Architecture: Architecture Reading List: Women and Identity

At a moment when the architectural profession is beginning to shift from its traditionally male domination, The Architect: Reconstructing Her Practice examines how the introduction of women to the main body of architecture might bring about a reconstruction of the orders that pervade architectural production and consumption.

Biennial Award, The National League of American Pen Women, Inc. The collection examines what female architects have achieved, how they think about themselves and their work, and what they see as the future role of women in the field.

What changes in teaching and practice, if any, are created by the increasing number of women entering the profession? Do the similar numbers of men and women students attending architectural schools in the west signal a gender-specific architecture? Well-known women architects from Europe and the USA discuss these matters and report their academic and professional experiences, how they see the way ahead and argue - from individual points of view - for a debate on educational structures and how the practice of architecture is composed. Contributors include: Barbara Bestor, Caroline Bos, Alison Brooks, Elke Delugan-Meissl, Jeanne Gang, Lisa Iwamoto, Sheila Kennedy, Regine Leibinger, Farshid Moussavi, Fuensanta Nieto, Monica Ponce de Leon, Mary-Ann Ray, Dagmar Richter, Denise Scott- Brown, Nasrine Seraji, Ingalill Wahlroos-Ritter and Jennnifer Wolch.

Over the last several decades, feminists and architects have independently developed critiques of modern Western assumptions and cultural practices. Architecture and Feminism addresses the intersection of these two seemingly disparate fields through a lively and diverse collection of essays and projects, including interdisciplinary investigations of literature, social history, home economics, and art history. Articles examine such varied topics as Niki de Saint-Phalles exuberant building-sized female sculpture Hon, the aesthetics and politics of the Playboy bachelor pad, Edith Wharton's ideas on domestic architecture, and the Legend of Master Manole, a disquieting Eastern European folktale that prescribes the ritual entombment of women in the walls of buildings, while visual projects take well-known structures by Philip Johnson and Louis Sullivan as points of departure for a feminist reading of architectural history. Rather than presenting a single, didactic position, this collection offers a range of fresh voices to describe the cross-connections and shared concerns between architecture and feminism. Contributors to Architecture and Feminism include Manuela Antoniu, Vanessa Chase, Deborah Fausch, Molly Hankwitz, Susan R. Henderson, Amy Landesberg, Lisa Quatrale, Christine S. E. Magar, Mary McLeod, and George Wagner.

The contributors to this book raise issues of relevance to architectural discourse and, in particular, this discourse as it is affected by gender. As such, it attempts to introduce a gendered awareness of architectural practice through criticism, architecture and psychoanalysis, and politics.

Utopia has become a dirty word in recent scholarship on modernism, architecture, urban planning and gender studies. Many utopian designs now appear impractical, manifesting an arrogant disregard for the lived experiences of the ordinary inhabitants who make daily use of global public and private spaces. The essays in this volume argue that the gendered body is the crux of the hopes and disappointments of modern urban and suburban utopias of the Americas, Europe and Asia. They reassess utopian projects - masculinist, feminist, colonialist, progressive - of the late 19th and early 20th centuries; they survey the dystopian landscapes of the present; and they gesture at the potential for an embodied approach to the urban future, to the changing spaces of cities and virtual landscapes.

This is a study of houses designed by architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Robert Venturi for independent women who headed their own households. It explores the challenges that unconventional attitudes and ways of life presented to architectural thinking - and to the architects themselves. Among the houses examined are Hollyhock House, the Farnsworth House, the Schroeder House and the villa, Les Terrasses.

Until now, the study of gender and architecture has been confined to femininity and he present. This series of case study essays is designed with the idea that by providing a framework, gender can be further explored. This book is a historically coherent package of case studies, with the final essay bridging into the contemporary.

This text brings together essays concerning the intersecting subjects of gender, space and architecture. Carefully structured and with numerous introductory essays, it guides the reader through theoretical and multi-disciplinary texts to direct considerations of gender in relation to particular architectural sites, projects and ideas. This collection marks a focal point in gender and architecture, seeking to summarize core debates and point toward new directions and discussions for the future.

How well do our designed environments - the places and spaces where we live, work and play - meet our aesthetic and functional needs? Increasingly, the distinction between the spaces considered public and private or work and home are becoming more blurred. As a result, innovative designs are needed to meet the challenges of our ever-changing environment. Our streets, parks, dwellings and tools are designed to a one-size-fits-all standard, and the responses of the design community to meet diverse needs have been mixed at best. This work offers feminist critiques of these inadequate design standards, and suggests ideas, projects and programmes for change.

"Discrimination by Design is a fascinating account of the complex social processes and power struggles involved in building and controlling space. Leslie Kanes Weisman offers a new framework for understanding the spatial dimensions of gender and race as well as class. She traces the social and architectural histories of the skyscraper, maternity hospital, department store, shopping mall, nuclear family dream house, and public housing high rise. Her vivid prose is based on exhaustive research and documents how each setting, along with public parks and streets, embodies and transmits the privileges and penalties of social caste." "In presenting feminist themes from a spatial perspective, Weisman raises many new and important questions. When do women feel unsafe in cities, and why? Why do so many homeless people prefer to sleep on the streets rather than in city-run shelters? Why does the current housing crisis pose a greater threat to women than to men? How would dwellings, communities, and public buildings look if they were designed to foster relationships of equality and environmental wholeness? And how can we begin to imagine such a radically different landscape?" "In exploring the answers, the author introduces us to the people, policies, architectural innovations, and ideologies working today to shape a future in which all people matter. Richly illustrated with photographs and drawings, Discrimination by Design is an invaluable and pioneering contribution to our understanding of the issues of our time--health care for the elderly and people with AIDS, homelessness, racial justice, changing conditions of work and family life, affordable housing, militarism, energy conservation, and the preservation of the environment. This thoroughly readable book provides practical guidance to policymakers, architects, planners, and housing activists. It should be read by all who are interested in understanding how the built environment shapes the experiences of their daily lives and the cultural assumptions in which they are immersed."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

In hundreds of businesses, secretaries -- usually women -- do clerical work in "open floor" settings while managers -- usually men -- work and make decisions behind closed doors. According to Daphne Spain, this arrangement is but one example of the ways in which physical segregation has reinforced women's inequality. In this important new book, Spain shows how the physical and symbolic barriers that separate women and men in the office, at home, and at school block women's access to the socially valued knowledge that enhances status. Spain looks at first at how nonindustrial societies have separated or integrated men and women. Focusing then on one major advanced industrial society, the United States, Spain examines changes in spatial arrangements that have taken place since the mid-nineteenth century and considers the ways in which women's status is associated with those changes. As divisions within the middle-class home have diminished, for example, women have gained the right to vote and control property. At colleges and universities, the progressive integration of the sexes has given women students greater access to resources and thus more career options. In the workplace, however, the traditional patterns of segregation still predominate. Illustrated with floor plans and apt pictures of homes, schools, and work sites, and replete with historical examples, Gendered Spaces exposes the previously invisible spaces in which daily gender segregation has occurred -- and still occurs.

Analyzing a range of ideas from biological, evolutionary and anthropological theories to a variety of feminist, psychoanalytic, poststructuralist and constructivist discourses, this book provides a comprehensive introduction to the problematics of gender and power in architectural and urban design.

Marion Mahony Griffin (1871–1961) was an American architect and artist, one of the first licensed female architects in the world, designer for Frank Lloyd Wright’s Chicago studio, and an original member of the Prairie School of architecture. Largely heralded for her exquisite presentation drawings for both Wright and her husband, Walter Burley Griffin, Mahony was an adventurous designer in her own right, whose independent and highly original work attracted attention at a moment when architectural drawing and graphic illustration were becoming integral to the design process. This book examines new research into Mahony’s life and paints a vivid portrait of a woman’s place among the lives and productions of some of our most noted American architects. The essays included take us on an ambitious journey from Mahony’s origins in the Chicago suburbs, through her years as Wright’s right-hand woman and her bohemian life with her husband in Australia—whose new capital city, Canberra, she helped to plan—up until her golden years in the middle of the twentieth century. Filled with richly detailed analyses of Mahony’s works and including and populated by an international cast of characters, Marion Mahony Reconsidered greatly expands our knowledge of this talented, complex, and enigmatic modern architect.

The home as part of material culture is the very place where the intricate relations between architecture, gender and domesticity become visible. This book investigates the multi-layered themes evoked by the interconnections between these terms. The contributions to this book address the gendered conceptions and the use of built spaces, the role of women as active agents of spatial production, and the mutual inscriptions of the materiality of architectural space and gendered subjectivities. The focus of inquiry is modern architecture, also including the celebrated architecture of the Modern movement as its more common and widely spread derivatives that became the dominant mode of building in the twentieth century. The articles in the introductory section provide an overview of the existing discourse on modernity, domesticity and gender. The following three sections consist of essays on specific spatial scenarios from a broad range of geographical locations in the West, whereby the complicated relationship between gender and domestic space are revealed in architectural discourse and practice. The topics range from well-known architects and architectural examples such as Adolf Loos and the Maison de Verre to relatively unknown cases such as the polykatoikia apartments in Greece. In all cases, the authors' emphasis remains on how the concept of domesticity is produced by the gendered subjectivity of builders and users of domestic spaces and by architectural discourse. The essays brought together in this book are based upon new interdisciplinary research which enriches architectural history with sociological, anthropological, philosophical and psychoanalytical approaches. Despite the Modern movement's prominent emphasis on housing, the point is often made that modern art and architecture were about the suppression rather than the glorification of domesticity. This book contends that the modern era marks the rise of a new sense of domesticity that developed simultaneously with re-definitions of gender roles and which led to unprecedented articulations of sexuality with domestic space.

A collection of 24 essays by women historians, theorists, educators and practitioners on issues in architecture and urbanism. They examine assumptions such as that man builds and woman inhabits, that man is outside and woman is inside, and that culture is male and nature is female.

Around the beginning of the twentieth century, women began to claim Berlin as their own, expressing a vision of the German capital that embraced their feminine modernity, both culturally and architecturally. Women located their lives and made their presence felt in the streets and institutions of this dynamic metropolis. From residences to restaurants, schools to exhibition halls, a visible network of women's spaces arose to accommodate changing patterns of life and work.

What was different about the environments that women created as architects, designers and clients at a time when they were gaining increasing political and social status in a male world? Through a series of case studies, Women's Places: Architecture and Design 1860-1960, examines in detail the professional and domestic spaces created by women who had money and the opportunity to achieve their ideal. Set against a background of accepted notions of modernity relating to design and architecture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this book provides a fascinating insight into women's social aspirations and identities. It offers new information and new interpretations in the study of gender, material culture and the built environment in the period 1860-1960.