Stories of Women Architects Who Made Their Mark

Good News. Women in Architecture is an exhibition curated by Pippo Ciorra, Elena Motisi, and Elena Tinacci, and designed by Matilde Cassani, which was inaugurated on December 16, 2021, at MAXXI Rome – the museum designed by Zaha Hadid which opened to the public in 2010. The intent of the exhibition (sited in Gallery 2 on the second floor of the museum) is to assess the anthropological and professional changes now happening in the world of architecture with a neutral and omnivorous approach, without stating a specific thesis – if not a tautological one – that there is a “tide” of women architects. Although the exhibition “limits” its scope to the presentation of the results of a massive, two-year-long archival, historiographic, and bibliographic research, displaying this material raises an issue that concerns architecture rather than gender. Architecture is – increasingly – a choral, hybrid, variable practice, in which a supposed single leadership reflects a fallacious narration rather than the truth. Good News – in Italian Buone Nuove – is a feminine, entirely adjectival title, a message of hope that incorporates a certain lexical ambiguity. While the fact that globally women architects have increased in numbers and prestige in recent years is in itself good “news,” the presence of women in architectural disciplines is by no means “new.” The Plan Journal 7 (1): 219-230, 2022 doi: 10.15274/tpj.2022.07.01.13