Women in the Modern Movement: Léonie Geisendorf and Architectural Practice in Mid-20th Century Europe

The complicated links between individual life stories and theories of gender are central to feminist discussion. Since the end of the 1970s, feminist discourse has debated the tensions between feminism's collective category, “woman”, and the diversity of women. Feminist theory has worked to undo the monolithic category of Woman. This paper argues that research on women in architectural practice should draw on this long-standing debate, particularly when researchers use life-story interview texts as the corner-stone for gender studies. Researchers who use gender as a category of analysis must negotiate the complexity of lived subjectivity narrated in the interview testimonial. The apparent “refusal” of women interviewees to self-identify as women architects or explain career trajectories primarily through the prism of gender invites us to produce more subtle theories of identity, lived subjectivity and mechanisms of gender identification in feminist architectural research. The term, woman architect, invites us to think about the hyphenated nature of identity.

Slovenian architectural historical compendiums rarely include women architects and their buildings.1 The most important survey of 20th-century architecture in Slovenia, authored by Stane Bernik, mentions only one work solely designed by a woman architect and two completed projects where women architects are noted as co-authors.2 Likewise, DOCOMOMO Slovenija_100, (DOCOMOMO Slovenia_100)3 presenting 100 of the most important buildings of the 20th century in Slovenia, contains only two objects by women architects. In contrast, the monograph titled 20. stoletje: arhitektura od moderne do sodobne (20th Century: Architecture from Modern to the Contemporary)4 completely ignores the achievements of women architects. Furthermore, only those women who were active after 1965, when post-war Slovenian architectural activity witnessed its first creative phase, or after 1991, when Slovenia became an independent state,5 receive notice in the above-mentioned monographs. Yet women’s contribution to Slovenian architecture, beginning with the establishment of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia in 1946 (after 1963, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia or SFRY) until the mid-1960s, has been ignored. Turning to the present day, gender discrimination in architecture persists: The first woman to become a full, tenured professor at the University of Ljubljana, Živa Deu, was only appointed in 2014, almost a century after its Department of Architecture was established.

Nellie (Nell) McCredie (1901-1968) worked as both an architect and a ceramist. She was enrolled in the second cohort of the Bachelor of Architecture at the University of Sydney between 1919 and 1923. However, after graduating, McCredie was unable to find employment in architecture; instead, she found work in various drafting roles in Sydney. In her search for full-time employment in architecture, she moved to Cairns in July 1925 and spent four months working for a small architectural firm, Lawrence and Lordan.[1] In November 1925, McCredie moved to Brisbane and joined the Queensland Government’s State Advances Corporation in the Workers Dwelling Board (WDB). She stayed there for three years designing affordable homes, funded by government-backed loans, for working and middle class families. During this time, she designed at least one house as a private commission, outside of her employment with the WDB. While in Brisbane, McCredie started taking classes in ceramics with LJ Harvey at the Central Technical College.[2] McCredie returned to Sydney in 1929 at the beginning of the Great Depression. Upon returning home, she undertook further training in ceramics, learning to throw pottery on a wheel.[3] What started as a hobby transformed into McCredie’s full-time career throughout the 1930s.[4] By 1932 she had started her own ceramics teaching and production business based out of a studio on George Street in Sydney’s CBD. McCredie also continued to practice architecture independently in Sydney during the 1930s and 1940s. One of her most significant architectural works in Sydney was her design for a purpose-built ceramics studio in Epping in 1936. She operated her ceramics business from Epping with her brother Robert until she died in 1968.[5]Existing histories on McCredie’s career have focused on her ceramics rather than her architecture. The lack of attention paid to McCredie’s architecture is not because her work was insubstantial but because of the complexities in attributing authorship by architects to their buildings.[6] This thesis details McCredie’s career in architecture for the first time, which has been made possible by the discovery of her architectural archive. McCredie’s architectural archive provides a rare opportunity to discuss the built work of one of Australia’s early women architects. This research has led to the identification of 12 previously undiscovered houses by McCredie, including seven houses in Queensland and five in Sydney’s northern suburbs. Of these 12, 10 are extant. Prior to this research, only one of her houses had been identified, Uanda (1928) in the Brisbane suburb of Wilston. It was only discovered after an application to demolish the house was submitted to Brisbane City Council in 1998. The council sought an interim heritage protection order for the house, which the then owners of Uanda disputed in the Queensland Land and Environment Court in 1999. Fortunately, the decision to protect Uanda was upheld, and it was included on the Queensland Heritage Register in 2000. The court case over the heritage listing of Uanda is an important departure point for this thesis, especially in terms of how the aesthetic merits of the house were debated between heritage expert Richard Allom and historian Judith McKay.[7] The discussion of McCredie’s architectural works presented in this thesis also provides new insights into the careers of the architects she worked alongside. McCredie was among the first identifiable cohort of Australian women in architecture, who as Julie Willis wrote, emerged in earnest in the 1920s.[8] This study builds on existing research on Australia’s early women architects completed by Willis, McKay and Bronwyn Hanna. In particular, it provides new details about the careers of Australian interwar women architects, Ursula Jones, Eunice Slaughter, Dorothy Brennan, Lorna Lukin, Marjorie Hudson, Rosina Edmunds and Heather Sutherland. Additionally, McCredie’s archive also contributes to existing histories about the institutions that she was involved with throughout her career, including new findings into the histories of the WDB and the curriculum delivered into Australia’s first Bachelor of Architecture degree at the University of Sydney. [1] Nell McCredie Employment Statement, Department of Public Works, 1928, Queensland State Archives document: WOR/A 1194 Department of Public Works Administration series files Brisbane, Australia [2] Judith McKay, “Designing women: pioneer architects”. Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, Vol. 20, No. 5, (Feb 2008): 174-175. [3] Robert McCredie, “McCredie Pottery: 1922-1974” McCredie Ceramics Archive, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia, 1 [4] “Where Pottery is Made By Hand: Sydney Girl’s Fascinating Hobby” The Sydney Morning Herald 20 October, 1936: 5 [5] Robert McCredie, “McCredie Pottery: 1922-1974,” 6 [6] Julie Willis, Invisible Contributions: The PRobertlem of History and Women Architects, Architectural Theory Review, 3:2, (1998): 61 [7] Michel v. Brisbane City Council, Qpelr 374, 1999 [8] Julie Willis, Aptitude and Capacity: Published Views of the Australian Woman Architect, Architectural Theory Review, 17:2-3, (2012): 323

Using as a departure point Bridget Fowler and Fiona M. Wilson's sociological reflections on the slow progress of women architects towards achieving equality within the profession, as published in their essay, “Women Architects and Their Discontents”, the aim of this article is to examine the image of Zaha Hadid in relation to Despina Stratigakos' arguments about what “a woman architect” looks like today. By referring to the feminist theories of Simone de Beauvoir, Stratigakos and Rochelle Martin, this article uses the image of Hadid to examine, firstly, the relationship women architects have with work and mothering; secondly, the image of the woman architect in relation to that of the male architect; and thirdly, the effects that the image of “the architect” has on gender traits and the practices of women architects.

This article discusses a specific architectural type: single-family homes designed by and for heterosexual couples who were both architects and collaborators, and who dedicated a particular space in their home to architectural work. My examples are a handful of modest houses built in the suburbs of Copenhagen with state-supported mortgages during the post-war period by Inger and Johannes Exner, Karen and Ebbe Clemmensen, and Rut Speyer and Eigil Hartvig Rasmussen. Taking the woman architect’s perspective as a starting point, my architectural readings reveal the wider implications of the intermingling of professional and private lives in these houses’ economic, cultural, and suburban contexts. The article, thus, contributes feminist architectural readings as well as a theoretical framework that highlights women architects’ conditions of creative work in the post-war period. In doing so, following sociologist Eva Illouz, the article takes seriously the post-war period’s institutional, spatial, architectural, cultural, and economic conditions for love, life, and work. This article builds on research carried out in the project Women in Danish Architecture 1925–1975 (www.womenindanisharchitecture.dk).

Women architects in the USA are generally satisfied with their work and feel that they are successful. Responses to a mailed survey form sent to women members of the American Institute of Architects throughout the USA allows a clear and unique profile of the woman architect to emerge. It appears that women architects have different values to women in general, and to women managers; but close to women engineers' values (with the exception of aesthetic value). There are, however, still many obstacles to be overcome by women architects before they achieve parity of treatment with their male counterparts.

The International Union of Women Architects (L’Union Internationale des Femmes Architectes, UIFA) was founded in Paris in 1963 “to make known and to promote the Woman Architect,” to foster contact and exchange, and to create a network of women architects.1 Moreover, a Hungarian participant-Eva Spiro-not only attended the 1st Congress, she was also elected to serve as one of the organization’s five vice-presidents. Between 1963 and 1990, when the political system in Eastern Europe changed, the UIFA organized eight congresses, which-with one exceptionincluded participants from Hungary. Keeping the limited opportunities to travel for citizens of socialist countries during the Cold War in mind, attendance at an international conference would not have been possible without professional assistance and official permission. Furthermore, while the official architectural journals of the Union of Hungarian Architects exhaustively documented the contacts to Western professional organizations, almost no references to the Hungarian participation in the UIFA are found in these forums.

This essay explores the public image of women architects in Wilhelmine Germany, examining the tension between cultural conceptions of femininity and the social construction of the architect as a masculine figure. Writings published between 1908 and 1920 concerning women architects are analyzed according to five prominent themes: the architect's body, the negotiation of the building site, the architect's mind and the female brain, the persona of the architect, and the woman architect as mistress of the domestic realm.

BACKGROUND: There is limited knowledge about the early formally educated architects on the territory of present North Macedonia, and, especially, about the early women architects. AIM: The aim of this research is to find more about the life and work of one the first women architects practicing on the territory of North Macedonia, Elena Bokus. METHODS: This work is based on the study of available primary and secondary sources complemented with selected gray literature. The primary research focused on finding additional information about the life and work of Elena Bokus since she was already identified as one of the first woman architects practicing on the territory of present North Macedonia. In addition, secondary research was carried out to identify Bokus’ contemporaries with similar names to exclude the possibility of misidentification within the original sources. RESULTS: The research to date has not identified any further information on Elena Bokus apart from those already available in the first volume of the “Architects in Macedonia” book by the late Professor Konstantinovski. However, the presence and work of the architect Jelena Bokur (née Tomić) were identified on the territory of the present North Macedonia in the period between 1915 and 1923. CONCLUSION: Based on the information available to date, it appears that Elena Bokus and Jelena Bokur most likely are the same person, whereby a possible misreading of a handwritten signature or similar had probably contributed to the misidentification of the actual name of one of the first woman architect working on the territory of present North Macedonia. Further research is required to confirm these findings and inform about her life and work, especially within the territory of present North Macedonia.

For women architects, the confluence of gender and professional identity has remained unresolved since their admittance to the profession of architecture. The past decade has seen a resurgence in the use of the term ‘women in architecture’ coupled with renewed debate around its use as well as challenges from feminist historians and theorists to recognise other forms of architectural practices and identities. The research presented here examines the interplay between gender and the professional identity of those working within, and outside of, architectural professional practice in Ireland by combining questions on gender and professional identity from a large survey (n = 684) and 23 semi-structured interviews. Launched in March 2023, the Irish Architecture Career Tracker Survey received over 680 completed online questionnaires. The respondents, ranging in age from 20 to 72, were asked, ‘How important is being a woman/man to the way you think about your career?’ Perhaps unsurprisingly, the results for men and women are almost the inverse of one another. Male respondents tended towards ‘being a man is not at all important to the way I think about my career,’ at 45%, whilst female respondents tended towards the opposite, ‘being a woman is extremely important to the way I think about my career,’ at 41%. Another key question asked was whether or not ‘The term ‘woman in architecture’ is an important reflection of who I am professionally?’ Just 40% of female participants agreed with this statement. In the 23 semi-structured interviews which followed the survey, these two topics were explored, providing rich qualitative. Interviewees were both male and female and ranged in age from 32 to 62. When analysed using a reflexive thematic approach, we identified six themes which, when taken together, show a difficult and at times contradictory and paradoxical confluence of gender and professional identity, especially, but not only, for female architects. We suggest that these apparent contradictions and paradoxes are a way to cope with the quintessential sexist dilemma that identifying as a ‘woman in architecture’ continues to present.

Architects operate in an intensely visual world, and as such visual markers can be seen as keys to their identity, work processes, and practices. Despite the many cliches, how architects dress and the workplaces they operate within are critical indicators of culture, of individual and collective identity–as creative, and as gendered. The image of an architect, the image of a woman architect, and the image of the architectural office as workplace, thus emerge as central to the concerns of a large research project investigating gender equity and women’s participation in the Australian architecture profession. This chapter reflects on two bodies of visual research related to that project-investigating the architectural workplace and architects as professionals. Despite a long and active history in Australian architecture, women architects still tend to be less ‘visible’ than their male counterparts, and to cluster in the lower levels of the profession. There are also many women working in the field who do not appear in conventional measures of professional participation-that is, they are almost entirely invisible. Employing tools and concepts drawn from visual sociology, this chapter analyses photographic images through the lens of identity, belonging, and the quotidian aspects of architectural work. Questions of persona and performance, and the gendered workplace in architecture, all equally emerge.

While the practice of architecture has traditionally been a male-dominated field in India, gender discourse in architecture has been slowly shifting the gender balance towards an increased participation of women in architectural practice and academics, as both leaders and team members. This paper explores the nuances of feminist spatial practices locating itself in the state of Kerala, India, that has historically unique gender politics. The paper draws on an ethnographically informed study of twelve women architects, using “Master Bedrooms” as a discursive tool to capture their engagement in professional practice. The study revealed that the critical feminist spatial practice is not watertight nor a conscious way of practice. It does not even require conformity to any one idea of feminism. These women practitioners deploy multiple modes of engaging with and challenging the dominant norms of professional practice. These range from conscious acts of individual subversion to organizational structuring, from overt challenges to quiet resistance. This paper offers to problematise contemporary discourse on critical feminist spatial practices in the context of India and thereby, contribute to critical spatial pedagogies.

From the 1970s social and political changes in Australia and the burgeoning feminist movement were challenging established power relationships and hierarchies. This paper explores how in the 1980s groups of women architects actively took positions that were outside the established professional mainstream. A 1982 seminar at the University of Queensland galvanised women in Brisbane to form the Association of Women Architects, Town Planners and Landscape Architects. Formally founded the association was multi-disciplinary and not affiliated with the established bodies. Its aims included promoting women and working to reform the practice of these professions. While predominately made up of architects, the group never became part of the Royal Australian Institutes of Architects, it did inject itself into its activities, spectacularly sponsoring the Indian architect Revathi Kamath to speak at the 1984 RAIA. For five years the group was active organising talks, speakers, a newsletter and participating in Architecture Week. In 1984 an exhibition ‘Profile: Women in Architecture’ featured the work of 40 past and present women architects and students, including a profile of Queensland’s then oldest practitioner Beatrice Hutton. Sydney architect Eve Laron, the convenor of Constructive Women in Sydney opened the exhibition. There was an active interchange between Women in Architecture in Melbourne, Constructive Women, and the Queensland group, with architects such as Ann Keddie, Suzanne Dance and Barbara van den Broek speaking in Brisbane. While the focus of the group centred around women’s issues such as traditional prejudice, conflicting commitments and retraining, its architectural interests were not those of conventional practice. It explored and promoted the design of cities and buildings that were sensitive to users including women and children, design using natural materials and sustainability. While the group only existed for a short period, it advanced positions and perspectives that were outside the mainstream of architectural discourse and practice. Nearly 40 years on a new generation of women is leading the debate into the structural inequities in the architectural profession which are very similar to those tackled by women architects in the 1980s.

Since the 1970s, feminist historians and polemicists have struggled to uncover the ordinary lives of women. They believe that gender ideals and biases are a critical part of the weft and weave of daily life. But the quotidian has been a restricted field in our discipline, often used to define a particular building type rather than the lives of architects. For example, we know little about the workdays of professionals or their labour in the workplace. The architectural office - its daily transactions and everyday culture - remains obscure. Even when represented in histories of the profession, the architectural office is filtered through a top-down lens trained on practice directors. The labour and lives of architecture’s male and female employees is unexplored terrain, but we could begin with the demographics: up to three-quarters of Australian women in architecture are salaried workers, continuing a historical trend. In the past, women generally worked for others. The gendering of salaried architectural workers raises questions about the relationship between gender and office work. Feminist historians and theorists have suggested that the office plays a role in forming gender ideals and practices. This paper endeavours to critically describe the lives and labour of women architects at the office, using survey and interview data from a large-scale Australian research project, publicly known through its website Parlour. This research inquires into gender disadvantage and investigates how gender ideals and norms shape the culture of the architectural workplace. The project’s research questions, evidence and explanations form the basis of this essay. The Parlour project is an ongoing platform for sharing information and research, but it gives particular voice to women’s experience in architecture, an experience largely shaped by salaried employment, studentship and the ownership of small practices.

Since the 1970s, feminist historians and polemicists have struggled to uncover the ordinary lives of women. They believe that gender ideals and biases are a critical part of the weft and weave of daily life. But the quotidian has been a restricted field in our discipline, often used to define a particular building type rather than the lives of architects. For example, we know little about the workdays of professionals or their labour in the workplace. The architectural office - its daily transactions and everyday culture - remains obscure. Even when represented in histories of the profession, the architectural office is filtered through a top-down lens trained on practice directors. The labour and lives of architecture’s male and female employees is unexplored terrain, but we could begin with the demographics: up to three-quarters of Australian women in architecture are salaried workers, continuing a historical trend. In the past, women generally worked for others. The gendering of salaried architectural workers raises questions about the relationship between gender and office work. Feminist historians and theorists have suggested that the office plays a role in forming gender ideals and practices. This paper endeavours to critically describe the lives and labour of women architects at the office, using survey and interview data from a large-scale Australian research project, publicly known through its website Parlour. This research inquires into gender disadvantage and investigates how gender ideals and norms shape the culture of the architectural workplace. The project’s research questions, evidence and explanations form the basis of this essay. The Parlour project is an ongoing platform for sharing information and research, but it gives particular voice to women’s experience in architecture, an experience largely shaped by salaried employment, studentship and the ownership of small practices.