Hello,
This is my first contribution to this list tho I have read it for
awhile. Hope I did it right.
In re: women designers, etc. there is much available but it sometimes
hides on the bookshelves. I suggest looking for work about Eileen Grey,
Charlotte Perriand for perhaps more commonly recognized woman designed
architecture and furniture of a modernist approach. Also try doing some
web searches. There are web sites out there but I haven't kept a record
of where they are. The recently published "Sex and Architecture" book
would also be a good springboard I should think.
Below follows a couple of pertinent articles that I think I may have
actually taken off this list. It's been a while though so I suppose it
won't hurt anyone to see them again. Good luck with your studies and
apprise us of what you find!
Anne Boynton
Graduate Architecture Student
University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM
***************************************************************************
Financial Times, October 12, 1996, p. XIX.
Zen and the art of design
Alice Rawsthorn on the life and work of Charlotte Perriand
The modernist pioneers of the 1920s were a gregarious
bunch, regularly staging get-togethers which ended with
team portraits of smiling faces, almost all of them male -
except Charlotte Perriand's.
For a woman who has created some of the 20th century's most
influential designs Perriand is a surprisingly obscure
figure. The leather and steel chaise longue she designed in
1928 with Le Corbusier and his cousin. Pierre Jeanneret, is
generally credited to Le Corbusier alone, as is their Grand
Confort chair. She is not even mentioned in France's Who s
Who.
Other women designers have suffered the same fate of seeing
their work credited to male collaborators, as Ray Eames'
was to her husband, Charles, and Lily Reich's to her lover,
Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe. Reich's achievements were finally
recognised in a recent exhibition at the Museum of Modern
Art in New York, as Charlotte Perriand's will be in the
forthcoming Design Museum retrospective of her career in
London.
Charlotte Perriand does not look like someone who is easily
ignored. Still spry at 93, she has a steely gaze which
hints at the strength of will that made her the first woman
to join Le Corbusier's studio.
Corbusier was sceptical when he met Perriand in 1927.
Regarded as one of the finest architectural minds of his
generation, he attracted young architects and designers
from all over the world to his studio in the rue de Sevres.
Few of the successful applicants were French, largely
because he considered the French design education system to
be too artisan to suit his industrial ethos.
At first glance Perriand was the antithesis of everything
Le Corbusier wanted. The only child of Parisian artisans,
she studied at the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, a
bastion of French decorative tradition. As a student she
conformed to Arts Deco conventions, but in 1927 Perriand
rebelled by creating a chrome bar, the Bar Sous Le Toit, in
an exhibition "My inspiration was the street, especially
cars with their incredible bodywork."
Convinced that Le Corbusier shared the same values, she
begged him to take her on. His doubts evaporated when he
saw her exhibit and Perriand, at 21, flung herself into the
cosmopolitan culture of rue de Sevres. "It was a new world,
incredibly exciting and completely different from anything
I'd known before."
Her role there was to design "household equipment" for Le
Corbusier's buildings, including Villa Savoye, arguably the
finest of his "purist villas", and the Salvation Army
headquarters in eastern Paris. Photographs of Perriand,
languishing on her leather chaise longue with a flapper's
bob and the ball-bearing necklace she made as a symbol of
her love of technology, are as evocative of the era as the
tubular steel in her chaises and glass-topped tables.
But by the mid-1930s the flow of projects into rue de
Sevres dried up. Perriand retreated to the Alps - "I loved
the mountains and went there whenever I felt low" - to
pursue her own projects, including a prefabricated housing
scheme instigated by the French modernist, Jean Prouve.
After a few years of flitting between the Alps, Paris and
Prouve's factory in Nancy, Perriand left France for Japan
where a Japanese colleague from rue de Sevres had arranged
for her to undertake a government-sponsored study tour of
schools and factories. Her ship left Marseille on June 14
1939 - "the same day the Germans entered Paris" and docked
in Tokyo two months later, having sailed all the way around
South Africa because the Suez Canal was blockaded.
Perriand remembers Japan as being "like a different
planet", but she was enchanted by the elegant simplicity of
traditional Japanese architecture and Zen aesthetics. After
two years there she curated an exhibition, Tradition
Selection Creation, mixing traditional Japanese artefacts
with contemporary ones conceived in the same sparing style.
In 1942 she tried returning to France but Japan entered the
war. She finally got to Indochina, where she spent two
years in a rural area before being interned in Saigon.
Arriving back in France at last, in 1946, she found it to
be "very different, sad and traumatised".
After the war Perriand devoted herself to bringing up a
daughter, Pernette, now a photographer, and took on new
projects in Japan, Brazil and France. where she designed a
vast ski station near her Meribel retreat She also resumed
her old collaborations with Le Corbusier and Jean Prouve.
Her most recent project is the studio she designed next to
her apartment off Boulevard Saint-Germain. Blessed with a
sensational view of the Paris rooftops, it is as apt an
illustration of her work as the Design Museum
retrospective, and the book she is working on. Perriand's
flair for mixing natural with man-made materials is
apparent, as is the Zen innocence in her unerring choice of
exquisite objects and the stark silhouette of a bamboo tree
on the stone-clad balcony.
The shelves are filled with books and sketches by Perriand
and her peers, alongside personal mementoes such as the
ball-bearing necklace. The only obvious omission is her
best known work, the tubular steel furniture she designed
with Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. "I gave it all to
my daughter, There wasn't enough room for it here."
[Photos] Charlotte Perriand: reclining on one of her famous
adaptable chaises longues in 1929; and as a spry
93-year-old, today
-----
Charlotte Perriand: Modernist Pioneer opens at the Design
Museum, Shad Thames, London SE1 from October 24.
[End]
This article and photos at http://jya.com/perriand.htm
********************************************************************
Subject: A Building of Her Own
U.S. News & World Report, October 14, 1996, pp. 66-68.
Culture & Ideas: A building of her own
Women architects are changing their field, melding
form and function in new ways
Asked what women bring to the drafting table, architect
Kate Diamond tells this story: Three years ago she was
selected to design an air-traffic-control tower for Los
Angeles International Airport. She didn't want to blow
it. Previous plans for the $19 million project did not
pass muster with the city's Cultural Affairs Commission.
which wanted something bold and stylish. Moreover, the
Federal Aviation Administration had just had an
experience in the Midwest with a superstar architect, a
man who, Diamond says, designed a beautiful tower, but
one much too costly and posing problems for his client:
Wide steel columns blocked controllers' views. In the
end, the plan was scrapped.
Diamond's goal was to marry form and function in a way
that would "bury my ego under the needs of my clients."
The design she and three female collaborators presented
to the board called for a tower with a curved roof,
simulating airplane wings. On the tower's shaft, 250
blinking colored lights formed an arresting egg-shaped
sculpture -- an allusion to the El Segundo blue
butterfly's eggs found in nearby sand dunes.
The design initially ruffled some feathers but finally
won approval. Diamond, 42, credits her communication
skills and a "good feel for contextualism" for her
success. It is a theme sounded frequently by women
architects of her generation, who are beginning to step
out from the shadows cast by their more dominant male
colleagues. Though their numbers are comparatively small
-- only 11 percent of the nation's 55,500 registered
architects are women -- many of them, now established
professionals and respected college educators, are
putting their stamp on American architecture.
The form that stamp takes differs with women's varying
approaches to their field. Many balk at the idea that
gender influences their work. They are simply good
architects, they say. Others have clear feminist agendas,
from creating affordable housing for single mothers and
elderly women to ensuring that sporting arenas and civic
centers have enough women's toilets. Still others feel
they are better attuned than many men to spatial issues
affecting women and children, in the same way some women
doctors may be more sensitive to the need for more
aggressive breast cancer research.
Client-centered? If there is any common motif in
discussions of women and design, it's that they seem to
pay close attention to architecture's human side, a
concern both for social issues and for clients' needs.
"Women tend to design less 'notice me, notice me'
architecture," says Susan Maxman, a Philadelphia
architect who in 1993 was the American Institute of
Architects' first woman president. 'We're less about ...
making a statement and more concerned with function and
fitting in with the environment, the community."
Maxman says that as AIA president she made environmental
sustainability her key issue. While many male architects
are involved in "green issues," women seem naturally
drawn to ecofeminism and to projects assuming a "human,
rather than a monumental, scale," she says. As an
example, she cites the work of Cathy Simon, whose
70-member San Francisco firm actively recruits women.
Simon recently designed an "almost pretty" sewage-
treatment plant by the Pacific Ocean. The plant,
two-thirds submerged in the ground to minimize odor and
fumes, still allows nearby zoo animals to graze safely on
the grounds.
Famously snubbed. An emphasis on tackling social and
aesthetic challenges in concert has been the lifelong
pursuit of Denise Scott Brown, widely regarded as the
most important living woman architect. Now 65, she and
her partner and husband, Robert Venturi, 71, are still
prolific producers of some of the world's most beautiful
"vernacular" architecture, including a recent extension
of London's National Gallery. They are now at work on a
$90 million hotel-and-sports complex in Japan and a large
government center in Toulouse, France.
Scott Brown believes women architects "don't need gurus
the way men seem to. We're less obsessed with achieving
stardom, more focused on the creative process, the
problem solving." She was famously snubbed by the
architectural establishment five years ago when her
husband, but not she, was awarded the coveted Pritzker
prize for lifetime achievement, despite the fact that the
couple collaborate on everything. In 1993, Venturi told
the AIA he wouldn't accept the Gold Medal unless the
nomination was jointly extended to his partner. It was
not. But earlier this year, Scott Brown received the
Topaz Medallion the AIA's highest honor for educators.
The architect says men have a hard time understanding
"the alchemy of collaboration," how she and Venturi
develop ideas and steer the design together, defending
and criticizing various elements of it as they go along.
"Bob is more talented in design, and he does most of the
drawing," she says. "I'm more creative with the social
questions that determine physical relations. But we both
design every inch of a building together."
Venturi became famous 30 years ago with his provocative
book *Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture*,
which helped set the postmodern movement in motion. Scott
Brown's 1990 book, *Urban Concepts*, is a manifesto for
architectural work rooted in social concerns. It lays out
her firm's urban-design schemes for several cities,
including Miami, Memphis and Minneapolis, and the
community-building goals considered for each. She has
been a champion of urban renewal that preserves the
pluralistic character of a place but allows for sensible
traffic flow, growth and commerce.
In a new book, *The Sex of Architecture*, a set of two
dozen essays by women designers and educators, Scott
Brown says architects and planners must rethink the ways
in which the transportation, housing and social needs of
today's working women and families are met. But she
cautions against overindulging in "fuzzy" feminist theory
and is not convinced by those who feel men have dictated
for too long how public and private spaces are used. "I
don't know what is really feminine behavior, nature
versus nurture, but I do see that women are highly
interdisciplinary," Scott Brown says. "We have superior
skills in dealing with people and discerning their
motivations and needs. I know I'm better at psyching out
the client than Bob is."
A fertile area for architectural innovation by women is
housing. Over the past decade, as intact nuclear families
have become less common, ideas for "holistic" or
"flexible" multifamily housing have emerged, tailored to
the needs of single adults, working parents and the
elderly. Many feature child-care and social-service
facilities, and in some cases they spark fierce zoning
battles. In downtown Los Angeles, a group called New
Economics for Women has developed two housing projects
for low-income families and young Latino women. At Casa
Loma, single parents and senior citizens live in 110
small apartments, where they have access to a large
child-care facility, a community room for socializing,
laundry rooms on each floor, Meals on Wheels and other
social services. Their low rents are subsidized by tax
credits.
Moving up. New Economics President Beatriz Stotzer
praises the tenacity of grass-roots activists and the
help of sympathetic city planners -- all women -- for
making the project work. As women move up the ladder in
architecture schools, they are formalizing this activity
by developing curricula that include examinations of
social problems and the revival of the community-service
studio.
Leslie Kanes Weisman, a New Jersey Institute of
Technology architecture professor and author of
*Discrimination By Design: A Feminist Critique of the
Man-Made Environment*, champions this approach. Most
American schools, she says, narrow students' focus to
aesthetics, building performance and cost, "without also
teaching them to consider whether what they are designing
is ecologically intelligent and socially just."
A recent survey of 650 students at six architecture
schools found women, who make up about 40 percent of
enrollments, are in general "more interested in
incorporating sociocultural issues into their projects"
than are males, who are more drawn to "objects and
abstractions." Research by Kathryn Anthony of the
University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign also indicates
that women architects are likely to prefer cooperation to
competition. Such gender differences are leading women
deans and professors to challenge the traditional macho
"studio crit" process, where the work of design students,
who toil alone late into the night, is critiqued and
often torn apart by older male professors.
Recognizing that architecture, in practice, is less about
individual brilliance and more about collaboration, some
women educators also are putting more emphasis on
team-building and communication skills. At a meeting last
year called "Inherited Ideologies: a Re-Examination," 400
prominent women architects, planners and educators
gathered to discuss their role. It was time, some said,
to declare war on the myth of "the autonomous
hero-architect," personified by Howard Roark, protagonist
of *The Fountainhead*. Of course, it was a woman, author
Ayn Rand, who breathed life into that myth. But as Scott
Brown puts it: "We all want to use our minds to make
beautiful things." The challenge is "to act as idealists
rather than ideologues."
_________________________________________________________
[Six photos]
Cathy Simon
The San Francisco Main Library (below), designed by James
Freed with Simon's help, is intended to build bridges
between people. In her work, Simon says, she is attuned
to the community and the landscape. Her design of the
Newport Beach Public Library (right) in Orange County,
with its Mediterranean-influenced style, was praised as
an "embrace of the concept of contextualism."
Kate Diamond
Los Angeles wanted a new airport control tower, but also
a structure that was "not the usual, vanilla FAA cookie-
cutter tower," Diamond says. The architect came up with
an eye-catching design, including a space-age roof and an
egg-shaped sculpture by Sheila Klein.
Denise Scott Brown
Scott Brown and her husband, Robert Venturi, design
"every inch of a building together." One recent project
was the design for the Sainsbury Wing of the National
Gallery in London (above).
_________________________________________________________
By Jill Jordan Sieder in Atlanta
[End]
To see color photos (2 each file):
http://jya.com/warch1.jpg (Simon)
http://jya.com/warch2.jpg (Diamond)
http://jya.com/warch3.jpg (Scott Brown)
---------
This article is on the Web at:
http://jya.com/womarch.htm
This is my first contribution to this list tho I have read it for
awhile. Hope I did it right.
In re: women designers, etc. there is much available but it sometimes
hides on the bookshelves. I suggest looking for work about Eileen Grey,
Charlotte Perriand for perhaps more commonly recognized woman designed
architecture and furniture of a modernist approach. Also try doing some
web searches. There are web sites out there but I haven't kept a record
of where they are. The recently published "Sex and Architecture" book
would also be a good springboard I should think.
Below follows a couple of pertinent articles that I think I may have
actually taken off this list. It's been a while though so I suppose it
won't hurt anyone to see them again. Good luck with your studies and
apprise us of what you find!
Anne Boynton
Graduate Architecture Student
University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM
***************************************************************************
Financial Times, October 12, 1996, p. XIX.
Zen and the art of design
Alice Rawsthorn on the life and work of Charlotte Perriand
The modernist pioneers of the 1920s were a gregarious
bunch, regularly staging get-togethers which ended with
team portraits of smiling faces, almost all of them male -
except Charlotte Perriand's.
For a woman who has created some of the 20th century's most
influential designs Perriand is a surprisingly obscure
figure. The leather and steel chaise longue she designed in
1928 with Le Corbusier and his cousin. Pierre Jeanneret, is
generally credited to Le Corbusier alone, as is their Grand
Confort chair. She is not even mentioned in France's Who s
Who.
Other women designers have suffered the same fate of seeing
their work credited to male collaborators, as Ray Eames'
was to her husband, Charles, and Lily Reich's to her lover,
Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe. Reich's achievements were finally
recognised in a recent exhibition at the Museum of Modern
Art in New York, as Charlotte Perriand's will be in the
forthcoming Design Museum retrospective of her career in
London.
Charlotte Perriand does not look like someone who is easily
ignored. Still spry at 93, she has a steely gaze which
hints at the strength of will that made her the first woman
to join Le Corbusier's studio.
Corbusier was sceptical when he met Perriand in 1927.
Regarded as one of the finest architectural minds of his
generation, he attracted young architects and designers
from all over the world to his studio in the rue de Sevres.
Few of the successful applicants were French, largely
because he considered the French design education system to
be too artisan to suit his industrial ethos.
At first glance Perriand was the antithesis of everything
Le Corbusier wanted. The only child of Parisian artisans,
she studied at the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, a
bastion of French decorative tradition. As a student she
conformed to Arts Deco conventions, but in 1927 Perriand
rebelled by creating a chrome bar, the Bar Sous Le Toit, in
an exhibition "My inspiration was the street, especially
cars with their incredible bodywork."
Convinced that Le Corbusier shared the same values, she
begged him to take her on. His doubts evaporated when he
saw her exhibit and Perriand, at 21, flung herself into the
cosmopolitan culture of rue de Sevres. "It was a new world,
incredibly exciting and completely different from anything
I'd known before."
Her role there was to design "household equipment" for Le
Corbusier's buildings, including Villa Savoye, arguably the
finest of his "purist villas", and the Salvation Army
headquarters in eastern Paris. Photographs of Perriand,
languishing on her leather chaise longue with a flapper's
bob and the ball-bearing necklace she made as a symbol of
her love of technology, are as evocative of the era as the
tubular steel in her chaises and glass-topped tables.
But by the mid-1930s the flow of projects into rue de
Sevres dried up. Perriand retreated to the Alps - "I loved
the mountains and went there whenever I felt low" - to
pursue her own projects, including a prefabricated housing
scheme instigated by the French modernist, Jean Prouve.
After a few years of flitting between the Alps, Paris and
Prouve's factory in Nancy, Perriand left France for Japan
where a Japanese colleague from rue de Sevres had arranged
for her to undertake a government-sponsored study tour of
schools and factories. Her ship left Marseille on June 14
1939 - "the same day the Germans entered Paris" and docked
in Tokyo two months later, having sailed all the way around
South Africa because the Suez Canal was blockaded.
Perriand remembers Japan as being "like a different
planet", but she was enchanted by the elegant simplicity of
traditional Japanese architecture and Zen aesthetics. After
two years there she curated an exhibition, Tradition
Selection Creation, mixing traditional Japanese artefacts
with contemporary ones conceived in the same sparing style.
In 1942 she tried returning to France but Japan entered the
war. She finally got to Indochina, where she spent two
years in a rural area before being interned in Saigon.
Arriving back in France at last, in 1946, she found it to
be "very different, sad and traumatised".
After the war Perriand devoted herself to bringing up a
daughter, Pernette, now a photographer, and took on new
projects in Japan, Brazil and France. where she designed a
vast ski station near her Meribel retreat She also resumed
her old collaborations with Le Corbusier and Jean Prouve.
Her most recent project is the studio she designed next to
her apartment off Boulevard Saint-Germain. Blessed with a
sensational view of the Paris rooftops, it is as apt an
illustration of her work as the Design Museum
retrospective, and the book she is working on. Perriand's
flair for mixing natural with man-made materials is
apparent, as is the Zen innocence in her unerring choice of
exquisite objects and the stark silhouette of a bamboo tree
on the stone-clad balcony.
The shelves are filled with books and sketches by Perriand
and her peers, alongside personal mementoes such as the
ball-bearing necklace. The only obvious omission is her
best known work, the tubular steel furniture she designed
with Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. "I gave it all to
my daughter, There wasn't enough room for it here."
[Photos] Charlotte Perriand: reclining on one of her famous
adaptable chaises longues in 1929; and as a spry
93-year-old, today
-----
Charlotte Perriand: Modernist Pioneer opens at the Design
Museum, Shad Thames, London SE1 from October 24.
[End]
This article and photos at http://jya.com/perriand.htm
********************************************************************
Subject: A Building of Her Own
U.S. News & World Report, October 14, 1996, pp. 66-68.
Culture & Ideas: A building of her own
Women architects are changing their field, melding
form and function in new ways
Asked what women bring to the drafting table, architect
Kate Diamond tells this story: Three years ago she was
selected to design an air-traffic-control tower for Los
Angeles International Airport. She didn't want to blow
it. Previous plans for the $19 million project did not
pass muster with the city's Cultural Affairs Commission.
which wanted something bold and stylish. Moreover, the
Federal Aviation Administration had just had an
experience in the Midwest with a superstar architect, a
man who, Diamond says, designed a beautiful tower, but
one much too costly and posing problems for his client:
Wide steel columns blocked controllers' views. In the
end, the plan was scrapped.
Diamond's goal was to marry form and function in a way
that would "bury my ego under the needs of my clients."
The design she and three female collaborators presented
to the board called for a tower with a curved roof,
simulating airplane wings. On the tower's shaft, 250
blinking colored lights formed an arresting egg-shaped
sculpture -- an allusion to the El Segundo blue
butterfly's eggs found in nearby sand dunes.
The design initially ruffled some feathers but finally
won approval. Diamond, 42, credits her communication
skills and a "good feel for contextualism" for her
success. It is a theme sounded frequently by women
architects of her generation, who are beginning to step
out from the shadows cast by their more dominant male
colleagues. Though their numbers are comparatively small
-- only 11 percent of the nation's 55,500 registered
architects are women -- many of them, now established
professionals and respected college educators, are
putting their stamp on American architecture.
The form that stamp takes differs with women's varying
approaches to their field. Many balk at the idea that
gender influences their work. They are simply good
architects, they say. Others have clear feminist agendas,
from creating affordable housing for single mothers and
elderly women to ensuring that sporting arenas and civic
centers have enough women's toilets. Still others feel
they are better attuned than many men to spatial issues
affecting women and children, in the same way some women
doctors may be more sensitive to the need for more
aggressive breast cancer research.
Client-centered? If there is any common motif in
discussions of women and design, it's that they seem to
pay close attention to architecture's human side, a
concern both for social issues and for clients' needs.
"Women tend to design less 'notice me, notice me'
architecture," says Susan Maxman, a Philadelphia
architect who in 1993 was the American Institute of
Architects' first woman president. 'We're less about ...
making a statement and more concerned with function and
fitting in with the environment, the community."
Maxman says that as AIA president she made environmental
sustainability her key issue. While many male architects
are involved in "green issues," women seem naturally
drawn to ecofeminism and to projects assuming a "human,
rather than a monumental, scale," she says. As an
example, she cites the work of Cathy Simon, whose
70-member San Francisco firm actively recruits women.
Simon recently designed an "almost pretty" sewage-
treatment plant by the Pacific Ocean. The plant,
two-thirds submerged in the ground to minimize odor and
fumes, still allows nearby zoo animals to graze safely on
the grounds.
Famously snubbed. An emphasis on tackling social and
aesthetic challenges in concert has been the lifelong
pursuit of Denise Scott Brown, widely regarded as the
most important living woman architect. Now 65, she and
her partner and husband, Robert Venturi, 71, are still
prolific producers of some of the world's most beautiful
"vernacular" architecture, including a recent extension
of London's National Gallery. They are now at work on a
$90 million hotel-and-sports complex in Japan and a large
government center in Toulouse, France.
Scott Brown believes women architects "don't need gurus
the way men seem to. We're less obsessed with achieving
stardom, more focused on the creative process, the
problem solving." She was famously snubbed by the
architectural establishment five years ago when her
husband, but not she, was awarded the coveted Pritzker
prize for lifetime achievement, despite the fact that the
couple collaborate on everything. In 1993, Venturi told
the AIA he wouldn't accept the Gold Medal unless the
nomination was jointly extended to his partner. It was
not. But earlier this year, Scott Brown received the
Topaz Medallion the AIA's highest honor for educators.
The architect says men have a hard time understanding
"the alchemy of collaboration," how she and Venturi
develop ideas and steer the design together, defending
and criticizing various elements of it as they go along.
"Bob is more talented in design, and he does most of the
drawing," she says. "I'm more creative with the social
questions that determine physical relations. But we both
design every inch of a building together."
Venturi became famous 30 years ago with his provocative
book *Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture*,
which helped set the postmodern movement in motion. Scott
Brown's 1990 book, *Urban Concepts*, is a manifesto for
architectural work rooted in social concerns. It lays out
her firm's urban-design schemes for several cities,
including Miami, Memphis and Minneapolis, and the
community-building goals considered for each. She has
been a champion of urban renewal that preserves the
pluralistic character of a place but allows for sensible
traffic flow, growth and commerce.
In a new book, *The Sex of Architecture*, a set of two
dozen essays by women designers and educators, Scott
Brown says architects and planners must rethink the ways
in which the transportation, housing and social needs of
today's working women and families are met. But she
cautions against overindulging in "fuzzy" feminist theory
and is not convinced by those who feel men have dictated
for too long how public and private spaces are used. "I
don't know what is really feminine behavior, nature
versus nurture, but I do see that women are highly
interdisciplinary," Scott Brown says. "We have superior
skills in dealing with people and discerning their
motivations and needs. I know I'm better at psyching out
the client than Bob is."
A fertile area for architectural innovation by women is
housing. Over the past decade, as intact nuclear families
have become less common, ideas for "holistic" or
"flexible" multifamily housing have emerged, tailored to
the needs of single adults, working parents and the
elderly. Many feature child-care and social-service
facilities, and in some cases they spark fierce zoning
battles. In downtown Los Angeles, a group called New
Economics for Women has developed two housing projects
for low-income families and young Latino women. At Casa
Loma, single parents and senior citizens live in 110
small apartments, where they have access to a large
child-care facility, a community room for socializing,
laundry rooms on each floor, Meals on Wheels and other
social services. Their low rents are subsidized by tax
credits.
Moving up. New Economics President Beatriz Stotzer
praises the tenacity of grass-roots activists and the
help of sympathetic city planners -- all women -- for
making the project work. As women move up the ladder in
architecture schools, they are formalizing this activity
by developing curricula that include examinations of
social problems and the revival of the community-service
studio.
Leslie Kanes Weisman, a New Jersey Institute of
Technology architecture professor and author of
*Discrimination By Design: A Feminist Critique of the
Man-Made Environment*, champions this approach. Most
American schools, she says, narrow students' focus to
aesthetics, building performance and cost, "without also
teaching them to consider whether what they are designing
is ecologically intelligent and socially just."
A recent survey of 650 students at six architecture
schools found women, who make up about 40 percent of
enrollments, are in general "more interested in
incorporating sociocultural issues into their projects"
than are males, who are more drawn to "objects and
abstractions." Research by Kathryn Anthony of the
University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign also indicates
that women architects are likely to prefer cooperation to
competition. Such gender differences are leading women
deans and professors to challenge the traditional macho
"studio crit" process, where the work of design students,
who toil alone late into the night, is critiqued and
often torn apart by older male professors.
Recognizing that architecture, in practice, is less about
individual brilliance and more about collaboration, some
women educators also are putting more emphasis on
team-building and communication skills. At a meeting last
year called "Inherited Ideologies: a Re-Examination," 400
prominent women architects, planners and educators
gathered to discuss their role. It was time, some said,
to declare war on the myth of "the autonomous
hero-architect," personified by Howard Roark, protagonist
of *The Fountainhead*. Of course, it was a woman, author
Ayn Rand, who breathed life into that myth. But as Scott
Brown puts it: "We all want to use our minds to make
beautiful things." The challenge is "to act as idealists
rather than ideologues."
_________________________________________________________
[Six photos]
Cathy Simon
The San Francisco Main Library (below), designed by James
Freed with Simon's help, is intended to build bridges
between people. In her work, Simon says, she is attuned
to the community and the landscape. Her design of the
Newport Beach Public Library (right) in Orange County,
with its Mediterranean-influenced style, was praised as
an "embrace of the concept of contextualism."
Kate Diamond
Los Angeles wanted a new airport control tower, but also
a structure that was "not the usual, vanilla FAA cookie-
cutter tower," Diamond says. The architect came up with
an eye-catching design, including a space-age roof and an
egg-shaped sculpture by Sheila Klein.
Denise Scott Brown
Scott Brown and her husband, Robert Venturi, design
"every inch of a building together." One recent project
was the design for the Sainsbury Wing of the National
Gallery in London (above).
_________________________________________________________
By Jill Jordan Sieder in Atlanta
[End]
To see color photos (2 each file):
http://jya.com/warch1.jpg (Simon)
http://jya.com/warch2.jpg (Diamond)
http://jya.com/warch3.jpg (Scott Brown)
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