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The call for submissions for the themed issue on “Gender Matters” of The Plan Journal (TPJ), vol.4 [2019], no.2 [Fall] explains:
The TPJ seeks contributions that can illustrate recent research on “gender issues in design”, and how this knowledge can be used to envision more sustainable cities and habitats. We welcome proposals that address innovative research on this topic from a variety of angles, including: historical/theoretical case studies in Modern architecture, typological or technological investigations, cross-disciplinary studies (across the fields of product design, interior design, landscape architecture, and urban design), projects and/or case-studies in reflective practice, critical reflections on gender and urbanism, and experimental pedagogies.
The call continued to ask:
What are the most important contributions of the female pioneers in architecture, design and urbanism still to be duly investigated and recognized? Will gender mainstreaming continue to challenge contemporary design issues? And will it become a basic principle in architecture and design, as well as opening up new issues in urbanism?
In his editorial “Beyond What is Right,” Maurizio Sabini, Editor-in-Chief of The Plan Journal wrote:
It is with this ambition (that we are committed to model also within our teamwork here at the TPJ), of exploring gender matters beyond the rightful call for equity – which still needs to be discussed, analyzed and advocated for – that we present this themed issue of the journal. Relevance and timeliness have been among the main criteria for identifying the topics of focus and certainly gender studies emerged as a compelling choice. Due to the particular nature of the theme, we asked Dörte Kuhlmann, a recognized scholar on the subject, to serve as Guest-Editor. We truly appreciated our collaborative endeavor and we thank her for her vision, insights and commitment. It is our hope that this themed issue of the TPJ will contribute in a meaningful way to the ongoing discourse in architecture, design and urbanism, on gender equity and beyond.
Dörte Kuhlmann, Guest-Editor shares in her position paper “Gender Matters. The Grand Architectural Revolution” that “the revolution of the modern style might have failed without the strong female support. We may conclude that gender matters – having a huge impact in numerous ways on the architectural discourse as we know it and sponsoring many important ideas that are captured in our most precious masterpieces.”
We are presenting some of the ideas and visions contained in the Gender Matters issue of the journal that resonated with us. The first two articles explain gender matters in two very different cultures— India and Portugal. In “Women Who Design “Master” Bedrooms: A Study of Kerala Women in Architectural Practice,” the authors Soumini Raja and Sumitra Nair use the “deeply gendered space” of the “Master Bedroom” as a research tool to examine the participants’ design conceptualization of not only the “Master Bedroom” as a space but of “their philosophy in practice as women in architecture.” In “The W@ARCH.Pt as an Ongoing Feminist Research Project in Architecture: Contextualizing Initial Reflections,” the author Patrícia Santos Pedrosa explains that “the research project W@ARCH.Pt (Women Architects in Portugal: Building Visibility, 1942-1986) strives to give visibility to female architects – revealing “who?”, “when?”, and “how?” – and contribute to expanding the history of Portuguese architecture, as well as developing feminist studies and ideas within the discipline.”
The next four articles raise awareness of critical issues regarding gender matters. Linquin Bi, Barbara LaCost and Hengle Jiang share in their article “Women Leaders, the Sustainable Society Cannot Afford to Miss: A Qualitative Study on the Paths to Women Leadership in Sustainable Architecture Education” that “Candice Stevens has pointed out that the lack of progress on gender equality may be at the heart of the failure to advance on sustainable development.” The author Olivier Vallerande of “Who Are the Lesbian Architects? Visibility and Its Challenges” explains the research in this article “presents a review of discourses in architecture and design as well as interviews with lesbian designers to understand how and why queer women have been almost invisible.” The author Eszter Polonyi of “Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Modernism and Its Discontents,” explains that for Sibyl Moholy-Nagy architecture was “a process of thinking through matter and form.” In their book review, the authors, Dörte Kuhlmann and Alexia Bumbaris of “A New “Book of the City Ladies”,” state that the “cleverly selected original texts make the reading pleasantly varied and take you back to the old times.”
Finally, we recap and share some thoughts and lessons learned from a recent text, Women in Architecture.
>> We encourage you to browse The Plan Journal and explore its issue dedicated to Gender Matters for yourself.
In “Women Who Design “Master” Bedrooms: A Study of Kerala Women in Architectural Practice,” the authors Soumini Raja and Sumitra Nair explain that “critical feminist spatial practice is not watertight and a conscious way of practice. It does not even require conformity to any one idea of feminism.”
Women practitioners deploy multiple modes of engaging with and challenging the dominant norms of professional practice.
“Given the multi-dimensionality of spatial practices, feminist architectural practice calls upon the professional skills, latent knowledge, and the human body.” Raja and Nair urge us to “first call out architecture as a deeply political space, and then to carve out from within it a space for feminist discourse. [Because,] in the context of India, this understanding is critical and pedagogical.”
>> To learn more about Raja’s work, check out the abstract in TPJ (in English)
In “The W@ARCH.Pt as an Ongoing Feminist Research Project in Architecture: Contextualizing Initial Reflections,” the author Patricia Santos Pedrosa discusses her research and “the issues raised [that] require a critical understanding of the processes that sustain the silencing of female architects’ voices, imposing limitations on how we understand the profession in its many facets.”
Cities and Gender Summer School: Perspectives and Strategies’ poster.
Pedrosa poignantly states “besides being identified, seen, heard, and introduced to the world, we must understand the many ways in which these contributions have been silenced, both in the past and in the present, and how they operate. Only by understanding the mechanisms at play, by looking at the institutions and individual bodies/voices can we build a historical and theoretical analysis capable of acting on the reproduction of various forms of oppression.”
>> You can find the abstract for her article here in TPJ (in English)
In “Women Leaders, the Sustainable Society Cannot Afford to Miss: A Qualitative Study on the Pathes to Women Leadership in Sustainable Architecture Education,” the authors Linquin Bi, Barbara LaCost and Hengle Jiang explain that “this qualitative study aimed to discover the insight into the leadership development journey of women focusing on sustainable architecture education and to establish coping strategies. Insights from their stories may assist aspiring women candidates to better prepare for their career advancements.”
Age by gender for architects, except naval.
Bi et al. show in the above graph that “after age forty, male architects dominate over 80%.”
>> The abstract for this article can be found here in TPJ (in English)
Olivier Vallerande’s article “Who Are the Lesbian Architects? Visibility and Its Challenges” wonders “while lesbian figures are certainly not omnipresent in other fields, other related disciplines such as geography or arts have a much larger number of outspoken lesbians. The question is, therefore: why has lesbian visibility been so lacking in architecture, compared to other fields?”
Bessie Marbury and Elsie de Wolfe.
Vallerande believes that “even if we should indeed be challenging architecture’s heteronormative assumptions much more deeply, this will not be possible until that first step of visibility.”
>> To learn more about the authors’ work, read the article here in TPJ (in English)
Eszter Polonyi’s book review “Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Modernism and Its Discontents” shares that “in a 1961 article dedicated to the state of the architectural curriculum entitled “The Future of the Past,” the German historian, critic, and educator Sibyl Moholy-Nagy placed a photograph of an interior court of an embassy designed in 1959 in juxtaposition with one of a factory interior from 1920 and that of a twelfth-century cathedral. Certain commonalities in structure become apparent when the images are viewed side by side.”
Polonyi points out that “Moholy-Nagy is neither the first nor the last established female author to vanish from the collective pool of scholarly references after her death, it is worth considering both her work and its reception for reasons why this happened.”
>>The article can be found here in TPJ (in English)
Guest-Editor Dörte Kuhlmann and Alexia Bumbaris share in their book review “A New ‘Book of the City of Ladies’,” that many have “argued that the exclusion of women in the history of art and architecture is not coincidental but based on deliberate discredit. Christine de Pizan already formulated this accusation in the fourteenth century in her Book of the City of Ladies. To support this argument, she created a reconstructed history of women in which she stressed the achievements and virtues of numerous women since antiquity.” For Kuhlmann and Bumbaris, “the anthologies edited by Katia Frey and Eliana Perotti should be regarded as one more attempt to record in writing the many neglected female contributions by asking how women contributed to the development of modern city planning.”
Kuhlmann and Bumbaris suggest that “both volumes are strongly recommended for everyone dealing with architecture and city planning, as they provide unfamiliar original resources, profound background information as well as new inspiration for practitioners and researchers.”
>> The article can be found here in TPJ (in English)
In Women in Architecture: Past, Present, and Future by Ursula Schwitalla, female architects reflect on their careers and design philosophies. Featured are: Mona Bayr, Odile Decq, Elke Delugan-Meissl, Julie Eizenberg, Manuelle Gautrand, Annette Gigon, Silvia Gmür, Cristina Guedes, Melkan Gürsel, Itsuko Hasegawa, Anna Heringer, Fabienne Hoelzel, Helle Juul, Karla Kowalski, Anupama Kundoo, Anne Lacaton, Regine Leibinger, Dorte Mandrup, Rozana Montiel, Kathrin Moore, Farshid Moussavi, Carme Pinós, Nili Portugali, Paula Santos, Kazuyo Sejima, Annabelle Selldorf, Pavitra Sriprakash, Siv Helene Stangeland, Brigitte Sunder-Plassmann, Lene Tranberg, Billie Tsien, Elisa Valero, Natalie de Vries, Andrea Wandel, Helena Weber and Lu Wenyu.
Despite the number of women who have shaped the discipline, female architects still frequently struggle to receive the recognition their work deserves. This tribute to contemporary female architects across the world recognizes their experiences as designers in a male-dominated field. Women in Architecture portrays thirty-six architects and shares examples of their projects. The text examines the current state of architecture and investigates works of a number of women who pioneered the craft, striving to expose discrimination of women architects in and out of the profession.
We agree with the contributing editors and authors of The Plan Journal’s issue on “Gender Matters” and Women in Architecture— equity in the design professions must be part and parcel of our daily practices and it is imperative that any/all injustice(s) are revealed.
>> To learn more, check out the reference below:
Schwitalla, Ursula, ed. 2021. Women in Architecture: Past, Present, and Future. Hatje Cantz.
Why support + read TPJ?
The Plan Journal is intended to disseminate and promote innovative, thought-provoking, and relevant research, studies, and criticism related to architecture and urbanism. The journal grew out of an awareness that academia is all too often engaged in research that’s disconnected from the real-world challenges that face different professions, and that research is only possible for a small number of professional organizations, and, even then, with limited platforms for its dissemination. The overarching aim of TPJ is therefore to enrich the dialogue between researchers and professionals so as to foster both pertinent new knowledge and intellectually driven modes of practice.
How does it works + why does it matter?
Prospective contributors are encouraged to submit proposals or complete manuscripts to the Editor-in-Chief. Subject to positive feedback, proposals can then be developed into complete manuscripts and submitted for review, using the dedicated portal on the TPJ website.
After preliminary approval, manuscripts will be forwarded to suitably qualified people for commenting. TPJ is committed to following a rigorous double-blind peer review process using at least two reviewers. The Editor-in-Chief may also occasionally invite recognized academics, critics, or professionals (including members of the editorial board) to contribute to the journal without going through the peer review process, if warranted by the author’s reputation.
