Interview from issue 06|20 of A&B
Does an architect have a gender? No one should care. If it weren't for the fact that despite a century of women practicing architecture, it's still best for an architect to be a man.
Despina STRATIGAKOS - Canadian researcher, architectural historian and writer with Greek roots. She has taught at Harvard University and the University of Michigan, and currently works at the School of Architecture and Planning at the University at Buffalo, New York. She works on the topic of diversity and equality in the field of architecture. She is the recipient of a Marie Curie Fellowship, among others. In Poland, her books "Hitler's House" (translated by J. Dzierzgowski, Warsaw 2015) and "Where are the female architects?" (translated by A. Rasmus-Zgorzelska, Warsaw 2019).
Agnieszka Rasmus-Zgorzelska: We are talking over the Internet in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the world is talking about nothing else but the virus, but after all, the question of the situation of women in the world of architecture has not been invalidated by this. So let's talk about female architects. What made you take up this topic?
Despina Stratigakos: I first studied socio-cultural anthropology and was interested in intercultural communication. I grew up in Montreal, Quebec, at a time of political turbulence and tension between the francophone and anglophone communities. My parents were Greek immigrants, so cultural, linguistic and social differences were ever-present in my daily life, as was wondering how to reconcile these differences, if at all possible. I think trying to understand multicultural reality has shaped my life.
The book "Where Are the Architects?", on the other hand, led a long way. It began with a specific situation. I did a degree in the history of design and architecture, then worked as a curator in Montreal. One day I was listening to a program on the radio about the Bauhaus. It was recorded on the occasion of an exhibition on design of the 1920s shown at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. I think it was 1990. A Bauhaus graduate spoke on the radio. Among other things, he talked about the parties that were held there. They were famous parties, extremely creative and colorful. But he talked about something else - about the women he danced with.
Agnieszka: Female students of the Bauhaus?
Despina: Well, that's right, I had a glare at the time - who is he talking about? What were these women? Although I had done a master's degree in design history, I had no idea who specifically he meant. I started looking for literature on women in the Bauhaus, there was very little of it at the time, and studying histories of female architects. I also became interested in how we write these histories and who is included and who is left out. After defending my doctorate, I started teaching at architecture schools and was struck by how much the experiences of some female architecture students reminded me of those of women entering the architecture industry in the 1920s. I thought that I had studied history not for nothing, because knowledge of it could be used to understand the present.
So I started analyzing the culture of today's architectural profession and realized that many of the barriers women face are very deeply rooted. I believe that if we want to eradicate prejudices and bad attitudes, we need to figure out where they came from, when they started forming, and reveal this knowledge. Otherwise, we will experience it once again. Progress must not be expected to happen by magic. And that's how I started writing the book "Where Are the Architects?". It combines stories from more than a century ago with observations of the modern world of architecture.
Agnieszka: But, as you point out in the book, history does not always tell the truth. History has been written. We are always at the mercy of the text. What strategies should we use to be able to discover the truth about women in architecture, insofar as the truth exists, and to be able to recognize falsehoods?
Despina: The only right answer is in three words: the ability to read critically. Which we often so painfully lack. When reading history, one must constantly ask oneself: whose voice resounds in it, and whose voice is missing. This is a trick question, of course, because how do we know what we are not hearing? In classes with students, we look at mainstream history and try to figure out what is missing from it. Many times students say: we had no idea that this person existed or that this event took place. These are sometimes already graduate students, and they are as surprised as I was when I discovered that I had not been taught something. So I think it's also the responsibility of academics to make sure that their courses are truly inclusive, and that they don't simply teach things that they themselves learned during their studies, but rather stay abreast of everything that has happened since, and constantly examine their own biases.
When I submitted the topic of my doctorate - related to the first female architects - to the promoter, she didn't want to discourage me, but began to wonder where I would get the sources. And also, how much information about women in history in general (I was specifically dealing with the German context at the time). And - how many such women existed at all. So I think this is what my male and female students also face when they want to research a topic: questioning the existence of the history of female architects.
Agnieszka: Just because you can't see something, haven't heard about something or haven't seen it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Despina: I've encountered this phenomenon also when looking for information about female architects on the Internet. Wikipedia, whether we like it or not, is an important and extremely popular source of knowledge. As more and more literature on female architects began to be published, it became apparent that these texts do not appear in the online world. They have to be put there; they won't move by themselves. In my book, I tell the story of one of the first female architecture students in Germany, Thekla Schild. I researched her story and met her family. Someone tried to post an entry about her on Wikipedia, but it was immediately rejected by a senior editor whose job was to guard the workaround and chase away intruders. He explained that he had googled the architect and found nothing about her on the Internet, and therefore concluded that she did not exist. I thought that the situation would continue, that until all these slow [slow] histories - written for years by historians, histories for which it takes so long to gather information - are transferred to the Internet, conclusions will continue to be drawn that a century ago there were no active female architects in architecture.
illustration by Tom Morris encouraging women to use their editing skills in publishing information on Wikipedia, March 2012; the design refers to the propaganda poster We Can Do It! (We Can Do It!) by J. Howard Miller from 1942.
© Wikimedia Commons
Agnes: Interestingly, it is often not the academic world, but NGOs or passionate amateurs who dig through the sources in search of this knowledge, and then present it online.
Despina:I love Wikipedia edits, most often organized not by academics, but by cultural institutions or museums, for example, which makes us realize that history belongs to everyone, and even if you are not a researcher, you have an important role to play in making history visible online. I like the fact that people hearing about the editon may feel the urge to go through their family albums and add some material, make it available online for everyone, including researchers! Wikipedia has unheard of potential to popularize history.
Agnieszka: Well, that's right - and showing a different version of it?
Despina: Until now, we knew so little about the role of women in architecture because archives were not interested in preserving materials about them, and publishers were not interested in publishing these materials. They preferred, for example, to publish another book about Frank Lloyd Wright or Mies van der Rohe. I'm not saying that these are unimportant or uninteresting architects. But they fit into certain frameworks and structures built by institutions around historical texts that are difficult to fit into with other types of stories.
Agnieszka: What was your work (struggle) with the archives like?
Despina: I spent the first year and a half in the archives only to come to the conclusion that I was in deep trouble because there was no material in the archives. I realized that the archives themselves are, after all, constructs, not everything goes into them. Archivists make decisions about what is worth keeping. Documents and stories of female architects were apparently not considered valuable and didn't make it into the archives. I had to create for myself an unconventional research workshop, which as a historian I was not taught, involving detective work, reaching out to families, looking for places where there might be documents, if they survived. Once I knew how to get to the sources, I faced another issue: how to write the story? The dominant form of architectural storytelling so far has been the monograph, focused on the figure of a great architect. Stories about women did not fit into this frame. It took me a long time to come up with an idea for a narrative that would convey the stories of my female characters, express the issues and be interesting to the audience.
Agnieszka: A few years before the publication of the book, you started a project related to the Barbie doll. It caused a fierce discussion.
Despina:In 2006 I was on a research fellowship at the University of Michigan, there was a dense political atmosphere there at the time due to the abolition of affirmative action and problems with diversity and inclusivity. I was asked to create an exhibition about women in architecture. I felt that - given the context and the tense situation - with the traditional approach we would not gain much interest in the audience, at most in those who were already interested in the topic. To broaden the discussion, I decided to use humor - I liked the use of humor for political purposes, as the Guerrilla Girls did, for example. The students were given the task of designing prototypes of Barbie the Architect. Mattel, the doll's manufacturer, had already planned to launch the doll several years earlier, but it didn't happen. The results of the students' work amazed me - this was not the doll I expected. It was a radical, provocative play with super-femininity. The dolls shown at the exhibition at the School of Architecture at the University of Michigan had the question in their eyes: why shouldn't female architects wear pink? The provocation was to use Barbie's own femininity and "girly" attributes against the norms of the industry. I was delighted.
Thanks to its lightheartedness, the exhibition became fodder for a much-needed discussion about the gender problem in architecture. If it weren't for Barbie, the ice cream wouldn't have broken. It was a very positive experience, although who knows what they thought at first when I suggested it to them [laughs]. One of the great things about art colleges is that students appreciate radical ideas.
