PS17 The Problems and Potentials of Architectural Biography 3:00 - 5:10pm Thursday, 30th April, 2020 Location Salon C, 2nd Floor Track Track 3 Session Chair Anna Goodman,

All session times are in US PACIFIC DAYLIGHT TIME (PDT).

3:05 - 3:25pm

PS17 ’s 1958 Competition – a Zoé-graphy of emerging modernists

George Thomas Kapelos Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada

Abstract

The 1958 international competition for Toronto’s City Hall and Civic Square attracted 509 submissions, more than twice that of the earlier and more widely-known 1956 competition for Sydney’s Opera House. Entries came from 42 countries across the globe. Toronto’s competition arose from CIAM ambitions of the “new monumentality” and democratic public space in the “heart of the city”. It captured the imagination of a young, post-war generation of architects, striving to create modern public buildings and spaces. Many entrants were fledgling practitioners and recent school graduates. Some became significant modernists in the decades that followed. With very few exceptions, submissions were distinctly “modern” in their form, expression and aspiration. Archival research assembled into a data base provides detailed demographic, professional, and geo- socio/political information for each entrant. Specifically, collected data documents age, gender and architectural education; stage in career and architectural activity before and after 1958; and global location, language group, and conditions of economic and social development and type of political regime in country of origin. Entrant information is correlated with an analysis of their design submission. When aggregated, this information shapes a “collective profile” of a significant cohort of post-war architects, their aspirations at a pivotal moment in post-war modernity, and their future impact on architectural culture after 1958. Competition discussions often focus only on the winner and premiated submissions, and highlight biographies of successful proponents. This paper examines both commonalities and variants of entrant narratives. It seeks to form the collective life-story or “Zoé-graphy” (a neologism, drawn from the Greek zωή – the life or spirit of the whole – as opposed to βίος – the specifics of an individual life) of competitors. Consequently, it presents a method of writing the shared story of emerging modern architects globally at a seminal moment in modernist architectural history. 3:25 - 3:45pm

PS17 Designers and Drivers: Women, Auto/biography and Auto/mobility

Ipek Mehmetoglu McGill University, , Canada

Abstract

This paper brings a new understanding to how women have inhabited the masculine world, be it the architectural profession, or the interior of a moving car. It uncovers the life-stories (auto-biographies) of a group of women architects from the United States, Canada and England in the mid-twentieth century through their encounters with car culture (auto-mobility). In contrast to the linear life stories of universal and unique subjects we associate with men's lives, "Designers and Drivers" asserts partial and collective mobile biographies, by looking at particular instances in women's lives. Specifically, I analyze four stories with different cars: American architect 's road trip in Europe with a three-wheeler Morgan in 1956; British architect Alison Smithson's family road trips with a Citroën DS 19 in the 1960s; Canadian architect Blanche Lemco van Ginkel's architectural views on auto-mobility and a minibus that Van Ginkel Associates designed as part of their Midtown Manhattan Study about 1970; and Canadian architects Jean Wallbridge and Mary Imrie's 1949-1950 road trip from Edmonton, Alberta, to Buenos Aires in a Plymouth Suburban. These women were at times designers, venturing into the masculine domain of auto-age architecture; at times drivers, countering the masculinity of car-ownership; in others, they were passengers, occupying the feminine space of the passenger seat; and critics, explaining the structures of auto- metropolitan urbanism. These auto-based experiences were translated into personal and professional writing in diary entries, books, articles, and recordings in various media, as home movies. I trace how, by writing, driving, or designing with the car, women gave voice and vision to their own (life) stories. I thus treat the automobile as autobiography, engaging the car's identification as an extension of the self. I argue that auto-mobility allowed women architects to negotiate gender norms that are otherwise embedded in the traditional genre of biography. 3:45 - 4:05pm

PS17 "I just AM!": Brigitte D'Ortschy, Architecture, and Zen

Julia Walker Binghamton University, Binghamton, USA

Abstract

In 2019, the biographer Robert Caro published his memoirs, reflecting on a career spent exploring the lives of fixers and kingmakers. For a successful biography, Caro avows, “you have to choose the right man.” With titles like The Power Broker (describing Robert Moses) and The Path to Power (referring to Lyndon B. Johnson), Caro’s oeuvre makes clear that the very terms of biography are individualist, public, political, powerful—and, perhaps above all, male. Given the deep roots of these biases within the genre of biography, how might we understand the life of the German architect Brigitte D’Ortschy? Born and trained in Berlin, in 1950 D’Ortschy spent several months at a retraining program for German architects at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. During this program, she was most affected by a lecture delivered to the group by Frank Lloyd Wright. In 1953, Wright invited her to become an apprentice at Taliesin West. After a year at Taliesin, D’Ortschy moved permanently to Japan to study Zen Buddhism, eventually becoming the first Zen master from Germany. Though she is well known to scholars of Zen, she is virtually unknown in the history of architecture, despite her prolific career as an architect and planner. D’Ortschy’s fascinating life thus engages a number of biography’s methodological ambivalences—first in the context of her status as a woman in architecture, with its masculinist history of heroic self-fashioning through biographical performance (of which Wright may be the exemplar); and second in the context of Zen, with its simultaneous belief in both the illusoriness and the essentiality of the self. Though D’Ortschy’s spiritual exploration led her away from contemplating her life’s details, allowing her to declare, “I just AM!,” the truth, biographically speaking, proves more complex.