Women
Architects in Britain
by Lynne Walker
Based on Drawing on Diversity and related projects, I am currently writing a book
entitled, Gender and Architecture: A History of Women and Architecture in Britain from 1640 to the
Present Day. In the book, I draw on critical writing and
theoretical debates to investigate and explain the role, position and achievement of women
in architecture from the seventeenth century to the present day. For my talk today, I want
to provide a brief outline of this work. The architects I will consider range from
artistocratic lady amateurs in the 17th century to professional women
architects in practice today. Part of the larger project is to assess the problematic
nature of womens participation in
architecture in Britain, their absence of from history, as well their work and position
within the profession.
The dicotomy between public and private,
which traditionally situated women in the domestic sphere outside the public world of
remuneration and work, provides a theoretical framework, which I want to pursue as well as
challenge. Divisions of gender, space, and architecture are seen as especially important
in determining where it was thought appropriate for women to be generally; where women
worked; what kind of work was available to women; and what value was placed on that work.
I argue that architectural consumption--
patrons, patronage and the use of buildings and their spaces -- opens up a reconsideration
of the terms and perameters of architectural production and a revaluing of womens
place and practice in architecture. Among other benefits, this examination of consumption and
production demonstrates the diversity and architectural intelligence of British
women's participation in the built environment and establishes a central place for women
in architectural and cultural history as architects, patrons, builders, construction
workers, clients, writers, theorists, and most numerously, users of buildings.
The more I look at women and architecture in
Britain the more it becomes a study of the complex relationship(s) between women,
architecture and power. Lets take the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Although
subordinate before the law and disadvantaged in relation to influence and access to
political, professional, ecclesiastical and military affairs, some wealthy and elite women
built vigorously, producing architecture which represented and reinforced their power and
authority. Here individual women's agency as architects is recognised but seen
as operating within the constrained circumstances of historically specific regimes of
power. In other words, women's place and choices in architecture in Britain are seen as
structured through sexual difference and operating through competing sets of definitions,
hierarchies and divisions of gender, class and space.
In the seventeenth century and eighteenth
century in Britain, women's architectural
production was generally restricted to the private sphere, however, the elasticity and
blurring of boundaries between public and private worlds provided opportunities for women
to build and restore churches, chapels, monuments and almshouses as well as a variety of
other building types, including large scale country houses and gardens. Nevertheless, even
the most powerful women had their choices in architecture structured and limited by sexual
difference.
Looking back to the best known English woman
builder, Bess of Hardwick , for comparison, two
women producers of architecture in the seventeenth century, Lady Anne Clifford (1590-1676)
in Westmorland and North Yorkshire and Lady Elizabeth Wilbraham (1632-1705) in
Staffordshire and Cheshire demonstrate the way that heiresses and widows in Britain held and exercised power in their own right as
patron builders, during the highly politicised period of the Civil War and the
Restoration.
It is part of my argument that at this time
-before the organization of the architectural profession in the nineteenth century - a
very different relationship existed within the building industry which was more beneficial
to women. Before the nineteenth century, for example,
there was a much more fluid relationship between architect and patron/client. These
categories, such as architect and patron were less-well-defined
and therefore less restrictive to the involvement of patrons in architecture. Moreover,
there were no professional bodies to control access to architectural practice. These
conditions allowed women clients and patrons to undertake many tasks now associated with
the modern architect--selecting building materials, ordering estimates, making agreements
with builders and building craftsmen, instructing the superintending architect, visiting
sites and most significantly, ordering (and re-ordering) spaces and translating theory
into practice.
Designing and building for women in the
seventeenth and eighteenth was a domestic, private pursuit, and, therefore, it was
considered an appropriate activity for ladies. Money, leisure and an amateur
delight were prerequisites for an architectural practice completely within the boundaries
of the family estate. The familys land provided not only the site for architecture
but often the building materials and building workers. Since Anglo-Saxon and medieval
times, upper class women in Britain directed and controlled rural architecture, based on
their families' land. This association and familiarity with land, property, and control
sometimes spilled over into design. As we saw with Bess of Hardwick and Lady Anne
Clifford, women architects began in the
amateur tradition in country house architecture, gardens, and church building
Further down the social scale women artisans
played an important part in the building trades, and at the bottom level of existence,
indigent female agricultural workers built
cottages on waste ground. It is argued that while architecture was a sign of great wealth
and power, conversely, these most basic buildings could also signify the powerlessness of
poor homeless women, who were forced to live and build illegally. Nevertheless, through
their work as active agents in architecture homeless women provided for themselves basic
shelter and accommodation, as well as sustenance and self-support through cottage building
and garden making or the leasing of a cottage with common rights.
Gendered identities and categories
circumscribed women's participation in architecture in the eighteenth century and directed
them to the applied and decorative arts which were thought appropriate to their
femininity. However, architectural practice was accessible to elite women through an
amateur interest in architecture which led to building. In practice. nevertheless, they
were normally restricted to 'feminine'styles, family-owned sites and building types
perceived as suitable to their femininity (notably domestic architecture). However,
against the grain of both ideology and practice was the presence of middle and working
class women in the public sphere in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Their
role and work as architectural entrepreneurs and developers (Sarah Clayton and Elizabeth
Doughty); professional architects (Eliza Deane); manufacturers of building materials
(Eleanor Coade; and Nottinghamshire nail and brick makers).
The importance of class and culture can be
seen in relation to the complementary concepts of taste and femininity and through the
work of educated and aristocratic women in Britain who had the time and money for leisure
and amateur pursuits. While they sharpened their perceptions with the constant round of
travel and visiting, as recorded in the diaries of Celia Fiennes, women, such as the
Duchess of Beaufort who devised the garden buildings at Badminton, acquired skills in
drawing, mathematics and surveying as part of an Enlightenment education, which was
applicable to the planning and design of buildings.
The consequences of elite women's education,
experience and position often created a better informed client and by degrees an active
patron, such as Jemima, Marchioness Grey, who built an altar to the god Mithras to the
designs of Thomas Wright. The thin line between patronage and design is demonstrated in
the work of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, a well-known proactive client for a series of
houses, most famously Vanbrugh's Blenheim Palace (1704-1720) and Wren's Marlborough House
(1709-1711). It is less well-known that she designed the almshouses at St. Albans
(c.1736). The extension of charity, a culturally sanctioned feminine activity, to
architecture facilitated women's participation in architecture generally and provided an
approved building type which women habitually commissioned, endowed and, on occasion,
designed.
In a similar way, architectural design could
be seen as an extension of ladies' accomplishments, most notably, sketching and
embroidery, which did not threaten to disrupt the femininity of the practicioner or seem
to disturb the balance of power of conventional gender relations. Architectural design in
this context was perceived as a domestic activity in which the 'lady' could make her
design proposals, supervise the executant architect or builder and find the site, workers
and building materials without leaving the family estate, or her socially assigned sphere.
A-La-Ronde, a house in the country, near Exmouth, was built and decorated by Jane and Mary
Parminter in 1797 [Slides], and Plas Newydd, begun 1788, was the celebrated cottage of
Lady Eleanor Butler and the Hon. Sarah Ponsonby, the Ladies of Llangollen.
Femininity was also, and more widely,
constructed through women's work in the applied arts associated with architecture, in
architectural decoration and in the design of interiors; for example, in the shell houses
designed and decorated by the 2nd Duchess of Richmond and her daughters at Goodwood,
1739-1746, Sussex and in Ireland in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.
Femininity was also inscribed in and through the design of architectural features and
decoration, for example, Mary Delany's designs for the chapel at Delville, 1750, her Irish
home; and in 'gothick' schemes for interiors and architectural details and features at
Charleville Forest, Co. Offaly, c.1800-1812. by Lady Charleville.
In the nineteenth century, women's
involvement in architectural design developed from an aristocratic interest into a middle
class occupation. In contrast to earlier architectural work, formed and practiced around
ladies' accomplishments, travel, country houses, gardens and estate buildings, middle
class Victorian women designed houses, cottages, churches and chapels that met their needs
for financial security, personal independence and ambition, while fulfilling cultural
expectations about family duty and their mission to the poor. The amateur tradition
survived but it passed to the hands of middle class women. They often combined the twin
motives of philanthropy and building, for example, Harriet Martineau who designed The
Knoll, 1842, in Ambleside, to reform local building practices as well as provide better
planned and more economical accommodation for herself.
Often when British women made designs, they
were built as a memorial to a family members. In addition to domestic architecture,
churches and chapels were considered appropriate for women to design. Church building
reinforced notions of women's moral and spiritual superiority and could be seen as a
private and personal pursuit comfortably within a slightly expanded domestic sphere. Sarah
Losh's highly individual and imaginative Church of St. Mary, Wreay (1840-2) which was
built as a memorial to her sister, and the Watts Chapel and cloister designed by Mary
Watts (1897) and dedicated to her husband, the painter G.F. Watts, for example.
Although their primary concern was not
architecture itself, women philanthropists concern for social reform frequently led to
building. In conjunction with conventional architects, women, such as Englands first
woman physician, Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, provided better accommodation for the
poor in Victorian London, for example, the
New Hospital for Women, still in use in London, a hospitals run by women for women. The
most important patron builder of the period was Octavia Hill, the housing reformer.
Rehabilitation of small urban houses marked the beginning of her career, which included
many similar projects in London, most notably, she designed this block of flats which are still in use.
In the nineteenth century, debates about
architecture as a profession for middle class women took place against the increasingly
deep divisions of labour, gender and space, associated with the development of industrial
capitalism. Women's experience of philanthropic, religious and political work and, most
importantly, the organised Women's Movement which argued for equal rights and access to
paid employment, property and the professions facilitated womens entry into the
architectural profession. For feminists, such as Harriet Martineau and Barbara Leigh Smith
Bodichon, who led the campaign for Married Women's Property Rights, architectural design
of their own personal spaces (The Knoll, Ambleside, 1842 and Scalands Gate, 1860 &
1878, repectively) could provide power bases from which to run various political and
personal enterprises. For others, such Agnes and Rhoda Garrett, who trained in an
architect's office, their work as interior designers and decorators and their campaigns
for women's suffrage were a joint project. The impact and indeed success of these
arguments and experiments helped transform women's access to the professions and altered
their aspirations and status in architecture from amateur to professional during the
second half of the nineteenth century.
Womens entry into the profession was
formally marked by Ethel Charles, the first woman member of the Royal Institute of British
Architects (RIBA), the chief professional body for architecture in Britain. She joined the
RIBA in 1898 and her sister and architectural
partner, Bessie Charles followed her in 1900. The
implications of professionalism at this early stage can be traced in their work and in
that of the small group of nineteenth century
professional women architects, which included Violet Morris, who practiced architecture
outside the auspices of the RIBA.
The impact of the First World War on women's
entry into the architectural profession was highly significant. The combined pressure of
the Womens Movement and the absence of
male students at the front ensured womens access to systematic architectural
education. Women began to train in in considerable numbers as architects in universities,
art schools, polytechnics, and, most significantly at the premier private institution, the
Architectural Association in London. The training was modelled on the Ecole des Beaux Arts
in Paris. It is part of my argument that this Beaux-Arts training was crucially important
for the successful challenge to the sexual division of labour in architecture (the
mechanism and cultural prescription which limited women's practice mainly to domestic
architecture). Classical training contributed to legitimising the design of large scale,
public buildings by women and helped normalise their access areas of design that had
previously been considered beyond their capacitites. Beaux-arts training enabled women to
design public and commercial buildings for a wide variety of clients. The event which
publicly signalled the breaking of the domestic mould that limited women's practice to the
private sphere was the victory of Elisabeth Scott's design in the competition for the
Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford (1927).
The contemporary reception of the work of
women educated between the wars in the 1920s and 1930s was very positive. It contrasts
sharply to women's highly contested and unstable place in the architectural profession
since that time and their subsequent treatment at the hands of modernist historians. In
many ways the inter-war period was a golden age for women architects who flourished
professionally and were well-received critically, but history has been less kind to their
work and reputations, misattributing it and assigning it to their (male) partners,
neglecting their concerns and values or ignoring them altogether. The work of the first
full generation of professional women architects, which can be interrogated against this
reception and assessment, which variously ignored (Aiton) or neglected (Ledeboer) them;
misattributed their work (Crowley); or absorbed their names and reputations into their
male partners (Speight).
The rebuilding of cities, the demolition of
slums, and a better life for all were goals of many young women architects in the 1930s.
Coinciding with their experience and interests, modernism offered design opportunities in
social architecture, while its association with social reform and its rejection of past
styles easily conflated in the minds of left-wing architects who favoured a clean sweep
politically and socially as well as aesthetically. For instance, designs and projects for
working class housing and other social architecture were made by Justin Blanco White, Mary
Crowley, and Aileen Tatton Brown and women associated with the MARS Group and the Housing
Centre.
Women's close identification with the home
and domestic architecture was seen to qualify them for designing the modern house which
became both symbol and vehicle for the new architecture in Britain.The structural and
aesthetic possibilities offered by the use of the so-called new materials of steel,
concrete and glass fascinated some women architects, such as Norah Aiton and Betty Scott,
as an end in themselves. While architects such as Elisabeth Benjamin translated modernist
concerns into domestic designs, suggesting new ways of living. Here in the the George and
Dragon House, outside London, and in London, in this house for a prominent left-wing
female politician, Benjamin organized domestic space through open planning, built-in
furniture and architect-designed equipment.
At this very moment in France, a London
trained artist progressed from drawing and painting to the applied arts and extended
her practice to architecture. I am of course referring to the Anglo-Irish
architect, Eileen Gray. Gray is best known today for her elegant furniture and fashionable
interiors designs, and for her pioneering modernist houses built in the South of France
[SLIDES]. Less-celebrated are her designs which indicate her interest in cities and their
working class inhabitants, such as this design for a nursery and this cultural centre.
The form and scale of architecture and the
course of many architectural careers and concerns were changed by the Second World War and
its aftermath. Opportunities for women to train and work in architecture in the public
sector played a vital role in the post-war redevelopment of Britain. The contribution of
the many women architects came in work for government agencies and local authorities; for
instance, Rosemary Stjernstedt who led the team of architects that designed the Alton East
Estate at Roehampton, 1951-1955, and Patricia Tindale who became Chief Architect at the
Department of Environment illustrate this
point. In the post-war period, British women
architects also converted experience in housing , health and education into hard fact,
research, and ultimately official standards through membership on influential government
committees.
Building types needed for wartime were often
been associated with the needs of women and children and were sometimes designed by women
architects (creches, holiday camps, and nursery schools). When social architecture came to
the top of the architectural and political agenda in the post-war period, architecture
focused on schools, nurseries and housing, which were again associated with women. These
building types and the post-war social and politcal consensus attracted women's expertise
and experience. The architect, Mary Crowley,
for example, played a leading role in the
design of socially and architectural advanced building types before and after the war, as
a central player in the Hertsfordshire County Schools programme. In addition, town
planning, which attracted women architects
like Gertrude Leverkus, emphasised the social nature of the built environment. Town
planning in conjunction with architecture became a focus for those who envisioned a new
Britain architecturally and socially, such as
Judith Ledeboer in the New Towns of Harlow and Hemel Hempstead.
Although the post-war period offered
opportunities for women, the post-war reassertion of femininity also led women back to the
home. This reborn domestic ideal combined with the actual care of young families (and, for
some women architects, post-war relocation outside the architectural centre of London)
meant that for many women the war either ended their careers or lowered their place within
the professional hierarchy. Their work, not unlike the Victorian volunteers, became
ocassional or unpaid - designing for friends
or worthy causes. Moreover, the contribution of women architects who designed government
and local authority architecture was shrouded by the anonymity of the public sector.
Elizabeth Scott, for instance, who had experienced international acclaim in the 1930s,
worked in such obscurity for Bournemouth Architect's Department that her obituaries in
1972 all maintained that she had given up architectural practice before the war.
One of the most productive areas in post-war
architecture brought together the domestic and the professional in husband and wife teams,
which are a hallmark of contemporary architectural practice and a complex and
contradictory position for women. The growth of co-educational architectural training in
the inter-war period resulted in a proliferation of partnerships. A prominent practice in
urban regeneration in Britain today is one such team, Wendy Shillam of Shillam + Smith.
The late Alison Smithson and her husband Peter Smithson were the model of the aesthetically savvy husband and
wife team whose practice focused on regeneration and took a critical, even intellectual,
view of architecture. From the 1930s and early 1940s, architects, such as Jane Drew and Sadie Speight, had married
architects and set up in practice. Their husbands and architectural partners, Maxwell Fry
and Leslie Martin, achieved international
reputations and reached the top of the star system which still dominates and structures
the profession, while critics and other architectural writers have been less generous to
Drew and Speight. post-war husband and wife teams in the limelight have experienced the
misattribution of their work to the male partner alone. Even when the credit is properly
given the design of the work is assumed to have been done by the male half of the team and
therefore critical discussion, and credit, centres on his design. Richard and Su Rogers; Norman and Wendy
Foster;and Michael and Patti Hopkins are architects who follow the pattern of
architectural (male) star and less significant (female) other. The continuing critical
asymmetry and historical muddle feeds on notions of art and genius and the binary
structure of language from which gender distinctions arise become deeply embedded in the
fabric of the architectural profession: its working practices, values, and institutions.
In contrast but not in contradiction, the desire for individual recognition and the need
for visibility in a highly competitive profession has led to the emergence of a few women
stars in British architecture, most notably perhaps Zaha Hadid, whose
unexecuted Cardiff Opera House was the cultural keystone for a regeneration project in the
Welsh capital.
Feminist architecture, a distinctive form of
post-war practice, was developed by women who were both architects and part of the
revitalised women's movement. It grew out of inequality of opportunities within the
post-war architectural profession and the rejection of professional ideology which
projected the image of the architect as arrogant hero, as well as the perceived failure of
modernism. Related to earlier efforts for self-help by women architects and to a concern
for social architecture, the primary aims of feminist architects, such as Anne Thorne and
Julia Dwyer who are here today, have been to
change the design process and the balance of power within the profession so that women's
needs and interests are more fully represented in the built environment.
Women's representation in the architectural
profession has hovered around 10% for many years-- although this 10% currently stands for
approximately three thousand women architects in Britain. Nevertheless, women's increasing
access to architectural education, itself a key development in twentieth century
architecture, has occurred not because of equal opportunities within the profession but in
spite of them. Moreover, there is an urgent need for equality of opportunity across
boundaries of race and class, as well as
gender, which must be introduced to tap into the rich diversity of background and culture
required to produce quality and sustainability in architecture.
Lynne Walker,
London
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