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Limited Visibility: Portraits of Women Architects

2012; Routledge; Volume: 17; Issue: 2-3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13264826.2012.736870

1755-0475

Sarah Treadwell, Nicole Allan,

Cultural Industries and Urban Development

Abstract This paper considers the visibility of women architects across three New Zealand sites: the institutional architecture journal, the national architecture award system and a local website that allows for self-representation. The website, Architecture + Women , was set up in 2011 in anticipation of an exhibition of the work of New Zealand women architects planned for 2013 as an anniversary of an earlier event, "Constructive Agenda", held in 1993. The website accumulates images of women in New Zealand who identify as architects. The paper considers the portrayal of women architects in each of the three sites, juxtaposing a sociological viewpoint with the biographical, seen as distinct yet overlapping modes of representation. Five portraits from the website are selected for detailed discussion as they reflect upon representations of femininity, colonial encounters, nature and the limits of the discipline—issues that are persistent for women architects in New Zealand. Notes Program currently on New Zealand television with an architectural focus: Grand Designs, Grand Designs Revisited, Homes under the Hammer, Home of the Future, etc. "'Faces Behind the Façade': A Black and White Photography Exhibition of Architects' Portraits and Their Architecture", held at "Tusculum", headquarters of the RAIA, 3 Manning Street, Potts Point, Sydney, http://www.neilfenelonphotography.com.au/exhibitions.php (accessed 3 March 2012). Portraits + Architecture, 11September to 15 November 2009, curated by ChristopherChapman, http://www.portrait.gov.au/exhibit/architecture/ (accessed 26 September 2012). "Faces of British Architecture", exhibition at The Building Centre, London, 9 January–29 February 2012. Other exhibitions that display portraits of architectsinclude: Diverse Minds: Photographic Portraits from the Architecture Programme, 16 September 2008–9 January 2009, Royal Academy of Arts, London; Portraits of Architects and Collages, by Manfred Sack, 12 April–21 May 2006, Deutsches Architekturmuseum, Frankfurt, Germany. http://www.fondationpourl architecture.be/en/event/portraits-archi-women (accessed 26 September 2012). Gaël Turine, http://www.gaelt urine.com/#/Institutional & Corporate/Portraits for The Architecture Foundation/1 (accessed 26 September 2012). Gaël Turine, http://www.gaelt urine.com/#/Institutional & Corporate/Portraits for The Architecture Foundation/1 (accessed 10 December 2012). Joanna Woodall (ed.), Portraiture: Facing the Subject, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997, 20. Architecture and the Feminine: Mop Up Work, Jennifer Bloomer (guest ed.), 1, no. 4 (Jan./Feb. 1994), 50–55. Hélène Cixous, "Portraits of Portraits: The Very Day/Light of Roni Horn", in Roni Horn, A Kind of You: 6 Portraits, with text by Hélenè Cixous (trans. Eric Prenowitz), Gottingen: Steidl, 2007, 8. One of the authors is represented on the website, one is not. Both are represented by virtue of the repetition of inscribed experiences caught as abstractions in the repeated organisation of the face. Sidonie Smith and Julie Watson (eds), Interfaces: Women/Autobiography/Image/ Performance, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002, 11. http://www.architecturewomen.org.nz/database(accessed 5 January 2012). Ludmilla Jordanova, writing on a portrait of scientist Caroline Herschel: "Caroline's companion commented on a drawing by an unnamed painter: 'I'm sorry to say the drawing which I saw did not do justice to her intelligent countenance; the features are too strong, not feminine enough, and the expression is too fierce'. The femininity of the woman scientist and the depiction of her femininity remain contentious matters" (Ludmilla Jordanova, Defining Features: Scientific and Medical Portraits 1660–2000, London: Reaktion Books with The National Portrait Gallery, 2000, 108). Cixous, "Portraits of Portraits", 7. Kristina Huneault, Difficult Subjects: Working Women and Visual Culture, Britain 1880–1914, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2002, 3. Huneault, Difficult Subjects, 207. Woodall (ed.), Portraiture, 19. Woodall (ed.), Portraiture, 19. Cixous, "Portraits of Portraits", 7. Errol Haarhoff, Practice and Gender in Architecture: A Survey of New Zealand Architecture Graduates 1987–2008, Auckland, School of Architecture and Planning, University of Auckland, 2010, 24. Haarhoff, Practice and Gender in Architecture, 25. AGM Publishers, http://www.agm.co.nz/index.html? category=25&id=20 (accessed 27 August 2012). Allan Sekula, "The Body and the Archive", October, 39, (Winter 1986), 7. This refers to the first sub-category—those who have an architecture education, teach at an architecture school or practise architecture. K. Michael Hays (ed.), Architecture Theory since 1968, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000, 643. Denise Scott Brown, "Room at the Top? Sexism and the Star System in Architecture", in Ellen Perry Berkeley and Matilda McQuaid (eds), Architecture: A Place for Women, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989, 237–246. In 1996, Francesca Hughes wrote of "the hope that architecture's inclusion of women will help finally to undermine the theory/practice divide … and dispel the not entirely unconnected genealogical anxiety (architecture/not architecture), allowing their practices to supplement and expand the field as we now understand it" (Francesca Hughes, The Architect: Reconstructing her Practice, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996, xvii). A third female project architect featured in Issue 1 of 2007, but she is practising overseas and so was not included in the count. The article did describe her as a New Zealander and her name was counted when she was listed on the Contributors' page as a practising female contributor. See Germaine Krull, "Self-Portrait with Ikarette", 1925; Ilse Bing, "Autoportrait dans Miroirs'', 1931; Imogen Cunningham, "Self-Portrait with Korona View", 1933; and Lotte Jacobi, "Autoportrait", 1937— all in Herbert Molderings and Barbara Mülhens-Molderings, Mirrors, Masks and Spaces. Self-Portraits by Women Photographers in the Twenties and Thirties, http://lemagazine. jeudepaume.org/2011/06/molderings/ (access- ed 27 September 2012). Molderings and Mülhens-Molderings, Mirrors, Masks and Spaces (accessed 27 September 2012). Jordanova, Defining Features, 97. Hughes, The Architect, xiii. The choice to use incidental snapshots as self-portraits in a professional context is complicated. It tends to deny usual expectations of professional behaviour and constructs the website in alignment with more popular social networking sites. The happy snaps uploaded proclaim family affiliations, alternate works of labour and casual pleasures to friends and acquaintances in the architectural community. They also offer an implicit critique of the construction of architects as single-minded and obsessive. "Enduring" awards are given to projects that were completed in an earlier time-frame and that are deemed to have withstood the "test of time" and are, therefore, considered worthy of recognition. During 2002–08, the categories were as follows: Community and Cultural, Hospitality/Tourism, Education, Heritage/Conservation, Commercial and Industrial, Healthcare, Residential, Multiple Housing, Interior Design, Urban Design and Colour awards. In 2009, they were changed to the following: Public Architecture, Residential Architecture—House, Residential Architecture—Multiple Housing, Commercial Architecture, Interior Architecture, Heritage, Small Project Architecture, Sustainable Architecture, International Architecture, Urban Design and Enduring Architecture. It is important to note that within the 33 firms excluded are Lindley Naismith and Jane Aimer, who won two awards under the name, Aimer Naismith Architects. They have since changed their name to Scarlet Architects and, as such, their former name is no longer in the database. They have not received any awards under their new name. They would increase the number of female principals in award-winning practices from five to seven, increasing the percentage value to 5%. If their awards were counted, this would increase the percentage of awards to firms with female architects from 3.5 to 4%. To provide a snapshot of the gender makeup of those practices that have received an award(s) in the last ten years, the NZIA Directory of architectural practices was used as a consistent platform to compare practices. This public database has two categories of registered architects for each firm: principals and architects. Even though the employees of these firms may have changed since receiving the award, it is expected that this time delay will be lenient toward the number of female architects. Of the 95 different firms, it is important to note that 33 (35%) could not be found in the database and, as such, information on their gender balance is omitted. The rise in branding is perhaps evidenced by the recent flourish of monographs on many of New Zealand's largest firms. The A4 New Zealand architects monograph series edited by Stephen Stratford includes volumes on Architectus, Jasmax, Pete Bossley, Herriot + Melhuish Architecture, Architecture + and Studiopacific Architecture. Other recent publications include ASC Architects and Stephenson & Turner, both edited by John Balasoglou. The term, "brand", is used to describe a situation where a firm does not operate under an individual's personal name(s) or where a personal name has been used and that person(s) is no longer associated with the firm. The lack of attribution to personal names, published in the journal, distances the work from individuals, strengthens the tie to an entire practice and potentially hides significant contributions by females. Peggy Deamer's article, "Branding the Architectural Author" (Perspecta, 37, (2005), 43), usefully distinguishes between the concepts of "fame" and "branding" and how they are "recontextualised" in the realm of architecture. In her discussion of authorship, she explains that "(i)n branding, the maker is disengaged from the product, and the relationship between the 'name' and the product is extremely loose". In Hughes' introduction, describing the image that appears on the title page of the book, she writes: "Like the mirror postcard, the view is cacophonic: a set of different voices (allegory, autobiography, exposition, criticism, narrative) presenting the multiple and fragmented sites of their practices" (Hughes, The Architect, xvi). Nicholas G. Carr, Elena Sommariva, Bruce Sterling, Lev Manovich, Richard Baraniuk, Stefania Garissimi, David Weinberger, Stefan Heidenreich and Tobias Krafczyk, "The New Web" (In English; Italian; Italian andEnglish), Domus, 923, (March 2009), 105–128 (112). Matt Ferranto, "Digital Self-Fashioning in Cyberspace: The New Digital Self-Portrait", in Jane Kromm and Susan Benforado Bakewell (eds), A History of Visual Culture: Western Civilization from the 18th to the 21st Century, Oxford and New York: Berg, 2010, 357. "[T]he number of images uploaded to Flickr every week today is probably larger than all objects contained in all art museums of the world" (Lev Manovich, "How to Follow Global Digital Cultures, or Cultural Analytics for Beginners", https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:Q2c MM5VZqucJ:softwarestudies. com/cultural_analytics/cultural_analytics_overview_ final.doc+%E2%80%98It+is +interesting+to+note+that +the+ number+of+images +uploaded+to+Flickr+ every+week+is+probably+ larger+than+all+the+objects +contained+in+all+the+ art+museums+of+the+ world%E2%80%99&hl=en &pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESh 8PpZd1G2iOB5EkSIqM3F I3la9Kknauokb6vskZT4Cis v1HC9IMppYZZRaG2xK HQ_cbb1p8qR3LgTBX2sY vheGkqLwBljCBnpfEezTxO a3slOhkCYYDIbamR14YD_ wKnacDXma&sig=AHIEtb QQkzUa4qrWVKHCDw_ qb7_v4nMS1g (accessed 26 September 2012). Carr et al., "The New Web", 112. Sharon Vanderkaay, "The Social Media Evolution", Canadian Architect, 55, (June 2010), 39. Vanderkaay, "The Social Media Evolution", 40. "Question 6. How will we present ourselves? … How can we reveal our interesting personalities without appearing flaky or remote?" (Vanderkaay, "The Social Media Evolution", 40). The sponsor for this competition changed to Panasonic and, in 2009, the name of the competition changed to Auckland Architecture Association (AAA) Urban Eye Competition, thereby losing some of the critique implied by the name, "Urban Gaze". "[T]he longstanding, pernicious associations between 'woman' and 'nature' in Western culture—associations that are rarely advantageous to either woman or nature—have made 'nature' a treacherous terrain for feminism" (Stacy Alaimo and Susan J. Hekman, Material Feminisms, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008, 12). Huneault, Difficult Subjects, 9. Shelley Budgeon, "The Contradictions of Successful Feminity: Third-Wave Feminism, Postfeminism and 'New' Femininities", in Rosalind Gill andChristina Scharff (eds), New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 286.