Places of the Everyday

Places of the everyday. Women critics in architecture

Hilde Heynen

Prof. Hilde Heynen

Onderzoeksgroep Stedelijkheid en Architectuur

KULeuven – Departement ASRO

Kasteel van Arenberg

3000 Leuven

Belgium

Tel. 32-16-32 13 83

Fax 32-16-32 19 84 e-mail: [email protected] 2

Abstract

This paper describes the gendered landscape of the history of modern architecture.

Although there were many women in the early 20th century who intended to pursue a career in architecture, there remain few traces of their presence in the field. Women were also writing on themes connected with architecture, such as domesticity, social reform and housing. Given the fact that modern architecture has its roots in tendencies that embraced these issues, one would expect that these women critics would occupy a major place in modern architecture’s historiography. This is not the case, due to subtle and less subtle mechanisms that rendered their influence invisible and (re)constructed the image of the profession according to masculine lineages and concerns. A few of these mechanisms are described more in detail with respect to the work of Catherine Bauer and

Sibyl Moholy-Nagy.

Biographical note

Hilde Heynen is associate professor in architectural theory at the Catholic University of

Leuven, Belgium. She is the author of several articles in architectural periodicals such as

Assemblage, Archis or Lotus International. In 1999 her book Architecture and

Modernity. A Critique was published by MIT Press. She is currently co-editing with

André Loeckx and Lieven De Cauter an anthology in Dutch of major 20th century texts on architecture. 3

According to recent statistics, the participation of women in architecture is still very low, in the United States as well as in Europe. In the States one-third of undergraduate and graduate students are women, but only 9.1 percent of regular AIA members and no more than 8.7 percent of tenured faculty are female (Coleman 1996). In Europe the numbers are quite similar. There are many reasons for this situation. They partially coincide with the general reasons why women do not occupy positions of power and prestige – women have more than men difficulties in trying to combine a professional career with a family life; women are disadvantaged in terms of salaries, education possibilities or social networks. There is moreover the often underestimated influence of gender schemas

(Valian 1999).

In architecture these gender schemas are particularly important. They take different forms and are influential on different levels. Gender schemas play a role in the conception of what architecture is supposed to be. Francesca Hughes reminds us that architecture as a muse is female, and consequently induces a necessary crisis of identity for the female architect: How is the architect to be seduced by the muse, to succumb to her grace, if she too is female? (Hughes 1996) Elisabeth Grosz argues, through a close reading of Plato’s text on chora, that there is a link between the very concept of architecture and the phallocentric effacement of women and femininity (Grosz 1995). Gender schemas also have implications for a variety of practices and conventions that are determining the field.

As Mark Wigley points out: “The active production of gender distinctions can be found at every level of architectural discourse: in its rituals of legitimation, hiring practices, classification systems, lecture techniques, publicity images, canon formation, division of labor, bibliographies, design conventions, legal codes, salary structures, publishing 4 practices, language, professional ethics, editing protocols, project credits, etc.” (Wigley

1992, 329)

In this paper I will focus on one of the most basic of these discriminatory practices: the effacement of women’s contributions to the history of architecture and urbanism. As

Leonie Sandercock argues in her introduction to Making the Invisible Visible, professions such as planning tend to mold their members’ identity by constructing a specific understanding of the past of the profession (Sandercock 1998). This constructed image implies erasures and exclusions, for it keeps alive certain memories while suppressing others. Thus the historiography of a profession forges its identity along specific lines, which often have implications in terms of gender.

The historiography of modern architecture is no exception to this rule. There were many women in the early 20th century who tried to launch themselves into a career in architecture, but there remain few traces of their presence (Baumhoff 1997). Among those whose track is recorded, a rather consistent pattern can be discerned: women either fall in love with one of their teachers or colleagues, becoming their lover annex assistant, or they are directed towards interior decoration or tapestry, as occupations that surely are more befitting them. In both cases their presence in the field tends to become invisible.

Lotte Stam-Beese exemplifies the first possibility (Damen & Devolder 1993). She was one of the many women who entered the Bauhaus with the intention of becoming an architect. But since her affair with Hannes Meyer was bringing him into a difficult position, he asked her to leave the school which she did. It was only fifteen years and a marriage and three children later that she eventually managed to get her degree. Stam-

Beese nevertheless proved to be an exceptionally talented architect and urbanist. Late in 5 her life, she still made a carreer in Rotterdam’s city administration and became the chief planner for the famous settlements of Pendrecht and Zuidwijk. Lili Reich and Eileen

Gray (Colomina 1996) are examples of the second possibility: gifted, talented women whose work is not prominently present in the history books on architecture, because interior design is considered to be of secondary value in comparison with architecture itself.

At first sight it seems that this pattern of turning women invisible is somewhat less clearly established when it comes to writing on architecture. From 1850 onwards women have taken up the pen in writing about home and household. Catherine Beecher e.g. was an authority on domesticity (Sklar 1976), whereas Edith Warton (Chase 1996) and

Mariana Van Rensselaer (Koenigsberg 1989) wrote on interior decoration, art and architecture. Gradually women writers extended their expertise to issues of house planning and urban design, but for a long time they were not really accepted as equal contributors to the architectural discourse. As Diane Favro points out, by focusing on domestic economy, functionality, health, moral and social reforms, women’s writings often excluded themselves from the domain of architecture as an autonomous art (Favro

1996). And that was how architecture was seen and defended by male architects who demonstrated an open hostility to mass culture and to mundane concerns of everyday existence. Around the turn of the century, the hierarchy between high and mass culture was thus firmly established according to gendered lines.

The early 20th century however saw the advent of modern architecture, which came about as an attempt to re-conceptualize architecture based upon issues of rationality, economy, social reform and functionality rather than pure aesthetics – precisely the issues women 6 writers had been prolific about. The early manifestations of modern architecture in

Germany and Holland – the so-called ‘New Building’1 – called for functionality and sobriety. Their focus was on social housing and functional building types, rather than on representative or monumental buildings. Modern architecture’s program of economy, hygiene and rationalization in housing was clearly inspired by writers on domestic issues, such as Christine Frederick or Erna Meyer. The changing ideals in architecture nevertheless did not change the hierarchy between male and female values, or between male and female voices. Subtle mechanisms appeared, which blurred the genealogy of ideas and convictions that the Modern Movement shared with social reformers and early feminists (McLeod 1994; Wigley 1995). This genealogy was dissimulated by the ghostwriters of the Modern Movement, the most important ones being Pevner and

Giedion. Nikolaus Pevser clearly stressed the male lineage in his 1936 volume Pioneers of Modern Design: from William Morris to Walter Gropius, whereas Giedion focused on the abstract Zeitgeist-qualities of the new architecture (Giedion 1941).

The case of Sigfried Giedion is a particularly interesting one, for it is possible to trace in his work a clear evolution with respect to his conceptualization of architecture. Giedion’s early books on modern architecture (Giedion 1928; Giedion 1929) display an attitude, which celebrates the new and witnesses of a fascination for the transitory. Giedion argues here in favor of a new conception of architecture, questioning the nature itself of the discipline. He suggest that in the future, architecture might no longer limit itself to the design of representative buildings but should develop instead into to a more comprehensive discipline that is focusing upon the whole environment and that merges with social reality and with life itself. Architecture should penetrate into realms it did not 7 know before, it should master techniques and domains which previously belonged to other disciplines and it should enjoy its contamination by the practicalities and requirements of everyday life. In the 1941 volume Space, Time and Architecture, however, the tone has shifted. There is no longer any serious questioning of the notion and scope of architecture. Social and political considerations have been purged along with all references to social experiments and to the revolutionizing aims of the new architecture. The inclusive aspirations that characterized Giedion’s initial effort to describe modern architecture, have disappeared. There is moreover a shift in his attitude towards fashion and mass culture. Whereas the first books rather revelled in the idea that the new architecture corresponded to a whole new life style which liberated people from old conventions and gave them the opportunity for constant change and new inventions,

Space, Time and Architecture established a much more classical notion of modern architecture in which the genuine modern architecture was clearly delineated against kitsch and mass culture. In Giedion’s work, therefore, it is clear that the initial attempt to re-conceive architecture as a social art gradually gave way to a renewed avowal of architecture as an upscale artistic practice which clearly distinguished itself from everyday building (Heynen 1999). This means that the tendency towards a more inclusive and less elitist approach, which was perceived as a tendency of feminization – feminization, that is, of high culture through its contamination by popular culture or by issues of domesticity - , was countered by a serious and in many respects successful effort to re-establish the ‘natural’ order of things.

The struggle between two opposing conceptualizations of architecture was also acted out in the United States. When modern architecture was introduced in this country in the 8

1930s, one can say that two competing views were at stake. One is stated - eloquently and effectfully – by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson in their (in)famous book of

1932 The International Style. The other viewpoint is presented by Catherine Bauer in her

1934 volume on Modern Housing. Hitchcock and Johnson argued that the modern architecture they saw embodied in the work of Mies, Gropius, Oud and Le Corbusier, could be characterized as a new aesthetics with clearly distinguishable stylistic characteristics. The International Style would treat the building as a volume bounded by plane surfaces, rather than as a solid mass. Its buildings obey the principle of regularity, which means that the underlying structural order of the skeleton is expressed in its regular appearance. The International Style moreover avoids the application of decoration, for it celebrates the absence of ornament. These principles serve to describe the new architecture as different from mere building. Hitchcock and Johnson explain that “there is a broad differentiation between architecture and building. There exists a range, or hierarchy, of aesthetic significance. The degree to which an edifice represents consciously or unconsciously the result of an aesthetic, as well as of a technical ,effort of creation, determines its place in the hierarchy.” (Hitchcock & Johnson 1995, 90)

Catherine Bauer however drew a completely different picture. She made herself a name with her book on Modern Housing. It was through her acquaintance with Lewis

Mumford that she developed a taste for architecture. She went on a long study trip to

Europe in 1930, and visited a good deal of the recent housing projects that were built in

Germany, the Netherlands, France and England. This trip, she said later, “transformed her from an aesthete to a housing reformer” (Bauer 1965). She was indeed very much taken by the newly developed ideas from Europe and her book was mainly intended to instruct 9 her fellow Americans about the planning methods and architectural characteristics of modern housing as she had come to know it. In presenting these ideas to the American public, she was – in my opinion – much more in tune with the underlying motivations and convictions that were essential to ‘the New Building’. For Bauer the social ideals of the Modern Movement were preeminent. She advocated that modern architecture was first of all about "a new standard of human environment, and a new technique for achieving it” (Bauer 1934, xvii). In concentrating on housing and planning issues, she backed away from the purely aesthetic view, which made Hitchcock and Johnson turn modern architecture into ‘the International Style’. The age-old distinction between architecture and mere building, which was re-confirmed by them, didn’t hit a mark with her. She considered architecture as being “the social art, the expression of those forces which keep people together and not of those which separate and individualize” (Bauer

1934, 213). Modern architecture according to her was not about monuments, but about “a new vernacular to replace the chaotic and ugly old one. It was a movement toward a new kind of order in human environment.” (Bauer 1934, 215)

The book did much for Bauer. She became actively involved in public housing programs, was a lobbyist for housing legislation and got a position with the US Housing Authority that she had helped establish. (Oberlander & Newbrun 1999) She was clearly a major person in her field, “her role was truly an historic one”, says Suzanne Stephens, but nevertheless “she is not as well remembered today as her efforts would warrant”

(Stephens 1977). This lack of recognition doubtlessly has to do with the difficulties her contemporaries had in ‘placing’ her - difficulties which tend to lead a long life and which obviously continue to influence the writing of history. Whereas her qualities as a 10 professional planner and housing activist were acknowledged, commentators tended to wonder about the combination of her being female and her accomplishments on the professional level. An article in Architectural Forum of March 1946 e.g. features

Catherine Bauer as an exceptionally successful woman. Its title - “Housing’s white knight: a ‘handsome blonde with brunette economic ideas’” - already sums up the challenge that she provided in terms of conventional gender schemas. The text reads as an ongoing balancing of this ambiguous gendering: she is described as a tweedy woman with a masculine stride, who performed extremely well in her career - not really a chosen one, though, but one in which she bumped almost accidentally. The author’s admiration for his subject is only really getting high-tuned when he comes to describe her latest accomplishment – her marriage to Bill Wurster and her giving birth to a first child at age

40. Bauer is celebrated because of her exceptionality in being a woman and performing well, rather than because of her actual accomplishments. This means that her contribution to the profession and her position within the architectural debate are not the focus of the article. Instead of giving priority to the discussion of her ideas, this seemingly appreciative comment contributes in fact to obscuring them.

This stressing of her exceptionality is not the only way to diminish her importance. Other evidence of marginalizing mechanisms can be found. If one studies e.g. the March 1965 issue of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, a remarkable pattern seems to unfold. This issue documents a symposium, held at Columbia University the previous year, discussing “Modern Architecture in the Decade 1929-1939”. Of the seventeen invited speakers – all distinguished scholars from various universities –two were women: Catherine Bauer and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy. The last entry of the theme issue 11 is “A Selective List of Architectural Publications, 1929-1939” elaborated by Adolf K.

Placzek (Placzek 1965). It is interesting to see his classification of seminal publications.

For the US there is a first heading entitled “The Rise of the New Architecture”. Here one finds some 20 items, all written by male authors, among which of course the

Hitchcock/Johnson-book and numerous writings by Frank Lloyd Wright. Bauer’s book however is listed under a second heading, called “The Social Movement”, which counts only three items. Placzek’s intervention is thus a very telling one. He acknowledges

Bauer’s work, but by listing it under a separate heading, its relevance for the architectural discussion is denied. In this one gesture, a female voice is praised and at the same time displaced and muted. She is considered not to deal with issues central to architecture, she is located outside the main discourse. Marginalization is here seen at work on a most literal level.

The second woman contributing to the Columbia symposium of 1964 was Sibyl Moholy-

Nagy. She was the second wife and biographer of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, the famous artist and Bauhausprofessor. Born as the daughter of an architect in Dresden, Germany, she was active as an actress and scriptwriter before her marriage to Moholy in 1934.

Throughout their marriage, she was involved in her husband’s pedagogical undertakings in directing the New Bauhaus and later the Institute for Design in Chicago. After his death in 1946, she decided to become a professional teacher, establishing herself as an architectural historian in her own right. At the Columbia symposium, she argued, like

Bauer, that modern architecture in the twenties had been about social and civic improvement, about a desire for better living conditions and about functionalism. Having first hand knowledge of the realizations of the New Building in Germany, and having 12 witnessed the cultural debates surrounding it, she was fairly critical of Hitchcock’s and

Johnson’s interpretation of it. She professed to be shocked by their opposition towards functionalism, for functionalism had been at the heart of the new architecture. She considered the arguments of Hitchcock and Johnson completely incompatible with Le

Corbusier’s CIAM, Gropius’ Bauhaus, Mies’ Werkbund, or Oud’s De Stijl. She wondered how it was possible for them to write about the necessary separation of architecture and building, when the whole Bauhaus idea was founded on the absolute unity between architecture and building. That no one stood up to blame Hitchcock and

Johnson for their misunderstanding of modern architecture, had to do, she assumed, with the fact that the diaspora architects were only too eager to be accepted in the United

States, and could not afford to criticize possible benefactors and patrons. (Moholy-Nagy

According to the proceedings of the symposium, neither Hitchcock nor Johnson took care to directly answer to this criticism, although they had plenty of opportunity to do so.

Others took up the challenge and an argument developed over a next issue of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. Especially Moholy-Nagy’s less than praising words for Mies Van der Rohe were found at fault (she had spoken about Mies’s “deadly fascist designs for the Reichsbank”). Howard Dearstyne, a former Mies-student, attacked her for her “faulty scholarship and unreliable judgement”. (Dearstyne 1965) Dearstyne subtly uses her being female to back his argument. He sarcastically accounts that “during the discussion on the day following the delivery of her paper, Mrs. Moholy-Nagy (at her

Sunday best) practically accused him (Mies) of having been a Nazi-collaborator).” (my italics – hh) He further contrasts Mies’s love for his country, which he was unwilling to 13 leave, with the position of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy – a Hungarian, he underlines - who stated that “For an artist there is no such thing as his country.” Arguing through her late husband, he comfortably ignores the fact that Sibyl Moholy-Nagy herself was a native

German and might have had feelings of her own concerning the matter. Personally I fail to see, moreover, what Sibyl’s way of dressing or Laszlo’s supposed lack of patriottism, might possibly have to contribute to a discussion of Mies’s relation to Nazism. It is obvious, however, that Dearstyne thought they did. Moholy-Nagy’s being female is turned against her by him in such a way that no defense is possible. In her carefully crafted reply she wisely ignores these sexist remarks. Instead she supplies the readers of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians with an abundance of factual information as to why Mies could not be considered entirely innocent in his dealings with the Nazis – an issue which still today continues to bother Mies-scholars.

Raising discussion in print was nothing new to Moholy-Nagy. A considerable amount of her writing consists of “letters to the editor” which she sent in to Architectural Forum or

Progressive Architecture whenever she disagreed with the views expressed in certain articles. She was indeed very much present on the architectural scene, from the late fifties throughout the sixties (she died in 1971). A professor at Pratt Institute, she managed to publish several books, which, unfortunately, are now all out of print. Her first non-fiction book was the biography of her late husband, Moholy-Nagy. Experiment in Totality, published in 1950, four years after his death. Her next book, Native Genius in

Anonymous Architecture (1957), was written after very demanding fieldwork which brought her across the American continent. In it she develops a series of arguments which some years later would make others famous: it anticipates indeed Rudofsky’s 14

Architecture without Architects (1964) and Rapoport’s House Form and Culture (1969).

The book presents vernacular architecture in America, which, she claims, has been ignored by architectural culture out of a misplaced disdain for local traditions. It discusses the factors of site and climate, of form and function, and of materials and skills.

Its final chapter assesses “a sense of quality” which is present in this vernacular, but absent from the real estate developments that she sees booming all over the country. Her basic argument is: “To provide the home as an ideal standard is still the architect’s first cause, no matter how great and rewarding are his other contributions to monumental and technological building. (…) As those builders of old, the architect of today has to create an anonymous architecture for the anonymous men of the Industrial Age.” (Moholy-

Nagy 1957, 23)

Unfortunately this book has never had the same impact as the later ones by Rudofsky and

Rapoport. I would argue that this cannot possibly be for reasons of content. The book is well researched, well written, well illustrated. It wouldn’t live up to scholarly standards of today, but the same can be said of Rudofsky and Rapoport. That it was almost ignored might have to do with the fact that the book went very soon out of print, due to a reorganization of its publishing house, Horizon Press. It remains to be seen, however, in how far its author’s rather ambivalent relationship with the old-boys-network that made up the architectural scene, has been an important factor in the process.

In a recent piece with the title “Everyday and ‘Other’ Spaces” Mary McLeod criticizes the present-day architectural neo-avant-garde for flirting with post-structuralist notions of

‘otherness’ and ‘other spaces’ (inspired by either Derrida or Foucault) without ever looking at the most obvious ‘other’ spaces of all: the spaces of everyday life, the spaces 15 where women and children and elderly people are leading their lives. The poststructuralist concern for ‘the other’ – being the repressed, subdued term within the binary logic governing Western thought – paradoxically favors a highly abstract notion of otherness, which often fails to provide connections with actual ‘others’ such as women or minorities. The architectural vanguard shares this flaw with its philosophical godfathers.

“In the United States,” McLeod argues, “the focus on transgression in contemporary architecture circles seems to have contributed to a whole atmosphere of machismo and neo-avant-garde aggression. The theoretical language of deconstructivist theory is violent and sharp; the architecture milieu is exclusive - like a boy’s club.” (McLeod 1996, 11)

Whereas the discourse celebrates ‘otherness’ and ‘difference, the architecture culture of symposia and publications that thrives on it tends to focus on the highly sophisticated work of white males, the newness of which is established in aesthetic and cultural terms rather than social or political ones. Consequently within this culture women’s voices are marginalized, underestimated and sometimes even ridiculed.

McLeod counters this practice of exclusion by pointing towards some moments in the recent history of architecture, in which one can discern a genuine interest in popular culture and everyday life. She discusses contributions such as those of the Smithsons,

Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, or Jane Jacobs, wondering whether it would be a coincidence that women played an important part in these moments. I share her assessment in this respect. When one reexamines the work of Catherine Bauer and Sibyl

Moholy-Nagy, two observations seem to be unavoidable. First it seems that in their writings and in their attitudes towards architecture and planning, an awareness about the import of everyday life and domesticity transpires, which gives their work a specific 16 flavor which is often not present in that of their male colleagues. Second it is clear that the impact of their work, or at least its lasting influence, is not as seminal as might have been expected given its topicality, its seriousness and its richness. I hope to have made clear that it is very plausible that these two observations really come down to one.

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MIT press, Cambridge (Mass.), 1995. 1 The terms used to refer to modern architecture are different in different language areas; these differences also have implications for the concept. The Dutch Nieuwe Bouwen and the German Neues Bauen explicitly avoid the term 'architecture' (which exists in both languages); this suggests an explicit longing for an architecture that is not limited to representative buildings but which embraces the whole domain of building and dwelling. This connotation is absent from the French expression 'architecture moderne' and from the English 'modern architecture'. In order to retain the broader concept contained in the German and Dutch expressions I prefer to use the term 'New Building'.