Outrage: blindness to women turns out to be blindness to architecture itself
- 8 March 2018
- London EMAP Publishing Limited 2018
‘With’, and not ‘and’, is how women are often credited alongside men in official records, if they are credited at all. Women are the ghosts of modern architecture, everywhere present, crucial, but strangely invisible. Unacknowledged, they are destined to haunt the field forever. But correcting the record is not just a question of adding a few names or even hundreds to the history of architecture. Nor a matter of human justice or historical accuracy, but of opening the field to its own productive complexity.
The secrets of modern architecture are like those of a family and it is perhaps because of our cultural fascination with exposing the intimate that they are now being unveiled, little by little. There is increasing interest in the ways in which architecture works; as if we have become just as concerned with the ‘how’ as with ‘what’. And the ‘how’ is less about structure or building techniques – the interest of earlier generations – and more about interpersonal relations. The previously marginal details of how things actually happen in architectural practice are now coming to light.