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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