Financial Times, February 23, 1997, p. V.
Female designs for living
Jeremy Myerson on why the building site is a battle ground
for the sexes
THE SEX OF ARCHITECTURE
edited by Diana Agrest, Patricia Conway and Leslie Kanes
Weisman
Harry N. Abrams, $19.95. 320 pages
Anyone who has followed the shabby treatment meted out to
Zaha Hadid the thwarted competition-winning architect of
the Cardiff Bay Opera House, will recognise just how tough
it is for women architects to succeed. Architecture remains
a ridiculously male-dominated profession and the building
site a battle of the sexes. This is despite growing
evidence suggesting that traditional male design
preoccupations with power, control, intellect, systems and
the machine are inadequate to respond to our fears about
the future of our cities and the fragility of our
environment.
It is bad enough in Britain where only 10 per cent of
registered architects are women, and the only female
recipients of the RIBA Gold Medal - Ray Eames and Patricia
Hopkins - were given their prestigious gongs for work in
partnership with their husbands. But it is even worse in
the US, as the editors of this new American anthology of
feminist academic writing point out. Over there, the number
of female architects is around 8 per cent, no woman has
been given a nationally significant building commission,
and women have little or representation either as
architectural critics or educational policy makers.
"The Sex of Architecture" sets out to redress the gender
balance. Its 24 essays are drawn from women in US
universities and practices who want a radical rethink of
the entire philosophy of architecture. The thesis that
eventually emerges says that the best answers to such
diverse challenges as ageing populations, cultural
diversity, ecological damage,and information overload are
feminist ones in which team-working, shared knowledge and
ethical standpoints replace the traditionally selfsh
pursuits of the solo virtuoso (male) designer.
Along the way, many received "truths" are questioned: that
man builds and woman inhabits; that man is connected with
production and the city, and women with consumption and the
home; that man is public and woman private; that nature is
female and culture - "the ultimate triumph over nature" -
is male. As one writer puts it, "Everyone's first
environment is a woman". A resonant theme of the book
deals with the dichotomy in American popular culture,
particularly movies, between the city as evil and the
countryside (and later the surburbs) as good. Christine
Boyer points out in an excellent study of the role of the
femme fatale in film noir, how the city "is a locus of
alienation and depravity, a dangerous and transitory no
place of unexpected happenings and surprise endings, a land
of used car-lots and fleabag hotels ..."
Joan Ockman, meanwhile, constrasts the masculine image of
the New York office block, Lever House, an icon of
international style modernism designed by SOM in 1952, with
Bernard Hoffman's 1948 photograph in Life magazine of
Levittown, the embodiment of suburban domesticity. How, she
asks, can two such contrasting strands coexist in postwar
American architecture? Part of the answer lies in the
acceptance of the machine-age Euro-modernist aesthetic at
work in public, but not in the American home. Some of the
essays take us back to the European roots of modernism and
show us the woman as architectural patron (Truus Schroder
and the Rietveld Schroder House of 1924) as well as the
woman architect as victim (Eileen Gray. whose Mediterranean
villa at Cap Martin in France was defaced by Corbusier's
murals).
Corbusier could in fact claim more than one female victim
- his appropriation of the credit for Charlotte Perriand's
classic modern furniture has become one of this century's
classic gender grudges. The sense of victimhood persists
with Esther Da Costa Meyer's study of agrophobia, which
Freud theorised as a "female malady", and which today is
linked by the writer to the prevalence of rape.
This is not, it must be said, a volume that clears a path
through the urban jungle of cultural theory. Rather, it
drops you right into that dense academic thicket populated
by the likes of Derrida and Foucault with only a flimsy
penkife to hack your way out. Some of the contributions
have footnotes as long as the essays; others are paired for
parallel dialogue in ways which sometimes confuse as much
as clarify the subject under discussion.
It is also easy to dismiss some of the writing as the work
of some transatlantic Paula Spart. Less easy to dismiss are
the crystallising ideas that guide this compilation and the
general flavour of a political call to arms. As the book
says, to design for women is to design for a different
social order. If you have ever wondered what the world
might have looked like if Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe
and Frank Lloyd Wright had been women and not men, this
might begin to tell you.
[End]
Female designs for living
Jeremy Myerson on why the building site is a battle ground
for the sexes
THE SEX OF ARCHITECTURE
edited by Diana Agrest, Patricia Conway and Leslie Kanes
Weisman
Harry N. Abrams, $19.95. 320 pages
Anyone who has followed the shabby treatment meted out to
Zaha Hadid the thwarted competition-winning architect of
the Cardiff Bay Opera House, will recognise just how tough
it is for women architects to succeed. Architecture remains
a ridiculously male-dominated profession and the building
site a battle of the sexes. This is despite growing
evidence suggesting that traditional male design
preoccupations with power, control, intellect, systems and
the machine are inadequate to respond to our fears about
the future of our cities and the fragility of our
environment.
It is bad enough in Britain where only 10 per cent of
registered architects are women, and the only female
recipients of the RIBA Gold Medal - Ray Eames and Patricia
Hopkins - were given their prestigious gongs for work in
partnership with their husbands. But it is even worse in
the US, as the editors of this new American anthology of
feminist academic writing point out. Over there, the number
of female architects is around 8 per cent, no woman has
been given a nationally significant building commission,
and women have little or representation either as
architectural critics or educational policy makers.
"The Sex of Architecture" sets out to redress the gender
balance. Its 24 essays are drawn from women in US
universities and practices who want a radical rethink of
the entire philosophy of architecture. The thesis that
eventually emerges says that the best answers to such
diverse challenges as ageing populations, cultural
diversity, ecological damage,and information overload are
feminist ones in which team-working, shared knowledge and
ethical standpoints replace the traditionally selfsh
pursuits of the solo virtuoso (male) designer.
Along the way, many received "truths" are questioned: that
man builds and woman inhabits; that man is connected with
production and the city, and women with consumption and the
home; that man is public and woman private; that nature is
female and culture - "the ultimate triumph over nature" -
is male. As one writer puts it, "Everyone's first
environment is a woman". A resonant theme of the book
deals with the dichotomy in American popular culture,
particularly movies, between the city as evil and the
countryside (and later the surburbs) as good. Christine
Boyer points out in an excellent study of the role of the
femme fatale in film noir, how the city "is a locus of
alienation and depravity, a dangerous and transitory no
place of unexpected happenings and surprise endings, a land
of used car-lots and fleabag hotels ..."
Joan Ockman, meanwhile, constrasts the masculine image of
the New York office block, Lever House, an icon of
international style modernism designed by SOM in 1952, with
Bernard Hoffman's 1948 photograph in Life magazine of
Levittown, the embodiment of suburban domesticity. How, she
asks, can two such contrasting strands coexist in postwar
American architecture? Part of the answer lies in the
acceptance of the machine-age Euro-modernist aesthetic at
work in public, but not in the American home. Some of the
essays take us back to the European roots of modernism and
show us the woman as architectural patron (Truus Schroder
and the Rietveld Schroder House of 1924) as well as the
woman architect as victim (Eileen Gray. whose Mediterranean
villa at Cap Martin in France was defaced by Corbusier's
murals).
Corbusier could in fact claim more than one female victim
- his appropriation of the credit for Charlotte Perriand's
classic modern furniture has become one of this century's
classic gender grudges. The sense of victimhood persists
with Esther Da Costa Meyer's study of agrophobia, which
Freud theorised as a "female malady", and which today is
linked by the writer to the prevalence of rape.
This is not, it must be said, a volume that clears a path
through the urban jungle of cultural theory. Rather, it
drops you right into that dense academic thicket populated
by the likes of Derrida and Foucault with only a flimsy
penkife to hack your way out. Some of the contributions
have footnotes as long as the essays; others are paired for
parallel dialogue in ways which sometimes confuse as much
as clarify the subject under discussion.
It is also easy to dismiss some of the writing as the work
of some transatlantic Paula Spart. Less easy to dismiss are
the crystallising ideas that guide this compilation and the
general flavour of a political call to arms. As the book
says, to design for women is to design for a different
social order. If you have ever wondered what the world
might have looked like if Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe
and Frank Lloyd Wright had been women and not men, this
might begin to tell you.
[End]