ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN

Abstract

The growth of Australian women's leadership in the fields of architecture and design was slow and hard fought. While a few notable women exercised leadership from the early 19th century, they did so as amateurs. The professionalisation of the architecture and design disciplines was a long process that took place in fits and starts over the course of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. Architects were the first to organise themselves into professional bodies and, by the beginning of the 20th century, there were institutes of architects in all capital cities. These were entirely male affairs, vigorously guarded, and the control of them remained in the hands of men for the better part of a century or more. In 1930, the national Royal Australian Institute of Architects (RAIA) was formed, now known as the Australian Institute of Architects (AIA). Industrial designers founded the Society for Designers for Industry around 1947; it became the Design Institute of Australia (DIA) in 1982, absorbing the Society of Interior Designers of Australia (SIDA) in 1998. The Australian Institute of Landscape Architecture (AILA) was not established until 1966. Professional education in tertiary institutions followed a similar trajectory. Hence almost no 19th-century women feature in this part of the story, only slowly emerging in the first decades of the 20th.