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A new planned community is built on the urban design philosophy known as ‘gender mainstreaming.’ [...]
Ms. Kail acknowledges that the parameters of gender mainstreaming are in flux. Where there used to be “a focus on the everyday life of white, middle-class women and their children,” she said, over the past decade or so, a new crop of urban planners has widened the lens, just as she’s stepping out of it.
— The New York Times
Vienna (the city previously declared by the Times to be a "renters utopia") owes a tremendous thanks to Eva Kail for its apparent equity strides. Though recently retired, the urban planner touts the new Aspern Seestadt development and its "female face" as the embodiment of the movement to infuse... View full entry
Residents of Mexico City are decrying a decision by officials to remove a statue protesting gender violence that had been mounted by activists last year.
El Universal reported that Claudia Sheinbaum, who serves as Head of Government in Mexico City (a position akin to a state governor), had made the call to remove the feminist “anti-monument.” The statue currently appears in a roundabout in the city, and will soon be replaced by another monument
— ARTnews
Sheinbaum has previously announced the commission of artist Pedro Reyes to replace a colonial-era sculpture by Frenchman Charles Cordier that depicted Christopher Columbus in light of the International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples protest last summer. Previously on Archinect... View full entry
Los Angeles-based critic and curator Mimi Zeiger has developed Feminisms: 1974 to Now, a curated video playlist of lectures that have taken place at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) over the decades highlighting "feminist thought and dialogue" at the... View full entry
Featuring a talk by Dr. Ann Rubbo on the artist and architect Marion Mahony Griffin, this screening of "A Girl is a Fellow Here: 100 Women Architects in the Studio of Frank Lloyd Wright" at the Center for Architecture in New York on June 28th at 6 p.m. investigates Wright's history of working... View full entry
The Modulor Man is a healthy white male enhanced by mathematical proportional gimmicks ‘of nature’, such as golden ratio and Fibonacci series. He represents the normative and normalised body around which Le Corbusier conceived his designs. As a result, most modern architectural forms are all tellingly calibrated on a similar standard, the healthy white male body. — failedarchitecture.com
"Given the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s groundbreaking research regarding medicalisation in architecture and its extensive Le Corbusier collection," the author Federica Buzzi writes, "I think it is time to address the role of norm and standard in Le Corbusier’s work and its legacy." View full entry
In this interview with PSMag, ArchiteXX co-founder and Syracuse University School of Architecture professor Lori Brown talks about the difficulties and rewards of attempting to design while female. She's specifically asked about how an architect attempts to integrate feminist notions of design... View full entry
SCI-Arc has announced its Spring 2017 lecture series. And not a single female architect was included in the list. Really, SCI-Arc?Granted, the roster includes historian and theorist Sylvia Lavin as well as the artist Amalia Ulman—but the lack of a single practicing female architect is pretty... View full entry
After Ms. Hadid died on March 31 at 65, The New York Times, in an informal online questionnaire, asked female architects among its readers to talk candidly about their experiences in the profession: the progress they’ve made and the obstacles they still face on construction sites and in client meetings. Below are edited excerpts from a few of some 200 responses we received. — The New York Times
Architecture, already a tough field, can be even more challenging if you happen to be female. As Christine Matheu from Bloomington, Indiana recalls in this article, “There was a time when women were not allowed to be members of the Century Club. About that same time, as a young architect... View full entry
In 2000, women represented 13 percent of registered architects; today, that number stands at 19 percent. If this rate of progress holds, we’ll have to wait until 2093 before we reach a 50-50 gender split...Yet numbers alone won’t ensure retention if architecture’s gender-biased professional culture remains unchanged. Ten or 20 years from now, we may still be asking ourselves, 'Where are the women architects?' — Metropolis Magazine
Despina Stratigakos — whose Architect Barbie collaboration sparked heated debate a few years ago — reflects on architecture's glacial progress toward gender equity as well as the profession's emerging "third wave of feminism".More related to equity in architecture:Why International Women's... View full entry
You’ve probably heard that today is International Women’s Day. But what exactly is it? And why is it important?For many in the global West, the significance of March 8th is probably a lot less familiar than, say, Mother’s Day. In fact, the holidays originated around the same time, during the... View full entry
Women are architecture's original rebels. Over 120 years ago, they insisted that architecture schools and professional organisations open their doors to women, arguing that the field would thrive (or wither) according to the diversity of its students and practitioners...And yet despite this long history of challenging architecture to be inclusive, women have been given little credit for their contributions. — Al Jazeera
Despina Stratigakos, historian and University at Buffalo architecture professor highlights in her Opinion article how women in architecture have challenged and continue to challenge the deep-rooted patriarchy in the field of architecture throughout the past century. Although there is a growing... View full entry
New tumblr blog that looks at "outrageously gender-imbalanced lecture series, etc." send observed inequalities to feministwall at gmail dot com. — feministwall.tumblr.com
Modern architecture, despite breaking with the past stylistically, nonetheless maintains this image of the gifted architect as a lone autonomous genius who overcomes gravity and prevails over his client [...]
Rather than an inner activity done in solitude, it has been found that people often discover their thoughts and ideas through interactions with others [...]
The centrality of collaboration in architecture is often overlooked in a culture celebrating and branding “starchitects.”
— Lilith
Referring to recent statistics concerning women in architectural practice and the Denise Scott Brown Pritzker controversy, architect Esther Sperber calls for an overhaul of how we think about creativity and authorship in architecture. Her piece for Lilith, "Revising Our Ideas about... View full entry
I think the development of design and planning ideas over the past three decades is where feminism has actually been most effective but least acknowledged...Architecture and planning have been reshaped by these feminist agendas in many areas...but I don’t believe academic culture acknowledges explicitly the influence of feminist ideas on the architectural and urban design practices and projects of the past three decades. - Torre — The Architectural League
The Architectural League has published some of the content (the introductory essay) of Susan Torres's 1977 exhibition/book Women in American Architecture. They also released an interview with Susana Torre conducted earlier this year, by Rosalie Genevro and Anne Rieselbach. h/t @amlblog here View full entry
My own conviction is that the most meaningful prolonged response to the Pritzker — but much more, to the entrenched discrimination it both reflects and reinforces — will involve political action directed toward measureable change. It will involve ramping up the current professional and cultural conversation — now focused on sharing experiences, promoting awareness, influencing leaders in the field — and articulating specific goals, definable outcomes. — Places Journal
Lately the subject of women's status in architecture — long dismissed as essentialist and unnecessary — has bounded back onto the agenda. As recent articles, books, exhibitions, online discussions and petition campaigns all attest, the full integration of the profession remains a... View full entry
