THE SEX OF ARCHITECTURE THE SEX 0 F ARCHITECTURE Editors Diana Agrest Patricia Conway managing editor Leslie Kanes Weisman DIANA AGREST DIANA BALMORI ANN BERGREN JENNIFER BLOOMER M. CHRISTINE BOYER LYNNE BRESLIN ZEYNEP ~ELIK BEATRIZ COLOMINA MARGARET CRAWFORD ESTHER DACOSTA MEYER DIANE FAVRO ALICE T. FRIEDMAN GHISLAINE HERMANUZ CATHERINE INGRAHAM SYLVIA LAVIN DIANE LEWIS MARY MCLEOD JOAN OCKMAN Harry N. Abrams, Inc., DENISE SCOTT BROWN Publishers SHARON E. SUTTON SUSANA TORRE LAURETTA VINCIARELLI LESLIE KANES WEISMAN MARION WEISS EDITOR: Diana rvlurphy DESIGNER: Judith Hudson LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATAlOGING-IN­ PUBLICATION DATA The sex of architecture I editors, Diana Agrest, Patricia Conway, Leslie Kanes Weisman. p. em. Includes index. ISBN o-8Io9-2683-0 (pbk.) 1. Architecture and women. 1. Agrest, Diana. II. Conway, Patricia. m.Weisman, Leslie. NA2543.W65s48 I996 720' .82-dc20 96-5552 Copyright © I996 Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Published in 1996 by Harry N. Abrams, Incorporated, New York A Times JVIirror Company All rights reserved. No part of the con­ tents of this book may be reproduced without the written permission of the publisher Printed and bound in Japan The quotation in M. Christine Boyer's caption to fig. 3 is taken from Malvin Wald and Albert I'vlaltz, "The Naked City": A Screenplay {Carbondale and Edwards­ ville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1948), 3· Front cover: Erwin Blumenfeld. Lisa Fonssagrives on the Eiffel Tower, Paris. 1938. Collection Kathleen Blumenfeld; courtesy French Vogue; © 1996 Artist Rights Society (ARS) New York/ADAGP, Paris CONTENTS 8 Acknowledgments DIANA AGREST PATRICIA CONWAY LESLIE KANES WEISMAN 10 Foreword PATRICIA CONWAY II Introduction DIANA AGREST PATRICIA CONWAY LESLIE KANES WEISMAN 15 "Other" Spaces and "Others" MARY MCLEOD 29 Missing Objects CATHERINE INGRAHAM 41 PresentTense DIANE LEWIS 49 The Return of the Repressed: Nature DIANA AGREST 69 The Case of the Death of Nature: A Mystery DIANA BALMORI 77 Female Fetish Urban Form ANN BERGREN 97 Crimes in and of the City: The Femme Fatale as Urban Allegory M. CHRISTINE BOYER 119 Investigating the City: Detective Fiction as Urban Interpretation MARGARET CRAWFORD 127 Gendered Spaces in Colonial Algiers ZEYNEP <;:ELIK 141 La Donna e Mobile: Agoraphobia, Women, and Urban Space ESTHER DACOSTA MEYER 157 'Women Internet" vs. the "Space ofTyranny" LAURETTA VINCIARELLI 161 The Matter of Matter: A Longing for Gravity JENNIFER BLOOMER 167 Battle Lines: E.I027 BEATRIZ COLOMINA 183 Colomina's Web SYLVIA LAVIN 191 Mirror Images: Technology, Consumption, and the Representation of Gender in American Architecture since World War 11 JOAN OCKMAN 211 Through the Looking Glass DENISE scOTT BROWN 217 Not a Muse: The Client's Role at the Rietveld Schroder House ALICE T. FRIEDMAN 233 Housing for a Postmodern World GHISLAINE HERMANUZ 241 Claiming the Public Space: The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo SUSANA TORRE 251 The Politics ofUnderestimation MARION WEISS 263 Confessions in Public Space LYNNE BRESLIN 273 Diversity by Design: Feminist Reflections on the Future of Architectural Education and Practice LESLIE KANES WEISMAN 287 Resisting the Patriarchal Norms of Professional Education SHARON E. SUTTON 295 The Pen Is Mightier Than the Building: Writing on Architecture r8so-r940 DIANE FAVRO 309 Notes on the Contributors 314 Index 320 Photograph Credits The essays in this book have been developed from selected papers delivered at a conference entitled "Inherited Ideologies: A Re-Examination," held at the University of Pennsylvania on March 31 and April 1, 1995, and attended by more than four hundred people from all over the East Coast and as far away as California, Canada, and Australia. The spirit of that conference was a con­ versational one: a dialogue among women theorists, historians, educators, and practitioners concerned with critical issues in architecture and the related fields of urban design and landscape architecture. While not a feminist conference per se, many of the papers presented there were informed by a gendered per­ spective - a perspective that eventually determined the contents of this book. So far as we know, "Inherited Ideologies" was the first all-women aca­ demic assembly on architecture in the United States, and credit for bringing together its remarkably diverse participants is due to the program organizers - Diana Agrest, Diana Balmori, Jennifer Bloomer, Lynne Breslin, Zeynep <;:elik, Patricia Conway (conference chair), Mildred Friedman, Susana Torre, and Leslie Kanes Weisman- who had been meeting regularly in New York City since 1992 as part of a larger group of professional women. When Penn's newly formed Annenberg Public Policy Center announced a year-long series of university-wide conferences on 'Women in the Public Sphere" (1994-95), Conway, then dean of Penn's Graduate School of Fine Arts, conjoined the planning for her school's conference with the emerging interests of the women with whom she had been meeting in New York. Out of this collaboration, the program organizers enlisted the participation of women colleagues around the country who were doing work that, broadly construed, related to the themes of public place and private space around which the Graduate School of Fine Arts "Inherited Ideologies" conference was being developed. All of the foregoing is by way of saying that to properly acknowledge the efforts that have gone into the making of this book, we must first thank the Hon. Walter H. Annenberg, a part of whose extraordinary gift to the University 8 of Pennsylvania helped to fund the "Inherited Ideologies" conference; and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of Penn's Annen berg School for Communication and director of the Annen berg Public Policy Center, whose leadership mobi­ lized an entire university around an issue, 'Women in the Public Sphere," that, heretofore, had received insufficient attention. In addition, we are grate- ful to those women who, while choosing to remain anonymous, have made important contributions to the success of these endeavors. For their unflagging energies in compiling and processing the contents of this book, Joshua Gesell, Eva Gibson, and Margaret Braver deserve special mention. We are also indebted to Diana Murphy, Senior Editor at Harry N. Abrams, Inc., who guided the progress from wide-ranging conference proceedings to a more topical collection of essays. Finally, our deepest appreciation goes to the authors, whose provoca­ tive essays collectively express the power and diversity of women's views on architecture today. Diana Agrest Patricia Conway Leslie Kanes Weisman 9 .570t•ecuoni Today women are playing more important roles in the production of architecture than at any time in this country's history. A growing number are succeeding in smaller, critical practices that tend to lead the larger, more commercial firms toward the cutting edge of design; they are entering- and winning- their fair share of public-sector competitions, traditionally the first step toward a distin­ guished career in architectural design. At the same time, women continue to encounter obstacles created by gender prejudice at defining moments in their careers. For the last two decades, they have constituted nearly half the enrollment in this country's most prestigious architecture programs - programs from which they are consistently graduated at the tops of their classes. Yet in 1995, only 8.9 percent of registered architects and 8.7 percent of tenured architech1re faculty in the United States were women. Almost no women are recognized as name partners in large commercial firms, nor has any woman in this country ever been commissioned to design a nationally significant building on the scale of, say, Ada Karmi-Melamede's Supreme Court in Jerusalem or Gae Aulenti's Musee d'Orsay in Paris. Moreover, the number of women holding top administrative positions and named chairs in American university architecture programs remains shockingly low; and since the retirement of Ada Louise Huxtable from the New York Times, no woman has had a commanding voice as architecture critic for a major city newspaper or weekly newsmagazine. It comes as no surprise, then, that although at least two women have received the RI BA Gold l.Yiedal in Great Britain, no woman has been awarded either of this country's highest architectural honors: the AlA Gold Medal or the Pritzker Prize. Nevertheless, it is critical practice and competition entries that exert the most powerful pull on the discourse of architecture, and in this discourse women have a remarkably strong presence. Writing as theorists, critics, historians, educators, and practitioners, women are at the forefront of the debate in archi­ tecture today - a debate that is reshaping the way we think about our built 10 environment at the millennium. Inevitably one of the most controversial issues to surface in this debate is gender: a seemingly circular discourse that begs, yet refuses, closure. P.C. .31/l t;•oclactto;z Sex. The word is layered with meaning and provocation. Embedded within it are the corporeal and the carnal, sensuality and desire, male and female, human reproduction. The inscription of the sexualized body is a central and recurrent theme in Western architecture, but that body is neither innocent nor andro­ gynous. It is a reification of the male longing to appropriate an exclusively female privilege: maternity. Thus the insistence, in ancient and contemporary discourse, that male architects "give birth" to their buildings. Implicated in man's inevitable state of childlessness,