Women architects in Britain

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 women’s 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 women’s 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. Let’s 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 family’s 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 England’s 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 women’s 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.

Women’s 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 Women’s Movement and the absence of male students at the front ensured women’s 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