An all-day event on women in architecture marked the second day of the World Congress of Architecture in Istanbul. The event hosted women architects from the United States, Britain, Turkey, Canada and Hong Kong, who explored the difference women make in modern architecture. From the Turkish Daily News
Denise Scott Brown delivered the first presentation of the all-day event, showing slides of her recent work, the Hȏtel du Département de la Haute Garonne in Toulouse, a regional governmental building in which she made significant use of the surroundings of the building and the fabric of the city of Toulouse itself.
The African-born architect, urban planner and teacher stressed the difficulties posed by stereotyping in the profession, indicating that people have persistently denied her work as an architect but opted to recognize her as a planner.
"At the highest levels of our profession, sexism is still rampant," Scott Brown told an overwhelmingly female audience.
"They said until Zaha [Hadid] women that women couldn't design." She said that even if there are more women architects now, as well as more African-Americans, Hispanics, etc., women have been treated as a minority, and she praised diversification in architecture. If aspiring women architects lack a feminist awareness, they may feel that what they are experiencing is their own fault, according to Scott Brown. "So I believe we women architects should not drop our solidarity or our feminism -- we will need both in our careers," she said.
She said anyone who grows up as a minority is destined to be of two minds. On the one hand they ardently want to be like the majority while at the same time they hold "values derived from our parallel identities."
But Scott Brown thinks these conflicts will spur creativity "because unsolved problems galvanize."
"We don't know if women think differently than men, and we may not know it for a long time," Scott Brown said. "Let's rather enjoy our differences and make the most of them. Yet, female or not, my personal way of viewing context, of deriving design from the urban scale, is a useful offering to architecture," she said.
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