Review: Glass Ceilings: Highlights from the International Archive of Women Architects

Abstract

Glass Ceilings: Highlights from the International Archive of Women Architects . Virginia Center for Architecture, Richmond. 4 March–6 June 2010 Housed in a sprawling Tudor Revival mansion designed in 1916 by John Russell Pope for financier John Kerr Branch, the Virginia Center for Architecture in Richmond stands among the contentious memorials to Virginia-born Confederate heroes and Richmond native Arthur Ashe that dominate Monument Avenue. Set within this insistently masculine topography, the recent exhibition Glass Ceilings: Highlights from the International Archive of Women Architects recast this particularly potent site to challenge historical narratives built on male privilege (Figure 1). Showcasing twenty women drawn from the hundreds represented in the International Archive, the exhibition rewarded visitors with fresh materials and new discoveries. As the title suggests, however, the show advanced two ambitious, if ultimately competing, curatorial aims: to offer a critique of gender inequity within the architectural profession, as the fittingly architectural metaphor of the glass ceiling suggested, and to further the celebratory, recuperative project for which these archival collections were originally built. Figure 1 Glass Ceilings (author's photo, courtesy Virginia Center for Architecture, Richmond) Founded in 1985 by the Bulgarian-born architect Milka Bliznakov, the International Archive of Women Architects (IAWA) is now a joint project of Virginia Tech's University Libraries and College of Architecture and Urban Studies. Its stated mission is to “document the history of women's contributions to the built environment by collecting, preserving, storing and making available to researchers the professional papers of women architects, landscape architects, designers, architectural historians and critics, and urban planners, and the records of women's architectural organizations.”1 While materials from the IAWA have been showcased in previous exhibitions, including Contributions of Women Architects …