Two radically different events in terms of gender representation took place in the same week. One was tiny, held in a basement, and the other was large, ticketed.
Text: Cătălina Frâncu
Photo: Olivian Șerban
“There are no women architects,” said a well-known admission prep teacher during the first session in 2011, who ran a few prep courses for aspiring architecture students. You could spot his students in the exam by the visible construction lines; in the room, almost two-thirds were girls. I wondered if this would be the way things were going to be from then on, if I would keep hearing that comment, and if it was common in the profession, in school. I didn’t last long in his class; he created a smoggy atmosphere where you had to struggle far too hard to succeed, so after being warned that I had no role models anyway, I gave up.
It seems this attitude hasn’t changed much if we look at some of today’s major conferences, though students are changing. After a long time, our interwar female architects, few in number but prolific, have finally reached a secondary place in the canon: they are mentioned occasionally, and you leave school knowing not necessarily their work but their names. Students are becoming curious about the hidden stories in architectural history: Why is the image of the founder of modernism naked, smoking and painting in her house more famous than Eileen Grey’s name?
Architecture as a discipline reflects Linda Nochlin’s 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists,”: “a dispassionate, impersonal, sociological, and institutionally oriented approach would reveal the entire romantic, elitist, individual-glorifying, and monograph-producing substructure upon which the profession of art history (to be read: architecture history) is based, and which has only recently been called into question by a group of younger dissidents.”
We still need dissidence today. Not to burn books, museums, or buildings, but to take the necessary steps in recovering the work of the architects who were women, then recognising their value in the broader context of universal architecture, and finally breaking hierarchical canons and personality cults. It is time to understand the need for inclusion—not just of women and not just in the profession, but of all those who have not yet had access to resources, regardless of ethnicity or (dis)ability, both in the profession and in the settlements we build. It’s in everyone’s interest. If things have worked up to now, the place we’ve reached demands know-how from all corners of life. Only then will we be able to call ourselves truly modern, moving into a new era where we fight together for a greater good.
Not out of rebellion, but out of the need for reconstruction.
pictures: left – Mihai Eminescu building, ASE, project coordinated by Cleopatra Alifanti, screen-printed by Atelier Codobatura together with the students who participated in the silk-screening workshops of the project Hidden in Bucharest (Ascunse în București). / right – Ioana Grigorescu’s diploma project, architect and restorer, screen-printed by Atelier Codobatura together with the students who participated in the screen-printing workshops in the project Hidden in Bucharest (Ascunse în București).
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