterior versus interior space in preservation projects, personifying the exterior shell as masculine, as the setting of male activities, construction, carpentry, masonry, and civic life. Conversely, she offers the early 20^th century library interior space as feminine, hosting a history of 78.5 percent female labour. Yet Van Slyck does not simply celebrate the interior of the library as feminist success but rather traces the burdens and pressures on early 20^th century library workers through architectural evidence and planning. In doing so, Van Slyck argues on behalf of the preservation of the interior as moments of learning and unlearning the gendered nuance of labour expectations.

The library charging desk is presented as symbolic of gendered expectations within the library setting, notably comparing the desk to a fortress. Originally intended to maximize book handling efficiency and dissolve the barrier between readers and the stacks, the charging desk became a space of scrutiny and surveillance toward the women library workers posted there. The desk itself reinforced gendered expectations for women workers: remain calm, receive books, file reports, direct patrons, answer telephones, all while placed on display in the central core of the library. Nevertheless, Van Slyck does not side with the removal of the charging desk in modern library preservation projects in her criticism of it but rather defends their presence as a piece of important feminist history. She suggests the opportunity for inverting the users’ perception, to get a view into the life of a women working at the charging desk and ultimately highlight the overlooked scope of work and vulnerability prescribed in the spatial planning.

Van Slyck’s exploration of women’s interaction in the public arena such as a library space offers an opportunity to rethink architectural preservation and the hidden stories told by buildings. “If we venerate architectural containers that were the products of male building skill, we also need to value the material evidence of women’s activities outside the domestic sphere”.

Rina Swentzell utilizes her childhood memories of school to illustrate the importance of place in a person’s development. Born into a Pueblo in Santa Clara, ones’ connection to the cosmos and the earth was considered vital. Her community consisted of a large courtyard building that was constructed of earthen materials by everyone in the Pueblo. Short ceilings and hand-plastered edges created feelings of intimacy, and the uniform dirt floors were nearly identical to the desert outside, blending interior and exterior spaces. Socializing, working, and playing occurred simultaneously in the large central courtyard and people could move in/around/on top of the buildings. Children were encouraged to learn, as in their society “to breathe or to be alive is to learn”, and through this curiosity they were empowered to make their own decisions and take care of themselves.

When the Bureau of Indian Affairs school was constructed a quarter of a mile away, life changed for the author and her fellow children. The new school building was surrounded by barbed wire fences and the landscape within had been scraped bare. Sanitization of school buildings through foreign western architecture made it impossible to become “a part of the place, the buildings, or the lives of teachers who lived there.” Pueblo students were cut off from the natural world they were used to, and encouraged to praise individual achievement rather than collective progress; Even within the same classroom students were segregated based on their reading abilities. The western notion of upward mobility into higher grades and different classrooms was totally foreign to the children, who had previously been encouraged to settle into the earth and become content with the present.

Swentzell ends the reading by concluding that there are long-lasting consequences of uprooting someone’s understanding of place and their relationship to the world; The Pueblo students who went to the BIA school developed confidence issues and feelings of inadequacy. I found this account of her time at the school to be both incredibly uplifting and sad. Learning about the Pueblo’s supportive community and their freedom as children to be curious and take responsibility for themselves only highlights the harsh divide between the Pueblo and the day school. It must have been so confusing to go everyday from a place where you were supported, trusted, and felt connected to the earth and enter the rigid, stark, and isolating classrooms of the day school. This reading brings into stark relief the power of space and architecture, both as a tool for good and for harm. The spaces we inhabit shape our lives from the moment we are able to remember them: Laughing at a kitchen table, stress at a school desk, happiness at seeing a loved one’s front door. By ripping away familiarity and introducing a foreign system, we are both physically and mentally adrift in a world we cannot recognize, struggling to find our place.

Swentzell addresses how the conflicting world views of the people of the Santa Clara pueblo and European settlers were reflected through their divergent relationship with landscape. Through lived experience of both spaces, she recalls the powerful connection between pueblo’s architecture and the land as well as the impact the Bureau of Indian Affairs school for Native Americans had on her community’s youth.

Santa Clara people’s philosophy was rooted in the belief that humans are one with the landscape. “Humans exist within the cosmos and are an integral part of the functioning of the earth community,” states Swenztell. Architecture, like the people’s spirits, was considered as an entity which emerged from and would return to the land. Beautification and landscaping were not needed, as there was no distinction between the natural and the human made. Architecture was seen as an expression of human shelter rather than a sign of prestige and power. Little distinction was made between the interior and exterior, and people could flow freely from a house’s dirt floor into the pueblo’s public spaces.

In opposition to the built environment of the Santa Clara pueblo, Swentzell describes the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) school as embodying the “Western-European attitude of human control”. Built in Santa Clara in the 1920s, the BIA school was one of the many institutions set up by European settlers to dissolve social structure and destroy land in Native American communities. Swentzell recalls her experience attending the school between 1945 and 1951. The building’s interior segregation and exterior barbed wire fences symbolised a lack of trust and respect of others and prevented human to human and human to nature interactions. The school grounds were scraped, leveled, mineralized, and covered by artificial playgrounds unfamiliar to the children’s idea of play. ”But the long-lasting impact may not be visual,” explains Swentzel. The foreign authoritarian values imbued in the BIA’s architecture had a generational impact on the pueblo’s youth, teaching different types of behaviours and instilling a lack of confidence and feeling of inadequacy in the children.

The architectural heritage of many educational institutions still embodies the settlers’ relationship with landscape to this day. Taking the school grounds of Mc Gill University as an example, control of architecture over the landscape can be experienced throughout many of the campus’ spaces. The Rodick Gates defining a clear separation from the city, the beautified and landscaped green spaces, and the imposing building facades dominating over clear open fields are only some of the architectural elements that align with the BIA’s authoritarian relationship to the land.

Swentzell’s reading makes us wonder what a university campus based on Santa Clara people’s principles would look like, and leads us to question what values and power hierarchies are still imbued in the architecture of the educational institutions we attend today.

In Victoria Rosner’s text, “Fear in a Handful of Dust,” she discusses how the germ theory led to a paradigm shift in how people started to view spaces, specifically the cleanliness of them. Rosner explains how senses used to be the main assessment of hygiene, meaning that people would rely on vision and smell to determine what would be clean. The germ theory created a “rupture in the relationship between the senses and hygiene” as “cleanliness was being redefined as necessary for the prevention of disease.” Through a feminist lens, she explains how this shift in perception of cleanliness fell on the hands of “housewives” who were the ones deemed responsible for preventing the spread of diseases coming from the home.

The germ theory was most powerful during the influenza epidemic of 1918. There was anxiety associated with not being able to see germs so one would never know who the next influenza victim would be. Therefore, the best way to prevent something contagious and threatening, yet invisible, was to start by clearing spaces and surfaces of any dirt or cluster of objects. There was a desire for making designs more transparent, clear and simple, therefore putting more importance on modernist aesthetics during this time. This was true of institutions that dealt directly with germs, such as hospitals, which created an institutional look. As much as hospitals were spaces that took care of those who already had the disease, many believed most germs derived from the home. According to Rosner, the modern house was not just categorized as such through its aesthetics, it also implied that it was properly maintained and had no dust.

During the early 20th century, the main caretaker in domestic spaces was either the “housewife” or “mistress.” This would mean it was the woman’s duty to maintain cleanliness to prevent anyone from contracting a disease and spreading it to people outside the home. As Rosner quotes The Science of Homemaking, by Kate Kennedy, “dust is one of the deadly enemies of the housewife. There is a continual war raging between them. Dust brings germs of disease and ill health in its trail.” Rosner uses domestic manuals from the same period to prove how anxieties around the germ theory fell upon the female’s supposedly main role, such as taking care of her family and household chores. If there is too much dust and a member is infected with a disease, then it is the woman’s fault for not doing a better job.

To conclude, even though the germ theory was meant to be a new scientific phenomenon in the early 20th century, which would help us understand how to prevent contagious diseases, it also ended up affecting the way we understand spaces, especially within our own home. Recently we experienced a new pandemic, known as covid, which once again made us question how we clean and maintain our space to prevent contagions. How did gender play a role in maintaining the spaces we lived in during this new pandemic, if at all?

In a feminist review by Juliet Kinchen, “Interiors: nineteenth-century essays on the ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ room” unpacks the constraining gender normalities that existed in the Western world for users of the home. The author initially states that the home represents the “antithesis of public space” (Kinchen, 13), an environment in which women, the assigned decorators of the home, were allowed to politely express themselves in a way that conforms with masculine and feminine social understanding of the time. Each room type was expected to be codified by function, and decorated in a way that reflected the expected gendered behaviour in each programme. Some of these assumptions began in the home’s front foyer, where one would enter and receive an impression of the family’s dignity. These judgments were gauged by the level of grandeur and quality of materiality (Kinchen, 14). Throughout the home, materiality, iconography, shapes, and scents were utilized to pair the gendered functions within each room. The drawing room is one of the first rooms transitioning from the main hall, often representing the “taste and values” of the women in the home. Like a shopping window, the room often functioned as a setting for unmarried daughters to interact with potential suitors, a place of performance to prove good morals and femininity. Often an axis between nature and feminine values was coupled together, using flora, fauna, and bright hues to communicate this “lightness and spiritual purity” (Kinchen, 23)

Dolores Hayden actively points to the sexist imbalance of contemporary housing in the United States (which I would personally extend to all North America and globally). As it is on many occasions, the urban sprawl is the main culprit to blame for the perpetuation of sexist stereotypes in home designs. Conservationism in planning that urban sprawls embody follows the inertia of the past century’s ideals of opulence, radical capitalism and environmental discreditation.

Most dwellings, with no regards to their size and arrangement, are built around “the same set of spaces: kitchen, dining room, living room, bedrooms, garage, or parking area.” Reinforced by the rise of individualism fed by capitalism, Hayden deplores the lack of communal spaces, especially those that can help with domestic chores, mostly executed by women. Among many alarming statistics on women’s inferiority in agency, the lack of housing alternatives and proper support systems for individuals outside of traditional living conditions is criticized the most. Moreover, the exclusion of men from unpaid housework aggravates the problem and remains largely unchallenged.

Looking for solutions, the author starts by presenting several examples from different countries that started working in the direction of abolishing the boundaries between private domestic labor and paid communal services. Even in the United States, experimental projects that tried to reinvent societal norms took place up until late in the 20th century. But for her, “reorganizing both home and work” to include both women and men working together to contribute to the creation of an egalitarian society is the needed course of action. Hayden calls her solution HOMES (Homemakers Organization for a More Egalitarian Society). Such organization would intend to tackle inequalities in housekeeping and childcare, paid labor, residential segregations and choices for households, on top of revising “unpaid domestic labor and wasteful energy consumption.” Applicable across urban and suburban areas, HOMES optimizes the use of existing facilities while providing opportunities for economic diversity within neighborhoods and increasing demand for services. Thus, the creation of new jobs for services that replace individual private household chores will also contribute to the abolition of sex stereotyping by employing people regardless of their sex, race, skill and hours.

By providing concrete numbers, diagrams and viable frameworks to prove HOMES feasibility, Hayden successfully shapes new guidelines by which non-sexist cities would improve our current state of housing. Her description of the benefits that would rise from the solution provided is the confirmation that such a system should be actively sought for, or at least taken into consideration when rethinking the future of our society that is still entangled in outdated stereotypes.

[Joyce], you already are a great woman [architect].

Portrait of Wieland in her Studio, Beaver Lodge, photographic negative, 1986

In her reframing of Canadian artist Joyce Wieland’s work, feminist historian, and artist Cynthia Hammond challenges prior biography-based interpretations of Wieland’s oeuvre with analyses of four creative works: three paintings, read as self-portraits, and Beaver Lodge, the artist’s former studio and house at 497 Queen St. East, Toronto.

Distinct from critics writing in previous decades, Hammond neither flattens Wieland’s work into a facsimile of her biological and romantic history, nor discredits the artist for her experimentation with media. Rather, she explores themes cited by Wieland: interspecies vitality, the feminist concept of ‘becoming,’ Katherine Mansfield’s conceptualization of Arcadia, and experimental landscape painting. Twenty-eight years prior, the two artists met during Wieland’s exhibition at the McMaster University Art Gallery. Speaking of Hammond’s artistic ambitions and work with feminist themes, Wieland remarked, ‘Cynthia, you already are a great woman artist.’ Through her autobiographical approach, Hammond connects herself to Wieland’s ecosystem, becoming, as in Wieland’s paintings, inseparable from the landscape of Canadian women artists.

The chosen artworks depict abstract figurative representations of women undertaking creative acts, rendered as integral to their environments. Wieland’s expanded definition of a landscape encompasses the women as well as their artistic tools, and the surrounding plants, animals, and natural phenomena. Space and the body, in Wieland’s hands, are both plastic. In both her self-portraits and her work at Beaver Lodge, Wieland practiced self-identification through matter. By extending Wieland’s body of work to include the interiors, landscape, and architectural work she choreographed at Beaver Lodge, Hammond ties the spatial history of the building to Wieland’s creative acts – again, the artist is inseparable from her environment. For Hammond, Wieland’s home and studio is a space of creative possibility and complexity, where the garden and interiors have been morphed into a hybrid of artwork and architecture, just as Wieland rendered her figures into human – non-human abstractions.

Today, a blue oval plaque left of the front door announces, ‘The artist and filmmaker Joyce Wieland … worked and lived here …’, yet Hammond relied on a real estate agent’s 3D tour to identify existing evidence that Wieland directly shaped an architecture for herself and other women artists to support further creation. While the phrase ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’ (‘Here in Arcadia, I am too’) remains carved into the dining room shelving, Wieland’s studio was converted to a primary bedroom and retains little of its original character. Mobilizing historian Abigail Van Slyck’s reading of library interiors as disappearing material evidence of women’s activities in public spaces, how does Beaver Lodge now reflect Joyce Wieland’s complex history, once her studio has been removed? Hammond’s argument for Beaver Lodge as a total work of art compels women writing architecture to search for sites that bear evidence of women artists asserting their spatial agency.

In Cynthia Hammond’s text titled “Suffrage City: spatial knowledge and Suffrage Work in Bath, 1909-1913” written in 2013, she answers “how early twentieth-century feminists used the larger space of the city for their cause” (Hammond 133) in response to “the special nature of suffrage activism in Bath” (Hammond 134). Her goal was to understand how women, in the search for the vote, built up the environment of the city of Bath and why the suffrage movement could be reconciled in a small town. This text by Hammond is a prime example of how to develop a method to study space, particularly city space through the feminist lens. She organizes her brief into four motives: “1) the Window 2) the Bicycle 3) the House and 4) the Luggage Tag”(Hammond 133), objects described in the diary of Mary Bathwayst. These motives help her address the movement of bodies through objects that speak to the “routes, access and points of denial facing” (Hammond 133) the city of Bath. Before moving towards the object scale, she explores the city more broadly through mapping seen in Figure 1 to reveal segregations of class and gender in public and private spaces.

For example, the Bath Central skating rink was used for outdoor skating and city events, including many government speeches as it lay on the border between the upper and lower classes of the area. The Liberal Federation used the rink as a stop on their tour to promote the Manhood Suffrage Bill that would bring even more votes to men ultimately making any bill passed on the women’s side obsolete. This event admitted men only. The objects are used to convey experience and feeling as Hammond feels a map couldn’t. The window-smashing, done in an act of rebellion by Mabel Capper, brought attention to the city of Bath as it shed light on a female reacting to inequality. The Bicycle, is an object of great status to Bathwayst’s life, as she recalls her many visits to the ‘Votes for Women’ shop. The Bicycle acts as an instrument for Bathwayst in the year 1910 to complete her busy days working towards women’s rights. The house, where Bathwayst lived, can be referred to as the most relevant building in Bath in regard to suffrage history. Architecturally, it mirrors the rest of Bath in its residential appearance along with hosting many suffrage events and rehearsals. Finally, the luggage tag represents the danger in which the women of Bath put themselves in to serve the fight for the vote. “The luggage tag incidence” where the Bath Golf Course was vandalized by suffragists, was thought by Hammond to possess a “ special spatial knowledge Bath in addition to some materials that spoke directly to gendered spatial experience” (Hammon 148) that a golf course innately has. Cynthia Hammond’s use of the four objects is proven essential when examining a city as a gendered spatial experience. Rendering these events personal allows the reader to understand the suffragists of Bath. The small city allowed for more links between important spaces for the suffrage movement.

In Alice Friedman’s essay, People Who Live in Glass Houses, she speaks about issues of gender and sexuality in the 20^th century with an emphasis on two iconic buildings: Philip Johnson’s Glass House and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House. While designed and constructed around the same time, the two structures allow for different discussions to arise, touching on topics of agency in the house and transparency versus invisibility.

Friedman argues a complex analysis of both houses individually, drawing attention to their function, form and occupation as she compares the differences between the glass houses. With the compelling exploration of the intricate relationship between architecture and the construction of gender and sexual identities during the modernist era, she navigates through the complex web of connection between spaces, structures, and the humane experience, provoking thought for how architecture played a significant role in shaping societal normals and challenging traditional understandings of the matters.

By examining the works of notable architecture, Friedman reveals how they not only responded to changing norms of the time. The title of the book, which is an adaptation of the common adage “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones”, emphasizes the idea that architectural space can be both revealing and transformative, offering a unique perspective on the intersection of identity and design.

Throughout the essay, the main conflict happens from the point of view of the clients, the user: one single female doctor and another queer architect who occupy these Glass Houses. There is a realization that conventional building types at the time and patterns of domestic planning were inadequate responses to the needs of gendered space, both programmatically and. Ideologically. The main argument on the Farnsworth House becomes the relationship between the architect and the client as Edith Farnsworth explains her view on the house she commissioned for herself and became a public attraction. With the intricate relationship between the architectural ideology the “floating glass house” conveys and the human experience of the client, the question arises: is the ultimate success of the project through the architect and their ideals or the experience of the client?

In contrast to the Farnsworth House, her analysis of Johnson’s Glass House shows a different perspective: the architect becomes the client. The house is a form of exhibitionism to its fullest, the emphasis being on the transparency of what is going on in the so-called living area. Friedman further argues that there is an embrace from Johnson’s side of embracing transparency, unlike Farnsworth. Finally, the contrast between the Guest House and the Glass House catches the attention. The pairing confirms the acknowledgment of Johnson on various subjects: his own need for privacy but also the impossibility of the glass house as a family home, paying tribute to Farnsworth’s alert.

Friedman’s essay provides a refreshing lens through which to examine the multifaceted nature of modernist architecture. It encourages us to consider how built environments have the potential to both reflect and subvert established social hierarchies and prejudices. With the comparisons, she highlights the biases of what queer space can be and how to exist in it.

In Esperdy’s manifesto, Who Needs the Top? An Ungentle Manifesto (2019), she delivers a powerful feminist critique of the architectural profession, focusing on women’s under representation and the prevailing sexism within the field. In this thought-provoking piece, she challenges conventional notions of success and hierarchy in contemporary society and urges readers to reconsider the obsession with reaching the top due to the patriarchal power structures that have historically shaped our understanding of success.

Esperdy argues that this obsession often leads to inequality, exploitation, and a disregard for the well-being of individuals and communities. This manifesto thus takes a bold stance against the male-dominated power structures in architecture, emphasizing the need for women to challenge and reverse these established regimes. In doing so, the author confronts the traditional hierarchy that has marginalized women in contemporary architecture culture. In this context, Esperdy’s manifesto serves as a rallying cry for women to demand their rightful place in the profession.

In addition, the manifesto aligns itself with feminist principles that prioritize collaboration, equality, and social justice. It stresses the importance of dismantling the star system in architecture that often elevates male icons while diminishing the contributions of women. Esperdy highlights the persistent sexism in the field, emphasizing the need to combat it both through media representation and in-person agency.

Esperdy’s manifesto is, in short, a call to action for women within the architectural profession and beyond. Although our professional practice has recently made slow progress in thinking, it urges individuals to challenge the status quo, resist the enduring presence of male icons, and work collectively to create an inclusive architectural culture. In this way, she highlights the imperative of breaking deep-rooted gender biases and promoting a more collaborative and egalitarian environment within our field.

Lillian Chee’s chapter, “Domesticity, Gender, and Architecture” provides a rich analysis of the complex interplay between domesticity, gender, and architecture. The text engages with a variety of disciplines, historical examples, and contemporary perspectives to offer a nuanced understanding of the implications of domestic spaces in shaping and reflecting societal norms.

One key aspect of Chee’s analysis is her exploration of domesticity as a dynamic and contested space. She emphasizes the multifaceted nature of domestic life, moving beyond traditional views of the home as a static, private realm. By incorporating perspectives from geography, ethnography, and cultural studies, Chee demonstrates that the domestic sphere is subject to negotiations, contracts, and exchanges, challenging the notion of a fixed and unchanging concept of home.

There are political implications of domesticity, particularly in relation to power dynamics. Chee discusses the critical geographies of domesticity, highlighting how spatial arrangements within the home can reinforce or challenge existing power relations. The geopolitical influences on domestic spaces, whether through colonization or migration, are examined to reveal how home becomes intertwined with broader political agendas.

The role of domesticity in the context of gender is a central theme of Chee’s analysis. She explores how mundane domestic routines, such as cooking and cleaning, contribute to the reproduction or empowerment of gender relations. By referencing feminist theorists and filmmakers, Chee illustrates how women have used domestic spaces as sites of resistance and self-expression. Her writing underscores the importance of acknowledging the gendered biases inherent in domestic architecture. Chee extends her analysis to the discipline of architecture itself, critiquing the tendency to marginalize domesticity within architectural discourse. She argues for an interdisciplinary approach, contending that understanding domesticity is crucial for comprehending spatial and identitarian politics. The text challenges the perception of domesticity as peripheral to architectural concerns, advocating for its recognition as an essential subject matter. The inclusion of affect and affective evidence in the analysis adds a dimension to the exploration of domesticity. Chee argues that affect, as a relational intensity between objects, spaces, and people, provides a means to unpack the complexities of domestic life. In areas affected by war, conflict, or censorship, affective evidence becomes particularly relevant in contexts where traditional knowledge may be hindered.

The ambiguity of domesticity is acknowledged – simultaneously limiting and emancipatory in its ability to maintain and unravel the status quo. The gendered overtones of domesticity challenge conventional narratives within architectural discourse, offering a critical space for reevaluation and transformation. Chee invites us to reconsider the significance of domestic spaces, viewing them as dynamic sites where societal norms, power relations, and gender dynamics are negotiated and contested. Chee’s interdisciplinary approach paves the way for a more comprehensive understanding of the role of domesticity within the intricate tapestry of architectural discourse, pushing architects to engage more with the socio-cultural dimensions of the spaces we design.

Katarina Bonnevier believes that the house, E. 1027, by Eileen Gray “hides and reveals simultaneously”. Gray’s first built home blurs spatial programmes, without discarding their remains. The building hides the ongoings inside, with an entrance from above and a private terrace at its depth. Bonnevier explains that while that the layout protects its visitors, it simultaneously exclaims their freedom within, encouraging play, pleasure, and rest in shared spaces. Interwoven textiles, repeated finishes, and integrated furniture notate a lack of expectation for the interior’s use, but a central day-bed in the boudoir sets a stage for people to define the space through intimate acts.

Bonnevier describes the project’s reliance on a “player/actor” to engage with sliding walls and screens, to flip windows and fold tables to their liking. The agency to transform space is compared in the analysis to a possibility of an alternate sociality, the building asking you to deviate in order for it come alive as “un organisme vivant”. Suggesting that these instances of architectural queerness (the bending of heteronormative spatial expectations) are dependant on the user’s participation affirms the contemporary role expected of many LGBTQ+ people as accepted, even celebrated, within prescribed constraints. Conventional building practices always include an allowance, expecting the deviancy of land to move built elements within calculated amounts. The project’s performative allowances of deviation spatialize the limitations of queer experience in relation to a female architects’ pressure to operate in a white male dominated industry. Gray uses heteronormative conventions as means to deflect, carving moments of difference into a space predetermined to comply.

The interest in melding together interior with exterior, decorative with tectonic, aligns with Gray’s care for the building’s totality. Gray stated, “The thing constructed has greater importance than the way one has constructed it” and “the architecture itself should be its own decoration”. By integrating “decorative” elements like furniture and textiles with the structural materials, Gray names them as architectural, implicating their importance. Another way to deviate from heteronormative conventions may not have relied on structural components to qualify the legitimacy of their non-structural counterparts. While Gray may have felt that ornaments fixed to the room communicate essentiality, it may also express the limitations of architecture to enact social change while the profession is funded, shaped and analyzed to reinforce heteronormative superiority. Bonnevier commends E.1027 for its opposition of “a simplistic architecture of opposites”, which is a statement I would attribute to the project’s incapacity to revolt in entirety, utilizing modernist protocol to project freedom without ensuring it.

Desai’s introduction to “Women Architects in India” encapsulates perfectly how similar the discourse of feminism in architecture is across the world. It is not particularly limited to the western world (although many of the regions that reveal a similar fight have in the past been colonized by a western entity). With certain contextual nuances in mind, similar fights for feminism in architecture are in effect globally.

Starting a family and childbearing generally overlapping with crucial career progression, women and “women’s practice” being “almost exclusively associated with domestic architecture and/or interior ‘decoration’” (7, Desai, Madhavi), an obvious gender imbalance in individuals in leading, high-level positions – are some of the struggles women consistently experience in the field of architecture.

Desai’s insights remind me of the documentary titled “Arab Women in Architecture,” where Arab architects, historians, conservationists, landscape architects, and interior designers share their experiences, insights, and achievements in the field. In a similar vein, this dynamic also exists in the Arab world. Suad Amiry, a Palestinian architect who was the second women to attend the Architecture program at the University of Beirut in 1970 recalls how when she entered the program as the second female, the Architecture School was nicknamed “the Guy’s college”. Meisa Batayneh explains how, when her kids became of adolescent age, she had to make an intentional decision to pause the competition projects her firm would participate in, despite knowing the influential recogni8on that said projects would bring.

In an attempt to rectify the little exposure these women have received (for one reason or another), I have listed their names as they appear in the documentary. I see this as a table of contents (similar to the one Despai does in her book). In writing their names, we shed light on these influential women, but also give opportunity for their full stories and narratives to be recovered in the future.

Shadia Touqan
Rula Yaghmour
Basma Uraiqat
Jala Makhzoumi
Mayyasah Akour
Simone Kosremelli
Suad Amiry
Howayda Al Harithy
Nida’ Masannat
Leen Fakhoury
Hana Alamuddin
Meisa Batayneh
Shahira Fahmy
Saja Nashashibi
Nemeh Al-Qatanani
Bernard Khoury (speaking of his mother, whose name is not mentioned)
Fadwa Abu Ghaida
Sandra Hiari
Nora Akawi

“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” (de Beauvoir, 1949)

Simone de Beauvoir’s work as a pioneering feminist philosopher and writer is not lost on anyone. In her most famous contribution to feminist theory, “The Second Sex” published in 1949, she challenged traditional conceptions of gender by introducing the notion of “Woman as Other”. This relational theory proposed a new understanding of femininity by positing that womanhood has only been defined in relation to what man is not.

In de Beauvoir’s words, “woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity [from man].”¹ According to her, the very essence of woman is contingent upon her being juxtaposed with man – a perspective rooted in the historical interpretation of woman’s biological difference as inferiority. This bold assertion was a strong call to reconsider the deeply entrenched societal norms that relegated women to a subordinate position where they were stripped of individuality, subjecting them to a state of dependency on their male counterparts. De Beauvoir astutely distinguishes between sex, the biological differences between male and female, and socially constructed gender roles, which were – and still are – imbued with power dynamics and expectations. Her analysis shattered the illusion that femininity was an inherent, immutable trait, emphasizing instead that it was a product of cultural and historical context. Such a take was evidently revolutionary at a time when rigid gender norms permeated every aspect of society.

Moreover, because de Beauvoir’s insights extended beyond binary understandings of gender, she provides a theoretical framework that could encompass queer experiences. The notion of “otherness” she articulated spoke not only to the condition of women in a patriarchal system, but also resonated with those who simply did not conform to conventional notions of sexuality and identity. This way, de Beauvoir laid the foundation for a more inclusive feminist theory that acknowledged, in a broader scope, the diversity of human experiences. However, this also speaks to the limitations of her writing as it notably overlooks the complex intersections of racial categories and social classes with women’s perceived “otherness”. The experiences of women of colour, disabled women and of those coming from unprivileged socio-economic backgrounds are distinct and influenced by multifaceted layers of discrimination. De Beauvoir’s work, while innovative for its time, does not fully account for the intricacies of these intersecting identities and the unique challenges they face, thus necessitating a more nuanced exploration of intersectionality².

In closing, it is still worth noting that Simone de Beauvoir’s writings laid crucial groundwork for feminist theory. Scholarship has since evolved, and contemporary feminist thinkers continue to build on her legacy, recognizing both the enduring relevance of her contributions and the need for ongoing refinement and expansion in the pursuit of gender equity and social justice.

¹ Being “only the negative” is understood in relation to man as the positive. “Man” stands for the positive and the neutral, the gender through which human beings in general are understood and is thus the universal subject to woman as the “Other.” It is “Man” who stands for mankind. Beauvoir, Simone de, and Judith Thurman. 2011. The Second Sex.
² “Intersectionality”, a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, precisely addresses this issue of theoretical studies often failing to acknowledge that individuals hold multiple identities that intersect in multiple ways and lead to unique experiences of oppression or privilege. In Crenshaw’s perspective, women’s experiences are not uniform, and various aspects of their identity (such as race, class, sexuality, disability, etc.) intersect to shape their individual realities. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 2014. On Intersectionality: Essential Writings.

Beatriz Colomina discusses the vandalism rendered by Le Corbusier on E. 1027, a house designed, built, and inhabited by the architect Eileen Gray. The author presents the degrees of Le Corbusier’s invasion on Gray’s architecture and identity and compares it to the traces of violence of the bullet marks left all over the walls of the house from World War II. Colomina uses sources, photos, mural and letters to retrace the series of events that lead to confusion and the polemic misreading of the space. The author describes the first case of invasion as the execution of eight murals on the walls of  Gray’s house. Le Corbusier admits that the murals dematerialize the pure white wall characteristic of Gray’s modern building, writing over her intention of the space.

Colomina exposes a second invasion. Le Corbusier represents  Gray and her partner Jean Badovici, with whom she shared the house, in a mural that he refers to as “Sous le pilotis,” “Graffite à Cap Martin” and “Three women.” The mural questions  Gray’s sexuality as a lesbian and, at the same time, dictates her expected social feminine role with the figure in the middle that he describes as “the desired child, who was never born.” Le Corbusier projects a retraced image of  Gray’s sexuality as a fetish on the wall, in the same way he recreates “Les Femmes de la Casbah” of his travel of Algiers by drawing from a post card of the place and then redrawing from his own drawings repeatedly. Colomina expresses the association of the body and identity of a women with an architectural piece by Le Corbusier. The woman becomes an object used as he pleases.

The third element to the invasion of Eileen Gray’s house is the wooden cabin built by Le Corbusier next to her house, that originally cannot be accessed from any road, Roquebrune at Cap Martin in France. Le Corbusier erases Eileen Gray’s intention of isolation of the building and represents a building that overlooks her privacy. Lastly, Le Corbusier published his murals in the collection of his works, without mentioning Gray. Le Corbusier’s name was lately associated with the design of the house, erasing Eileen Gray from her own project.

Exactly 90 years ago, in A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf delineated the necessary conditions for the creation of pure poetry. The foundation of her argument was the so-called room of one’s own, meant both as a weighty symbol and as a very concrete place of retreat, where one can think of things in themselves, idle, contemplate the future or the past of the world, dream over books and “let the line of thought dip deep into the stream”.

The origin of these ideas can be found in the England of the 1920s; a period of upheaval, when pedestrians, horse-drawn carriages, bicycles and automobiles all shared the streets of London. This was a time when female students at Oxford University finally received the right to study for the same degrees as their male colleagues. But then, a year later at Cambridge University, the decision is made to block this very same policy. Students celebrate by destroying a monument to Anne Jemima Clough. This place – England – is where radio waves are transmitted for the very first time, and where the BBC extends its area of coverage to the whole of the British Isles within a mere three years. It is, too, the heyday of the English imperialism: the British Empire encompasses 458 million inhabitants (a quarter of the world’s population at the time), making it the largest empire of all time.

In 1929 Virginia Woolf described a situation without which the writing of pure poetry is impossible. A situation which can only be achieved when certain basic requirements of space, time and spirit are met. In doing so, she denounces a society that has until then hindered the very existence of female poets:

It is important to have a room of one’s own, which is reserved for oneself alone. It offers the possibility to be oneself, to think of things in themselves, and bars admission to any distraction. It offers time to linger and to become engrossed, without any deadline that may expire.

A social counterpart is needed: a society that is curious about thinking. Indifference should not exist, nor should hostility. A community is needed to prevent the mind from being mislead, to avoid feelings of resentfulness, protest, anger, bitterness or fear. Only in such conditions can the mind arise that is androgynous, porous and resonant, and is freed from expectations of how it must fit within the social order.

The path to education must be free. There must be a universal basic income of CHF 30’000 per year*, to guarantee independence and free one from having to work in grey suits for some unknown person or thing.

Woolf gives a hopeful prognosis for the year she is in: Shakespeare’s sister may well be born – a poet with an androgynous mind, with the same talent and carefree life as her brother, who enjoys the conditions stipulated by Woolf, who has the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what she thinks.

The birth of Shakespeare’s sister – and thus of Woolf’s hopes in the possible realization of the social structures she’s called for – is imagined in today’s world, a time nine years after the Swiss Federal Council first contains a majority of women; in a decade when the Swiss electorate has its first opportunity to vote on a referendum for the Universal Basic Income, when the term ‘fake news’ has entered our dictionaries and the Democratic Republic of the Congo holds the last place on the Human Development Index of the United Nations. Her prediction coincides with the thirtieth anniversary of the World Wide Web.

In our present, without explicitly referencing Woolf’s texts, Rita Siegried paints spaces which show us the room of one’s own: they remind us of Woolf’s aspirations for the contemporary world. The motifs seem familiar, they seem to show what has already become part of our material reality. And yet Siegried’s works still leave us with a feeling of longing. The moments in which we can linger and become engrossed seem rare; an androgynous, porous and resonant mind turns out to be the exception to the rule. Let us together take the final steps to this goal.

For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

-Woolf, Virginia: A Room of One’s Own.

* Virginia Woolf donated the sum of £500 per year in 1929, which would be about CHF 30,000 today.

Text for Exhibition <Rita Siegfried : A Room of One’s Own>

28.04.2019 —01.06.2019

at Milieu in Bern

Virginia Woolf asks in her text why women publish so little. One of her answers is that they usually do not have their own room. In this context, ‘one’s own room’ stands symbolically both in real spatial terms as a place of demarcation, but also in a figurative sense as a space for thoughts and the possibility for personal development, whereby the mental demarcation, for example, from family and other flatmates plays an important role. The possible demarcation, the withdrawal from the ‘public’ spaces of a flat is elementary to be able to produce something of one’s own. Now, this statement is very significant for me as an architect. We are always building and thinking about living spaces, such as flats or houses, where we should allow this kind of retreat and this type of work. We create possibilities of ways of living with our designs. The proportions of rooms and the design of their basic elements such as wall, floor, ceiling, column, and the openings in them, which can be closed with doors and windows, are important in everyday life as well as in the creation of living spaces. A room gets a specific atmosphere through the architectural elements and also gets a political and social dimension through Woolf’s book ‘A Room of One’s Own’. This is precisely where my interest in architecture and fascination with this text lies.

A Room of One’s Own is an extended essay published first in 1929, based on the lectures Woolf delivered at two women’s colleges at Cambridge University. Woolf’s writing is about the women’s struggle for independence and creative opportunity and is a landmark in feminist writing.

At the commencement of the essay Woolf narrates how she set off to write this essay and her walk through the college deep in thought; in her description of the journey she alludes to the boundaries that limit us; she walks on the campus lawn and is immediately called up by a guard. Woolf says ‘he was a Beadle, I was a woman. This was the turf, there was the path’. Only Fellows and scholars were allowed on the lawn. In the process of being called off the turf Woolf loses her trend of thought. Her description of boundaries resonates with my experiences as a female growing up in a conservative family from the south of Sri Lanka; I was constantly encountering boundaries which I had to adhere to and to which my male cousins were not subjected to. I realised quite early in life that higher education was not a choice but a necessary way of escape.

A Room of One’s Own is important not only for its critique of the patriarchy of the time but also for its passionate assertion of women’s creative originality.

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.

‘It’s time to write women architects back into history’ is the first message Despina Stratigakos conveys as a subtitle of her article ‘Unforgetting Women Architects: From the Pritzker to Wikipedia’. This sentence indeed expresses the urgency of the matter. The Flanders Architecture Institute is commencing this writing back into history’ on a Belgian scale with Wiki Women Design.

Stratigakos’ step-by-step analysis of why women architects have been excluded from public awareness, and the clear argumentation of why contributing to Wikipedia is the most logical, inclusive, and straightforward solution to the problem in our digital age, form both the foundation of and the leading thread through the project.

She writes: ‘…damnatio memoriae, after the ancient Roman judgment passed on a person who was condemned not to be remembered…Today, in modern architectural history, it’s simply what we do to women architects’.

The forgetting of women architects is due to numerous and diverse reasons, some of which form a vicious cycle. Museums, archives, and libraries have neglected to collect women’s work, making traditional research methods impossible. This has led to the absence of female architects in architectural history books, which again has led to them being considered irrelevant for institutions, keeping them difficult to research, and so on. However, the last 20 years have seen an increase in publications on women architects. This knowledge, unfortunately, is still largely invisible and women still rarely appear in course syllabi or major museum collections. ‘The books and articles alone have not been enough to build a collective memory that recognises women architects’. The solution to making this knowledge publicly known, is to make them Googleable.

Wiki Women Design’s goal is the recuperatio memoriae of women who’ve contributed to Belgian design heritage. Through publication of articles on Wikipedia, Wiki Women Design aims to break the vicious cycle, allowing this knowledge to become accessible and more generally known. The presence of women’s contributions in the collections of Wiki Women Design’s partner institutions is also re-investigated.

Aiming to be as inclusive as possible, Wiki Women Design calls on the collaboration of its partner institutions, students, volunteers, and the Wikipedia community to publish more histories of women into the World Wide Web.

Very fittingly, Despina Stratigakos concludes the article with the following quote from Sue Gardner of the Wikimedia foundation: ‘Wikipedia will only be as diverse as the population itself: you can help make that happen. And I can’t think of anything more important to do, than that.’

In Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1870-1900, Annmarie Adams explores the middle-class home in nineteenth century England as a battleground among health reform minded women, doctors, and architects. Middle-class women positioned themselves as the healers of houses, which Victorians considered toxic and disease-ridden, and thus a potential mortal danger to their inhabitants. The considerable control women exerted over domestic spaces in this era waned in later decades, as male architects asserted their authority over hygienic housing. After reading Adams’ fascinating book, I never looked at houses –with their nooks and pipes and vents – in quite the same way again.

Jane Rendell’s introductory writing to part two of the book Gender Space Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction provides a feminist discourse on the intricate relations between gender and space. A series of multidisciplinary gender analyses are drawn upon to challenge the existing paradigm of classifying spaces according to the biological sex of its users (e.g. public bathrooms). Instead, the writing is structured around the novel perspective of associating space to gender based on the daily activities performed by the occupants (e.g.kitchen).

The first part of the writing builds upon works of geographers and anthropologists to argue that space is parameterized by society and culture. As opposed to innate and inert, space is in a constant state of reproduction, subjecting to the agency of its occupants. Reversely, as occupants form a dependent and intimate relationship with the space they inhabit, the space unconsciously becomes a major parameter governing their day-to-day, ultimately shaping the affiliated social and cultural productions.

Anthropology research first suggested a connection between the gendering of space and power relations, especially those relating to patriarchal and capitalist ideologies. Examples such as the exclusion of women from certain spaces reinforce the statement that space is often a manifestation of power. This relates to the work of female geographers who argue that “space is produced by and productive of gender relations”, in which the impact of gender to society is comparative to the intangible yet evident impact gender asserts on the built environment. Gender, then, influences the systematic structure to both space and society.

Rendell then moves on to investigate the ways in which gender and space are represented. The prevailing “separate spheres” paradigm is based on the binary hierarchy: the public realm of production is associated with male entities; the domestic scenes of reproduction are associated with femininity, treated as the negative complementary to the positive. This problematic perspective can be deconstructed by building alternative frameworks to describe the gendering of spaces, a process Rendell had broken down into 3 steps. Beginning with the reversal of binary terms, the positions of the positive and negative in the pair are interchanged to take on new meanings. The second step is the movement of displacement in which the negative term must be displaced from its dependency of the positive to become an individual entity. The third step can be theorized from studies done by Griselda Pollock on male impressionist paintings. The paintings offer a variety of visual representations pointing to the dominating effect of the male gaze on female relations to the urban domain, where women are often placed at the center of male desire and scrutinized as objects of pleasure. This idea draws attention to the relations between looking and moving, creating a new intervention that includes and exceeds the scope of the binary hierarchy.

The last part of Rendell’s writing focuses on investigating the role of space in the construction of female subjectivity, identity and experience through examining the use of feminine metaphoric devices. Cities and countries are often assigned the pronouns “she/her”, forming an analogy associating their nurturing characteristics with the uterine form of the female body and its associated shape, colour and texture. Additionally, several spatial metaphors can be drawn upon to make the distinction between the acts of “position” and “place”. Rendell analyzes bell hooks’ theory of the margin and center, in which the margin is seen as an expression of emancipation: “a site of resistance not domination, of both radical possibility and oppression”. Choosing to be positioned in the margin, instead of being placed, is a radical and fundamental step to the construction of feminist spatial theory and the feminine identity.

It remains a topic for debate whether a framework can be pin-pointed to unequivocally describe the relations between space and gender. I hereby argue this is hardly realistic since the concept of gender is a form of social, historical and cultural representation which is inherently objective. The relations women experience between gender and space vary as a result of many factors including knowledge, experience and environment. Existing relational frameworks are often biased due to the patriarchal and capitalist ideologies they’re constructed upon. They designate the exclusion of women from certain spaces, strategically marginalize women and contribute to the erasure of feminist identity and values. Rendell’s writing provides an array of the different attempts made by women at resisting these discriminatory gender-spatial boundaries in the material and metaphorical sense, working towards the ultimate goal of setting a true feminist narrative for themselves.

Throughout architectural history, women were always in the background, many shadowed by their male coworkers or husbands. Just like Denise Scott Brown with Robert Venturi, incredibly talented female architects had major roles in contributing to great designs, but never received the recognition they deserved. In this text, Scott Brown advocates for the importance of accurately mentioning who contributed to what part of architectural works. Without recognition, female architects might feel self-doubt and confusion and think they are ‘dull thinkers’, she says. Then, Scott Brown explains her main argument: this lack of recognition is due to the architecture Star System. This system is unfair and hard on women because it thrives in a sexist environment. The Star System of Architecture over-represents male gurus and omits the complex relationships happening under the designer at the top.

Figure 1: Montage of ‘the greatest architects of all time’. These male figures were our gurus from the very first day we started architecture school. The female contributions behind their work were never mentioned.

My favourite part of the text was when the author talked about the source of the problem: the education in architecture schools. Indeed, the promotion of the Star System starts early in an architect’s life. Teachers show us early on that the best designs were all made by male architects (figure 1) and that a toxic office and studio culture made them successful. There is no room for broader views of the profession. Indeed, fantasizing about doing the same designs as male gurus comes from authoritarian and judgmental educational techniques that we were thought in architecture school. Unfortunately, after five years of studying the Star System, this will undoubtedly and subconsciously be the model students will want to reproduce. This has great consequences. After their studies, women will be tempted to be part of the men’s club (figure 2). Instead of building their own identity, they will try to fit in and do what male architects do. If students only have male architect models, women will become as macho as them because they will think it is the only way to survive in this competitive world.

Figure 2: Norma Merrick Sklarek in meeting. The few female architects mentioned to us at school were exceptions that were able to fight for recognition in a male-dominated sexist environment.

Moreover, Scott Brown’s article is not that much about herself wanting to be recognized, but rather about revealing that her story is a more common phenomenon than we think. She is not alone in feeling that there has never been much room for women at the top. She is stating loudly that most women experienced discrimination, and we must talk about this issue. She makes women want to be more aware of the forces around them, understanding their role, how people see and treat them and what they should fight for. Finally, after reading this text I am more aware that speaking up about female injustices in architecture is important. To my great surprise, people might relate, tag along and support me. Just like Denise Scott Brown noticed during her conferences and talks, if I speak up, I will quickly see that many people identify to my experiences

In Denise Scott Brown’s “Room at the Top? Sexism and the Star System in Architecture”, the author recounts her experiences and observations of sexism in the field of architecture. She criticizes the star system for perpetuating the oversight of women’s contributions and positions no matter how significant. Scott Brown’s observations of the vicious circle generated by the star system and of critics as complicit make a compelling case against the system. In the text, she writes that the critic’s “satisfaction comes from making history in his and their image. The kingmaker-critic is, of course, male; though he may write of the group as a group, he would be a poor fool in his eyes and theirs if he tried to crown the whole group king” (Scott Brown 1989, 262). The architecture world is dominated by men who design for men who critique, write, and document architectural history for men. In a vicious circle, content reinforces culture reinforcing content. To deny the star system is to deny yourself a successful or engaging position within the field. Exclude the other in your narrative as a writer or be excluded. Young women critics “become as macho as the men and for the same reasons – to survive and win in the competitive world of critics” (Scott Brown 1989, 264). Is successful content then truly due to skill and critical thinking or the ability to conform? The system is hermetic and stifles creativity, collaboration, and truth. Countless contributions remain to be documented and written about. If critics and writers hope to represent a truer reflection of the field, pretending that collaborative work, a reality, is solely the work of a single individual should end.

Originally penned in 1975 and held from publication for fear of a ‘hostile reception’, this article is an honest and important record of architect Denise Scott Brown’s encounters with misogyny as a professional. Even today, despite the progress made by multiple waves of feminism and the more recent #MeToo movement, women still have a distance to go to achieve equitable treatment in the architecture profession. She writes: ‘these experiences have caused me to fight, suffer doubt and confusion, and expend too much energy’—sadly, Scott Brown’s descriptions still resonate.