Gender / Representation

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The Citizens Beautiful: women at the first New Zealand town-planning conference and exhibition, Wellington, 1919

Julia Gatley, The University of Melboune

At the First New Zealand Town-planning Conference and Exhibition, held in Wellington in May 1919, almost one sixth of the delegates were women. This paper uses the conference and exhibition as a vehicle for considering the contribution of women to the early development of town planning in New Zealand. None of the women delegates came from the professions generally associated with early town planning (architecture, engineering and surveying). Most were educationalists and/or activists concerned with issues affecting women and children. The paper shows that most of the women delegates supported the continuation of women’s traditional domestic role; that they were concerned about standards of working class fitness and health; and that they advocated improved housing standards and more extensive facilities for children (kindergartens, parks and playgrounds) in urban areas in order to raise standards of fitness, health, morality and efficiency. The latter were national and, indeed, imperial concerns. But there were dissenting voices amongst the women delegates, indicative of the fact that they were not a homogenous group.

Could the real Barcelona Pavilion please stand up?

Clare Newton, Faculty of Architecture, Building & Planning, The University of Melbourne

Using the Barcelona Pavilion by Mies van der Rohe as a case study, this paper focuses on the gaps that can be found between the built Pavilions and their drawn and written descriptions. In its first iteration, the Barcelona Pavilion (1929) lasted under a year as a built form but lived on primarily through black and white images. Our perception has been complicated by the reemergence of a full-scale version in 1986 after sixty years living captured in black and white images. Rem Koolhaus, writing for the 'Mies in America' exhibition, blames the reconstructed Pavilion for destroying the aura of the black and white Pavilion we knew in the history books.

This paper looks at the discrepancies that exist between the two Barcelona Pavilions and their drawings. Misrepresentations and mistakes can be found alongside other changes and omissions that are due to the nature of translation between media. The 1929 building as photographed is made the reference point against which all other representations are measured. This is not to locate these other representations as secondary but rather to allow a structured review of the evolving images of the Pavilion. The twenty-eight remaining sheets of original drawings and an interview with one of the reconstruction architects, Cristian Cirisi, are considered, along with publications on the Pavilion.

The Film Desk Set (1957): skyscrapers, gendered space and the computer

Merrill Schleier, University of the Pacific Stockton, California

This paper explores the formulation of gendered architectural space with the introduction of a computer to a skyscraper office in the film Desk Set (1957). It brings together formerly discreet areas of scholarship, including architectural history, gender and space, and cinema studies. Original theater and film scripts, film production notes and press catalogues, and corporate archival materials are employed to explain authorial and directorial intent, and clarify the role of the IBM Corporation in forging a new vision of skyscraper space and gender identity.

Walter Lang directed Desk Set. It stars Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, who play a librarian and an efficiency expert respectively. It explores both the fears and hopes concerning the placement of an electronic brain into the untidy all-female reference department of a major television network. Methods engineer Sumner (Tracy) is employed to survey and discipline the space for maximum productivity, reminiscent of the masculinized policies of Scientific Office Management (1910s-1920s). Desk Set also pictures the skyscraper as a beacon of communication, whose lofty position, along with televisions, is charged with the dissemination of information. The arrival of Electro Magnetic Memory and Research Calculator or Emmarac, which is nicknamed “Emmy,” introduces a feminized computer to the skyscraper, traditionally seen as male, suggesting that the body has finally acquired a thinking brain in an act of consummation. This happens just as Hepburn and Tracy form a heterosexual liaison. Hence, the film’s prescriptive ending promotes the idea that IBM computers will ensure corporate efficiency, gender harmony, and romance in the new information age.

Fitting in the House

Mark Taylor & Mari North, Victoria University of Wellington

This paper explores the gendering of architectural space by examining family occupation and use of spaces in the home, such as kitchens, bedrooms, living rooms, and gardens which were designed with prescribed functions in mind. We expressly deal with several New Zealand State Houses in Naenae, Wellington, a suburban community planned and occupied in the mid nineteen forties. As the antithesis to slum dwelling and promoted through pro-natalist policies, this suburb expressed the state construction of family life with the family as the foundation of the nation. Promoted through a number of newsreels and publications, these ‘sunny’ homes supported by new community shops, schools and playgrounds were presented as ideal places to bring up families.

Oral histories from three original tenants, still occupying the houses, are used to give momentary reflections and memories of family life whilst living in their respective state house. The unique and specific situations of these three tenants offer an insight into such things as added daily work, isolation, and accommodation arrangements necessary for the house to function for the family. Their unique situations present a challenge to many assumptions about the inhabitation of the home by the nuclear family, and directly challenge the gendered inscription of patriarchy in the home.

‘Her ambition in middle age to build a weekend country house for herself prompted her to ask the Museum of Modern Art to recommend an architect’

Lynn Churchill, Curtin University of Technology

“Perhaps as a man he is not the clairvoyant primitive that I thought he was, but simply colder and more cruel than anybody I have ever known. Perhaps it was never a friend and collaborator, so to speak, that he wanted, but a dupe and a victim” (Schulze 1985 : 253). This remark by Edith Farnsworth, reflects on a series of transactions involving her architect Mies van der Rohe, and producing among other things, the Farnsworth House, 1946 – 1951, on the banks of the Fox River. Much was invested, sacrificed, lost, exposed, permitted, perverted, consumed and finally sublimated via Edith’s project. Therefore, the following study asks: Who gave? Who received? and Who had the glory? The flow of resources is dynamic. The house consumes nature, architecture consumes the female body, art consumes architecture and ‘[t]he inside no longer lies patiently within the outside, contained and stable and a guarantee that the world is just the world’ (Adams 67). Inspired by Orlan’s performance art, this study examines Edith’s project in the light of Bataille’s theory of the General Economy in which consumption, not production, is the primary object. The significance of the paper lies in its application of Bataille’s theory to an analysis of the collaboration between the woman, the architect, the house and nature.

The Origin of Drawing: event, embodiment, desire

Justine Clark, Assistant Editor of Architecture Australia

The mythical origin of painting, as told by Pliny the Elder, is discussed in many contemporary essays that seek to theorise architectural drawing. Pliny’s tale locates these origins in the actions of Diboutades, a Corinthian maid who traced the shadow of her departing lover on a wall. This myth does not overtly concern architecture, but it does figure drawing as both a motivated event and a procedure: an activity in the world. The introduction of this myth to architectural discourse over the last fifteen years indexes a growing interest in drawing and projection, but it also, perhaps unwittingly, introduces other issues. The myth and its allegorical history open up possibilities of exploring architectural drawing as an embodied activity. Such readings are mostly absent from the texts that refer to the myth. This paper speculates on what might be at stake in the architectural deployment of this myth, and on how its presents an opportunity to unpack and unfold issues of gender and desire in relation to architecture’s representational practices. Following Elizabeth Grosz, the paper suggests that attending to processes and practices of production might be a useful way to engage questions of gender beyond the particular sex of the maker – whether they are drawer, architect or reader.

Pictures of Lilly: Lilly Reich and the role of victim

Gill Matthewson, Wellington Institute of Technology

One of the early projects of feminism was the uncovering of the work of women that had been erased from accepted history. Later projects have investigated the processes of erasure arguing that complex sociological and conceptual operations are at play. In architecture the work of Lilly Reich, Charlotte Perriand, Marion Mahoney, Eileen Gray, etc have been “uncovered” and discussed particularly in regard to their association with some of the “great names” of twentieth century architecture. A recurrent theme within the stories as they have been presented is the portrayal of these women as victims of male ambition and bias in history texts. This victimisation deserves close attention as it denies the women any other role and locks them within a closed and limited system. This paper investigates the victimisation process by looking closely at the case of Lilly Reich. Reich has been portrayed as the woman who supported a great man (Mies van der Rohe) in his early years and was then abandoned by him when he emigrated to the USA, and subsequently erased systematically from history. The paper traces the traces of Lilly Reich in texts and periodicals following both her erasure and her qualified addition to architectural history. It argues that any addition is not simple but a complex equation.

‘Polished cities’: Roselands shopping centre, an everyday space of change

Shirley Daborn, faculty of the built environment university of new south wales

This paper will pay particular attention to the integration of modernity and the everyday in the construction of a shopping space that enabled a degree of ideological movement. Historically the shopping space was portrayed as a disordered feminine space that threatened social stability. As such, shopping became imbued with negativity, entwining aspects of space with the role of woman as primary shopper. The shopping space, however, also operated as a mediatory space, in-between ideological spatial divisions, and provided a level of freedom in which cultural change could be mediated. The suburban shopping centre developed representations particular to mid-20th century cultural ideals. The focus of this paper will be Roselands, built 10 miles southwest of Sydney in 1965 and envisaged as a mini-city community shopping centre. The development of Roselands incorporated modern ideals within the suburban landscape during a time of changing ideas relating to the cultural role of women. Roselands, therefore, can be discussed as a 1960’s space of potential movement, mediating social values of ‘old’ and ’new’ ideas of woman.

The Purloined Museum: a feminist reading of 20 Maresfield Gardens

Li Lian Chee, National University of Singapore

This paper proposes an alternative feminist reading and telling to critically add to the epistemology of 20 Maresfield Gardens in North London, also known as the Freud Museum and last home of celebrated psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. It argues that knowledge about the history and memory of the Freud Museum is fraught with paradoxes. Where is the Freud Museum? Is it in London where the physical traces of Freud survive or in Vienna where there are only memories? Perhaps more pertinent to the inquiry is “How to find the Freud Museum?

To reconsider the epistemology of the Freud Museum implies a consciousness for how such knowledge is constructed and what is at stake. By epistemology I follow Jane Tompkin’s definition of “a theory about how one gets one’s knowledge”. I am less troubled by the “meanings” of the Freud Museum per se but rather, “How do we arrive at these different meanings?” In this sense, the project colludes with certain tenets of feminist knowledge specifically that of “critical subjectivities”. It attempts to explore possibilities of how the personal may elide with the social and the historical in academic writing and research. Can architectural history’s disciplined boundaries be enlarged to situate the presence of the reader’s body and to account meaningfully for the experience of the reading subject in the construction of these histories?

Methodologically, this project traverses three disciplines – architectural history and theory, psychoanalytic theory, and detective fiction. The paper illustrates how these different threads come together and why they are instrumental in critically adding to “other” ways of seeing, reading and writing the Freud Museum.

Virginia Woolf’s Architecture: an incidental practice

Rebecca Sinclair, Massey University

Jennifer Bloomer writes of minor architecture as an architectural criticism that works to challenge architecture’s prioritisation of the image. She explains that minor architecture allows connections to be made between words and images and things that might otherwise be considered improper. This paper inhabits the territory of the kinds of practices that Bloomer describes, smudging ingrained boundaries and forging unexpected links. In the spirit of the ‘minor’ of Bloomer’s term, it employs ‘incidental’ as a way into architecture.

The paper is a consideration of architecture through that which might be considered incidental to it. It examines texts apparently incidental to architecture – the writings of Virginia Woolf – and focuses on architecture’s incidentals: interior, detail, decoration, surface, matter and inhabitation. The paper offers an architectural reading of Woolf’s novel Orlando, a mock biography in which several oppositions are set in motion: male/female, surface/depth, joke/seriousness, nature/culture. Orlando suggests a way of thinking about architecture in terms of shifts and interchange, rather than as clearly defined object. In the text, bodies, clothing, language, society, landscape are each brought into proximity with architecture. This paper explores the reciprocal transformations that occur.

Histories are understood as gendered and diverse, dwelling also in places other than where one would conventionally expect to find them. This paper offers “an other writing upon the body of architecture.” (Bloomer, Architecture and the Text: The (S)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1993, p. 36.)

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