The interview with Ewelina Jaskulska appeared
in A&B 4'2021
Interview with Ewelina Jaskulska, architect, founder of the author's design studio Artectonica, co-founder of the research and design group Molecule Architecture and one of the initiators of the "Architectonics" project carried out in cooperation with the Katarzyna Kozyra Foundation.
Ewelina JASKULSKA
Graduate of the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning at the Cracow University of Technology. Architect with many years of professional experience gained while working in renowned design studios. Winner of international competitions, including: honorable mention for the design of a pavilion for Museum Gardens in London ArchiTriumph Pavilion 2020: Discovery (2019); honorable mention in the international competition celebrating the centennial of the Bauhaus, Home For Dominic (2018); installation "Where is Tiffany" among the best works of the Burnham Prize competition at the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2017); Local House winner of the World Architecture Community Awards (2016). Her projects have been exhibited nationally and internationally, including Warsaw, Athens, London, Weimar, Munich, Paris and Chicago. In 2019, The European Centre for Architecture and Urban Studies included Ewelina Jaskulska on its "40 under 40" list. Since 2014, she has run her own design studio Artectonica, and since 2019 she has co-founded Molecule Architecture Research and Design, a research and design office she runs with Joanna Aleksandrowicz and Monika Nalewajk. She is a co-initiator of the research and design project "Architectonics" run by the Katarzyna Kozyra Foundation.
Anna Walewska: What do you do on a daily basis?
Ewelina Jaskulska: I am an architect. Together with Joanna Aleksandrowicz and Monika Nalewajk, I run a research and design studio. Each of us is completely different, but this clash of personalities brings a lot of good to the projects. We have such a female trio of our own, which met under rather unusual circumstances.
Anna: What were those circumstances?
Ewelina: I am from Nowy Sącz. I was studying in Cracow. Joanna was the first person I met after arriving in Warsaw. We met at work. We were both new to a large American design office. After years of friendship, we decided to do something together. I met Monika a few years ago, and after our mutual success, which was an honorable mention in the Bauhaus centennial competition, we wanted to work together. We quickly realized that it can be difficult for a woman in this business to act alone, and that experience and skills are no indicator.
Conceptual design based on mock-ups realized by Molecule Architecture
© Molecule Architecture
Anna: Why is it difficult for a woman to act alone?
Ewelina: We are not taken seriously in meetings. When I worked in large international design offices, such as Epstein, Valode et Pistre, RKW Rhode Kellermann Wawrowsky, my gender was never any kind of determinant. I've led really big projects, I was, among other things, project manager for the Euro 2012 stadium in Gdansk, Poland. Working on these types of projects, in large design firms, I never felt that I was discriminated against because of my gender or that my position was determined by the brand I represented. I was not treated worse or differently. Perhaps this is because the West has long since dealt with such issues. The perspective changed when I moved on and became my own boss.
Anna: What changed?
Ewelina: I thought that having a lot of experience in my profession, I could easily handle running my own office. I was confident because I knew I had a lot of experience and knowledge. In practice, it quickly turned out that this knowledge doesn't matter, because I'm simply not a man.
Anna: So you're saying that when you had a large international company standing behind you this wasn't a problem at all. However, when you don't have such a background the fact that you are a woman has become an obstacle in the investor relationship.
Ewelina: Yes. I felt very quickly and strongly that my gender was an issue. The fact that I am a woman was a barrier for investors to entrust me with a project. I'm not the only one to experience this. One of the first women to point out the dysfunction in this environment was Edna Cowan. It was 1931, an architects' ball in Manhattan. The only woman invited dressed up as... a washbasin and with a moon clad headdress stood by the side of "those great" masters dressed in their own skyscrapers.
library in Szczecin, designed by Ewelina Jaskulska
vision: Szymon Buzuk
Anna: So where did you get the idea that if there were more of these women then the barrier would disappear rather than strengthen?
Ewelina: We found that we had to win our position in this male world, and the best result would come from joining forces. The more the problem affected us directly, the more we became interested in the phenomenon, including from the historical side. It turned out to be very multidimensional and complex. Women in architecture appeared about a century ago, at a time when they gained the right to vote. In 1922, the first female architect, Jadwiga Dobrzynska, graduated in Poland. It's interesting to note that although women are successful, every woman who starts out in architecture has to fight this battle from the beginning.
Anna: You also talk about a woman's relationship with other women?
Ewelina: Last year I was invited to participate in 4 Design Days. Together with a dozen women from the industry, I participated in a panel discussion "Women who inspire." Only a few of us paid attention to the problem of women's presence in architecture and how it works. The other participants either didn't see this problem, didn't have similar experiences as I once did, or didn't want to see it. When we are raised in certain social patterns, the established culture, sometimes it is difficult even for women themselves to see this. When it was my turn, I tried to draw attention to the problem by highlighting the real dysfunctions of the system.
{Image@url=https://cdn.architekturaibiznes.pl/upload/galerie/56291/images/original/632aa097dc1c5863377ca1352f888f61.jpg,alt=Centrum conference and cultural center in Chabówka,title=Conference and cultural center in Chabówka}
Conference and cultural center in Chabówka, a pro-social center, the investor gives up part of the land and part of the facility for local community activities, design: Molecule Architecture
© Molecule Architecture
Anna: How does your gender affect how you are perceived in the profession and how you look at the profession?
Ewelina: I have to be twice as strong, twice as sharp and go to every meeting perfectly prepared, so that I don't give anyone the argument that as a woman I can't do it. A man has the right to not know something, a woman does not. When a woman in this profession succeeds, it is said that she achieved it "despite her gender." Do men also achieve success despite being men? Probably not. For a man, there are no additional categories. Architecture is big money, it's economics. I don't do interior architecture, but just volume architecture. The main players here are men, it is men who entrust men with their money. Women have less credit here. A potential investor is not able to accurately verify knowledge and skills. What matters is the impression. Others are made by a man, others by a woman. And this only stems from the patterns encoded in our heads, from the culture we grew up in. I was once tempted to make an experiment. I took my husband to investor meetings a few times to see if the presence of a man by my side would bring something to my relationship with the investor. My husband is not an architect. The result was that I answered the questions that the investors directed to him. However, answering the second part of your question, undoubtedly the fact that I am a woman makes me look at space differently. This is what the "Architectural Women" project, which Joanna and Monika and I initiated at the Katarzyna Kozyra Foundation, is about. Observing the development of various cities, I see that greater participation of women in their design has a positive effect on change.
Anna: We'll talk about the project in a moment, but tell us more, please, about the changes in cities that you are seeing?
Ewelina: The "other" users of a given space have been noticed. Other than the white male. Their needs are beginning to be taken into account. Note that in architecture the point of reference has always been the man. Take, for example, Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian man or Le Corbusier's Modulor, younger than him by more than four hundred and fifty years. Cities, neighborhoods, buildings were designed by men, taking intoaccount their needs, their way of looking and their body proportions. This is not an accusation. They just couldn't know certain things, and looking through the prism of their own needs, they were convinced that they would respond to the needs of the other users. And we replicated this patriarchal pattern, even unconsciously, for years.
prefabricated elements social housing estate, London, international competition, proj.: Molecule Architecture
© Molecule Architecture
Anna: This Is The Man's World?
Ewelina: To this day we still use proportions, rules, ways of functioning invented by men. Starting from small spaces like the kitchen, through facilities, neighborhoods, cities and so on to the global scale. Nowhere has the way women function and their needs been taken into account. And yet women are half of humanity. It's hard for me to comprehend that the other half, men, decide the needs of the former.
Anna: And this second look?
Ewelina: Generally speaking, women take into account every user of a space and assume that everyone can function differently in it. Halina Skibniewska, author of Zoliborski Orchards, when designing the estate, was one of the first to pay attention to people with disabilities using the space and adapted it and the apartments to their needs. She is also the designer of School 115 in Sadyba. The school's after-school space was intended to be a place for the entire local community to meet and do activities. This is exactly the kind of thinking that is at stake. An example of design by a woman with a woman in mind is Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky's Frankfurt Kitchen, which just happens to sound rather grotesque in the context of this liberation we are talking about, but the story of this project is extremely interesting. Changes are happening today, here and now.
continued conversation on next page
