Woman Architect Research Articles

The Quest for Architect Elena Bokus

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.

Romance as a medium-Lin Huiyin’s relationships in transmedia intertextual discourse

ABSTRACT Lin Huiyin (1904–1955) was the first woman architect in modern China. Her romantic love stories have shaped a discourse that, for optimal engagement, both provides and requires transmedia and intertextual media theories. This research examines Lin’s romantic stories that entangled with her career and life, from the perspective of media ecology, narrative, and gender studies. I argue that although the Chinese media environment is censored, constrained, and scrutinized, given enough time and movement among multiple platforms, a medium can shape its own ecology and develop “organic” discussions on a subject that is commonly perceived as less political and more humanistic, particularly romantic love. These discussions provide a more spontaneous discourse for media users to share their opinions and expose more genuine views on gender, nation, and morality. These topics require continuing conversations rather than didactic education to change. Although change usually does not occur quickly, the airing of genuine yet problematic opinions helps the public and stakeholders observe, identify, and interact with them and create the possibility to reshape public opinions on gender roles, particularly women’s roles in romantic discourse, which always interacts with women’s individual realization as well as professional, familial, and social relationships.

The feminist perspective as a counterpoint in the architecture of Anna Bofill (1977–1996)

The vast and plural production of the woman architect, musician, activist, occasional educator and tireless researcher Anna Bofill Levi (Barcelona, 1944) is characterized by certain features that make its author a unique personality, although one hardly known and recognized in the Spanish and international circles that are the custodians of prestige in architecture. She has achieved most public recognition as a composer, the field in which she has been most productive over time and developed the furthest. Her music is characterized by the number of references, especially contemporary, she includes, the wide diversity of countries where it has been performed, and the range of people to whom she has dedicated her works, all these aspects testifying to her cosmopolitan and libertarian spirit and her commitment to equality. Her incessant writing, with all the reading it entails, has also left us with a large body of written work, extending over a number of fields, including most notably her reflections on the influence of the gender-based perspective on urban planning. A factor also reflected in her architecture, for example, in the implementation of participatory processes in her project designs. She joined the Taller de Arquitectura from the time she began her studies at the School of Architecture in Barcelona in 1964—she graduated in 1972—, and then commenced her independent career in 1981, although her first solo works date from 1977. Her work at the head of her office for almost 20 years is evidence of a tireless capacity for work and an unwavering commitment to people's welfare. This paper analyses Anna Bofill's contributions to feminist thinking through her work as an architect. Also, it addresses the study of a cultured person, a woman with great sensitivity and a strong political and personal commitment who has suffered discrimination and who has made rigor and determination the means to achieve her non-negotiable freedom.

Between passion and possession: women architects and the houses they built for family, love and work

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).

The Image of Women Architects in Films, 1912–1943: New Careers and Stereotyped Femininities

Contrary to what might be expected, portrayals of women architects in films can be found as far back as the early decades of the twentieth century. In this article, the authors review a few films released between 1912 and 1943 in which one of the characters is a woman architect, focusing on three of them: Dr. Monica (1934), Woman Chases Man (1937) and The Lamp Still Burns (1943). The article explores the ways in which architecture was used by screenwriters and directors as a suitable vehicle to portray the ‘new woman’, as well as the conflicts that arise when a woman practices a traditionally male profession. It analyses the differences and limitations of these depictions, and the stereotypes regarding femininity that permeated these works of fiction.

Magyar építészek Dél-Ázsiában és közvetítőszerepük a magyar építészetben

The role of oriental art was significant in architecture at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. While the Art Nouveau movement in Western Europe was influenced by the Japanese and Persian art, Hungary made efforts to find the origin of the Hungarian architecture. This study presents the Asian trip of architect Károly Róbert Kertész, published in his work entitled Architecture of Ceylon. In the 1930’s architect István Medgyaszay was invited to India to design a museum in Mumbai. His archive, containing the plans, photographs and letters born during the trip, can be found in the Medgyaszay Memorial House. During the reconstruction of Medgyaszay’s Indian trip (2021) some mysterious watercolour plans were discovered among his designs. Additionally, as a result of the research in Mumbai (2020) this study introduces István Medgyaszay’s friendship with Perin Jamshedji Mistri, the first professional woman architect in India; and highlights the role of Jenő Cholnoky geographer in the work of both of the aforementioned architects.

Crafting the archive: Minnette De Silva, Architecture, and History

This article is about the work of Minnette De Silva, which made claims upon heritage and historical meaning through its concerns with craft. It investigates three facets of her oeuvre—her building, her writing and teaching, her design and handicraft—through the lens of her pictorial autobiography, The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. She identified this remarkable publication as her ‘archives’, documenting in it her life and work (in the absence of a dedicated collection of records), and the equally notable twentieth-century sites and spheres through which she moved. Few careers invite critical investigation of South Asia's modern architectural forms and history as does that of De Silva, an understudied figure credited as a pioneer: a Sri Lanka Institute of Architects Gold Medal recipient, a Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Associate, a co-founder of the journal MARG, a participant in the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM), and an architect practising in a range of discursive media. This article argues that De Silva positioned her intellectual and practical labour as a basis for authority rooted in a situated knowledge. In a reading of gender, caste, race and labour that maintains a scholarly scepticism about the purpose of the artist's biography, this article recovers her life and work from a fragmented archive, including an interview with De Silva in the year before her death, as well as a consideration of craft—interrogating each vis-à-vis the politics of historiography.

Mapping the (Invisible) Salaried Woman Architect: the Australian Parlour Research Project

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.

Reiko Hayama, Between the Acts: Legacies from Le Corbusier and Kunio Maekawa

Filiation, or the sharing of a creative legacy from one generation to another, is more obvious when considering principles specific to architecture. This paper examines how Le Corbusier’s legacy was passed down to Reiko Hayama, a pioneering Japanese woman architect who started her career working in Tokyo from 1959 until 1965 for Kunio Maekawa, one of “the Master’s” previous collaborators at Rue de Sèvres 35. She then moved to Paris to work for Charlotte Perriand and Jean Prouvé before establishing her own atelier from 1976 until 2013. This article focuses on the active resonances of Le Corbusier’s heritage in Hayama’s personal practice. Her reflections indicate that Maekawa and Prouvé opened a path to her that was situated apart from Le Corbusier’s principles. This path included: an environmental concern ethic, a design process that took cultural context deliberately into account and an architectural form derived from a technological reasoning process. In direct heritage, she assumed the Modulor’s legacy itself, an important operative tool in Corbusian methodology.

Virginia Haret – The First Woman Architect in the World

A case investigated in detail was of the architect Virginia Haret, the first woman architect in the world. After obtaining a diploma in Bucharest, it spent a period of residence in Italy, where she worked with architects and archaeologists of the time. The influence of neo-classical architecture of the Italian Novecento remains not seen in the works of architect, maybe just in the Povernei Street extension, now demolished. In the early years she had built in Neo-Romanian style, moving then to Modernism.

Zaha: An Image of “The Woman Architect”

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.

The Woman/Architect Distinction

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.

Aptitude and Capacity: Published Views of the Australian Woman Architect

The paper examines the evolving portrayal of women architects, or the possibility thereof, in the popular and professional press in Australia from their earliest consideration in 1888 to a particular moment in 1970. In doing so, it reveals some of the assumptions that underscored the experience of women architects in the profession. It also reveals a number of barriers, outside of the profession, that women faced in architectural careers. In doing so, it raises questions as to the assumptions and hidden barriers to women's full engagement in the Australian architecture profession today.

Review: Women Building History: Public Art at the 1893 Columbian Exposition by Wanda M. Corn

Wanda M. Corn. Women Building History: Public Art at the 1893 Columbian Exposition . Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011, xi + 266 pages, 9 color and 144 b/w illus. $49.95, ISBN 9780520241114 The 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition requires little introduction for readers of this journal. What Wanda Corn accomplishes with her marvelous study is to shift the emphasis away from Daniel Burnham, the exposition’s formidable Director of Works, to the women who designed and decorated its Woman’s Building. The result is an important reinterpretation of the fair and of the importance of gender for understanding public art and architecture. Women Building History is divided into four parts that address the history of the exposition, the history of the Woman’s Building, the history and content of the mural decorations, and the critical responses to the design and decorations of the building. Two additional features of this book are notable. First, it includes short biographical entries about the women who contributed to designing the Woman’s Building. Second, it includes sidebars to tell parallel and alternative stories about topics ranging from “the feminization of the banjo” to the “skirt dance,” subjects that shed light on the content of the building’s decorations where, Corn contends, there is more to the story than meets the eye. Designed by Sophia Hayden, the Woman’s Building was situated at the intersection of the forces …

Following Hélène Cixous' Steps Towards A Writing Architecture

In her book Coming to Writing, Hélène Cixous suggests that the woman writer must always struggle to establish her right to write. Within the field of architecture the act of writing is often assumed to be a passive after-effect of the built form and not an active force that might substantially participate in the process of design and its material outcome in a world. Using Cixous as a guide, I will argue that a creative and critical practice of writing can materially contribute to the thinking and doing of architecture, especially with regard to the woman architect.

Layers of Changing Space in Jerusalem: View From a Hilltop

The space around me is Jerusalem?my city for over twenty years, since I moved here my hometown, Tel Aviv, after returning my studies in Paris. All these years, still a pilgrim in Jerusalem, I have been exploring its unique space. Breathtakingly beautiful, always surprising, un containable, and constantly changing: the changing light of the four winds of its slopes between desert and lush vegetation, the changing seasons, the changing years of rain or drought, and the changing history?imprinted on its landscape. During the last ten years, Jerusalem's space has become the focus of my writing Snapshots} a novel?whose narrator, the woman architect liana Tzuriel, is planning a Monument, or rather an Anti-Monument for Peace in Jerusalem. liana's fictional project is located in a real place: on the high est hilltop of Jerusalem, The Mount of the Evil Counsel. It is seven minutes drive my apartment, just outside downtown; yet, it stays as a foreign enclave, belonging to another space and time. A bare hilltop, covered with rocks, thistles, wild herbs, broken glass. From time to time a herd of sheep, led by an Arab shepherd, crosses it. On its slope, next to the remains of a Jordanian outpost, stands the ritual bath of the nearby Jewish neighbor hood, and on the very top of the hill erupts the communication antenna of the U.N. forces, stationed at the Governor's House, a relic the British Mandate. A desolate hilltop that dominates an incomparable panoramic view of three hundred and sixty degrees. A space intensely layered? topographically, ethnically, politically and textually.2 The hilltop's name, The Mount of Evil Counsel, is a quote the New Testament, and look ing northwards it faces the Holy Sepulcher with Jesus' grave. To this hilltop Abraham and Isaac, with the young men and the donkey who accompanied them, arrived after three days walk, and watched from afar Mount

Architects in Skirts: The Public Image of Women Architects in Wilhelmine Germany

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.

Suturing of Dualities: An Addiction to Perfection

In an ever-changing patriarchal society, the female is faced with the decision to stay home with her family and become a “center” for the house or to go out Into the work force and pursue her Interests and a career. As she strives to balance these two roles. In her addiction to perfection, we find that the domicile, as we once knew it, is destructing … making way for a new form that must be allowed to take shape. The basic “bare bones” of the house remain; yet, in their new form, they are allowed to take on different Identities which are necessary for this “new house.” This project investigates the role of the homemaker and the home-maker: the woman and the architect, i.e., the woman architect and the house in the “middle” of it all. As the project begins to define “middle” architectonically, the patriarchal bonds to this house are broken: releasing the female.

Decision Styles, Values and Characteristics of Women Architects in the United States

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.

Standard requirements and multi-storey housing design

The proportion of multi-storey housing in the USSR virtually trebled in the past decade from 5.5 per cent to 16 per cent. In cities like Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev it approaches 80 per cent. This paper by a woman architect closely concerned with the problem explains the role of the standard requirements laid down in the Soviet Union.