Revealing Work. Interrogating Artifacts to (Re)View Histories of Feminist Architectural Practice

Abstract

Contemporary investigations of feminist practices in architecture from the near past rely upon scant and therefore precious sources. Many unique physical artifacts are lying, unarchived, in box files and plan chests or fading on bookshelves, and their meanings and associations remain caught in the era in which they were made. We have selected artifacts from 1970s and 80s feminist spatial practice in London that we, with others, were instrumental in creating, to re-examine, and to invite further commentaries. Through contextualizing them in their period–and interrogating through our own memories–we became particularly concerned to reappraise what counts as work; the work of actual doing; the work of finding ways to generate social change; the experiences of that work as embodied; and the work that the artifact itself does–how, through what happens to it in the world, it exceeds or alters what had been intended.