Her buildings, our buildings

Abstract

A number of articles gathered in this issue share, quite prominently, their position to address the issue of under-representation of women architects in architecture, which connect with other articles that explore strategies of reinterpretation and revision to counter the tendency of lack of recognition in architectural history and building study. Altogether they have decidedly moved away from the remedial effort to restore and account for missing figures on the pedestals; instead, they believe in the importance to reconsider approaches and frameworks, and to draw from and construct unexpected relations between situations, subjects, and spaces. To understand buildings and projects past and present, there remains a need for diversification of evidence, embracing what is nuanced, inhibited, contested, ephemeral, or dormant, as well as frameworks of analysis and reconceptualisation. This is to shift from the dominance of certain ‘facts’ to what may be a more unstable realisation of ‘truths’, the architectures that are hidden in plain sight, repressed and contingent. Beyond adjusting visibility and articulation of previously neglected protagonists and contributions, it becomes our urgent task, prompted by the endeavours demonstrated in this issue, to rethink processes in the field at large as that which is shared and contingent; architecture is as much a matter of her buildings as our buildings. The two opening contributions from Henriette Steiner and Svava Riesto, ‘taking the women’s perspectives as my starting point’ as they declare, recognise the difference between what we see as facts, namely these objects of knowledge that the still largely patriarchal field assume to produce and command, and what may be truths traced through relations in shared lives conditioned and marked by desires and obstacles. These are the ‘drawbacks’ of gendered structures, as Virginia Woolf would say, which are manifested as gaps in architectural history where women protagonists often find themselves. The two articles are closely tied in their focus on the portrayal of Danish women architects— Inger Exner, Karen Clemmensen, Rut Speyer, Susanne Ussing, and Anne Marie Rubin — in the post-war period and their work through the complexity of life relations, from love to work, families to practices, dependence and autonomy, projects for oneself, to projects for and with others. Steiner remarks, ’Images of women’s liberation — the passionate, creative, and successful woman architect who possesses a house, a career, and a studio in partnership with a man she loves—weave in and out of other, more difficult motifs where work itself can possess you, where moral judgements reify women and turn them into possessions, where conflicts destroy partnerships, and where financial hardships reveal the downside of private property ownership.’ These Doreen Bernath