Architecture - Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: Gender Equity in Architecture

Contains letters collected from women architects that provide personal testimony to chronicle careers spanning from the turn of the twentieth century through two World Wars, the Great Depression, and into the 1970s, with more contemporary architects incl

By 1920, there were over two hundred women practicing architecture in the United States, actively working on major design and building projects before they were even given the right to vote. These women designed thousands of buildings nationwide: apartments in Kansas City, hotels in the nation's national parks, churches in Michigan, and mansions on the coast of California, to name a few. In The First American Women Architects, Sarah Allaback chronicles the lives and careers of more than seventy pioneering female architects practicing in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nearly all of whom have been forgotten--until now. Organized alphabetically as a reference guide, this volume provides a biographical sketch of each architect's life, education, and professional career, and a list of known works and sources for further research. Many of these remarkable women have never before appeared in any other history, making The First American Women Architects a unique and invaluable reference for students and scholars interested in women's history and architecture. As an instructive record of the legacy of women in architectural history, this book will also serve as a stimulating indicator of the broadening potential for women and other minorities within the field of architecture.

A ground-breaking visual survey of architecture designed by women from the early twentieth century to the present day 'Would they still call me a diva if I were a man?' asked Zaha Hadid, challenging as she did so more than a century of stereotypes about female architects. In the same spirited approach, Breaking Ground is a pioneering visual manifesto of more than 200 incredible buildings designed by women all over the world. Featuring twentieth-century icons such as Julia Morgan, Eileen Gray and Lina Bo Bardi, and the best contemporary talent, from Kazuyo Sejima to Elizabeth Diller and Grafton Architects, this book is, above all else, a ground-breaking celebration of extraordinary architecture.

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.

Women have practiced as landscape architects for over a century, since the founding of the practice as a profession in the United States in the 1890s. They came to landscape architecture as gardeners, garden designers, horticulturalists, and fine artists. They simultaneously shaped the profession while reflecting contemporary practice. It is all the more surprising, then, that the history of women in American landscape design has received relatively little attention. Thaïsa Way corrects this oversight in Unbounded Practice: Women and Landscape Architecture in the Early Twentieth Century. Describing design practice in landscape architecture during the first half of the twentieth century, the book serves as a narrative both of women--such as Beatrix Jones Farrand, Marian Cruger Coffin, Annette Hoyt Flanders, Ellen Biddle Shipman, Martha Brookes Hutcheson, and Marjorie Sewell Cautley--and of the practice as it became a profession. Winner of a 2008 David R. Coffin Publication Grant, awarded by the Foundation for Landscape Studies

In the western world, the number of women studying architecture now roughly equals that of men. As women increasingly come to the fore as practicing professionals, the question of how this shift will affect the profession and the teaching of the discipline is of greater and greater interest. In this volume, well-known female architects from the United States and Europe discuss their academic and professional experiences, as well as their visions for the future. Inspiring, optimistic, controversial and at times subversive, Architecture: A Woman's Profession unites pioneers in the field with up-and-comers: 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 Jennifer Wolch. Photo essays and designs illustrate the contributors' discussions.

'Women Garden Designers' features 27 of the most important and influential garden designers and their gardens from around the world, showing both their finest commissions as well as the gardens they designed for themselves in their own space.

Set against the background of a 'general crisis' that is environmental, political and social, this book examines a series of specific intersections between architecture and feminisms, understood in the plural. The collected essays and projects that make up the book follow transversal trajectories that criss-cross between ecologies, economies and technologies, exploring specific cases and positions in relation to the themes of the archive, control, work and milieu. This collective intellectual labour can be located amidst a worldwide depletion of material resources, a hollowing out of political power and the degradation of constructed and natural environments. Feminist positions suggest ways of ethically coping with a world that is becoming increasingly unstable and contested. The many voices gathered here are united by the task of putting critical concepts and feminist design tools to use in order to offer experimental approaches to the creation of a more habitable world. Drawing inspiration from the active archives of feminist precursors, existing and re-imagined, and by way of a re-engagement in the histories, theories and projected futures of critical feminist projects, the book presents a collection of twenty-three essays and eight projects, with the aim of taking stock of our current condition and re-engaging in our precarious environment-worlds.

This beautiful book covers in depth the work of six designers Beatrix Farrand, Martha Hutcheson, Marian Coffin, Ellen Shipman, Ruth Dean, and Annette Hoyt Flanders and looks at a dozen other less-well-known women. It focuses on the Long Island projects that constituted a large part of their work and brings these pioneering women to life as people and as professionals.

This book examines the relationship between space, defined physically, legally and legislatively, and how these factors directly impact the spaces of abortion. It analyses how various political entities shape the physical landscapes of inclusion and exclusion to reproductive healthcare access, and questions what architecture's responsibilities are in respect to this spatial conflict.Employing writing, drawing and mapping methodologies, this interdisciplinary project explores restrictions and legislatures which directly influence abortion policy in the US, Mexico and Canada. It questions how these legal rulings produce spatial complexities and why architecture isn't more culturally and spatially engaged with these spaces.

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, Desiring Practices attempts to introduce a gendered awareness of architectural practice - albeit given an essentially patriarchical profession - through art criticism, psychoanalysis and politics. 60 b/w illustrations

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.

Making Space is a pioneering work first published in 1984 which challenges us to look at how the built environment impacts on women’s lives. It exposes the sexist assumptions on gender and sexuality that have a fundamental impact on the way buildings are designed and our cities are planned.

Written collaboratively by the feminist collective Matrix, tthe book provide a full blown critique of the patriarchal built environment both in the home and in public space, and outline alternative forms of practice that are still relevant today. Making Space remains a path breaking book pointing to possibilities of a feminist future.

Some authors worked for the London-based Matrix Feminist Architect’s collective, an architectural practice set up in 1980 seeking to establish a feminist approach to design. They worked on design projects—such as community, children and women’s centres. Others were engaged in building work, teaching and research.

"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.

In the late 1960s, the feminist scholar Kate Millet broadly defined »politics« as arrangements of power which enable individuals collectively to assert authority over others. Taking this definition, case studies by scholars from Europe, Israel and the United States explore the gendered professional in the 20th century as she navigated arrangements of power including organised religion, emancipation movements, cultural norms and shifting forms of government to practice architecture. Additional contributions reflect upon power structures in contemporary architectural education, practice and history to propose other means of architectural knowledge, representation and professional activity.