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Genius, Gender and Architecture: The Star System as Exemplified in the Pritzker Prize

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

10.1080/13264826.2012.727443

1755-0475

Hilde Heynen,

Architecture, Design, and Social History

Abstract This article theoretically unravels why the gender identity of "star architects" tends to be male. It posits that this masculine dominance has to do with a dovetailing of different factors. First, the traditional role model for architects has been gendered male, especially when that role model is manifested through the concept of "genius". Second, the words used to describe the performance of the avant-garde in architecture—cutting edge, innovative, daring, original—are more in line with "masculine" than with "feminine" features. Third, the idea of authorship, crucial for the self-conception of the profession, benefits men more than women. This hypothesis is backed up by a discourse analysis of the jury citations that legitimise the selection of the Pritzker Architecture Prize winners from 1979 onwards. Combined with evidence from scholarly literature, the article argues that the different contributing factors reinforce one another, making for a system that produces many heroes and few heroines. Notes Alan G. Brake, "Zaha Hadid: Barrier Breaker, Conversation Starter", Architectural Record, 192, no. 5 (May 2004), 25. All the information regarding the Pritzker Prize, including jury citations, was found on the Pritzker Prize website, http://www.pritzkerprize.com/ (accessed 6 January 2011 and 14 April 2012). Virginia Valian, Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. Francesca Hughes, "An Introduction", in Francesca Hughes (ed.), The Architect: Reconstructing Her Practice, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996, x–xx. See also Andrew Saint, The Image of the Architect, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983 (although Saint doesn't devote an explicit discussion to gender, it is easy to see that all the role models he introduces in his book are, without exception, male). Bridget Fowler and Fiona M. Wilson, "Women Architects and Their Discontents", Sociology, 38, no. 1 (February 2004), 101–119. Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989, 13. Mary McLeod, "Undressing Architecture: Fashion, Gender and Modernity", in Deborah Fausch (ed.), Archi tecture: In Fashion, New York:Princeton Architectural Press, 1994, 38–123. Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: "Male" and "Female" in the Western City, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984; Leslie Kanes Weisman, Discrimination by Design: A Feminist Critique of the Man-Made Environment, Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Karen Franck, "A Feminist Approach", in Ellen Perry Berkeley (ed.), Architecture: A Place for Women, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989, 201–216; Andrea Kahn, "Overlooking: A Look at How We Look at Site or … Site as 'Discrete Object' of Desire", in Katarina Rüedi, Sarah Wigglesworth and Duncan McCorquodale (eds), Desiring Practices: Architecture, Gender and the Interdisciplinary, London: Black Dog, 1996, 174–185; Weisman, Discrimination by Design. Hilde Heynen, "Modernity and Domesticity: Tensions and Contradictions", in Hilde Heynen and Gülsüm Baydar (eds), Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture, London: Routledge, 2005, 1–29. Christopher Reed (ed.), Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, London: Thames and Hudson, 1996; Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986; Jennifer Bloomer, "The Matter of the Cutting Edge", in Rüedi et al. (eds), Desiring Practices, 10–31. Amanda Sinclair, Doing Leadership Differently, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2005; Amanda Sinclair, "Seducing Leadership: Stories of Leadership Development", in Gender, Work and Organization, 16, no. 2 (March 2009), 266–284. Naomi Stead, "'Fabulous, Far Away and Gigantic': Myth in Australian Architectural Authorship", Les Cahiers du CICLas, 7, (2006), 45–57. Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author" [1968], in Roland Barthes (ed.), Image-Music-Text, New York: Hill and Wang, 1978, 142–146; see also Tim Anstey, Katja Grillner and Rolf Hughes (eds), Architecture and Authorship, London: Black Dog, 2007 (especially the introduction, 6–15). See, for example, Alberta Yaneva, "Scaling Up and Down: Extraction Trials in Architectural Design", Social Studies of Science, 35, no. 6 (2005): 867–894. Magali Sarfatti Larson, Behind the Postmodern Façade: Architectural Change in Late Twentieth-Century America, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993, 3–20; Dana Cuff, "Introduction to Section 5: Architecture's Double Bind", in Greig Crysler, Stephen Cairns and Hilde Heynen (eds), The Sage Handbook of Architectural Theory, London: Sage, 2012, 385–392. Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?" [1969], in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader, New York: Pantheon, 1984, 101–120. Beatriz Colomina, "Battle Lines: E.1027", in Hughes, The Architect, 2–25. A long analysis of both the book and the film can be found in Merrill Schleier, Skyscraper Cinema: Architecture and Gender in American Film, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009, 119–155. Beatriz Colomina, "Collaborations: The Private Life of Modern Architecture", Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 58, no. 3 (2000), 462–471. Tanja Kullack (ed.), Architecture: A Woman's Profession, Berlin: Jovis, 2011. Interview with Caroline Bos, in Kullack, Architecture, 20. Interview with Alison Brooks, in Kullack, Architecture, 21. Interview with Jeanne Gang, in Kullack, Architecture, 21. Griselda Pollock, "The Missing Future: MoMA and Modern Women", in Cornelia Butler and Alexandra Schwartz (eds), Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2010, 34. Pollock, "The Missing Future", 38. Pollock, "The Missing Future", 39. Gwendolyn Wright, "Women in Modernism", paper delivered at Women in Modernism: Making Places in Architecture, New York, 25 October 2007, http://bwaf. org/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/WRIGHT-Women InModernism.pdf (accessed 14 April 2012). Larson, Behind the Postmodern Façade; Cuff, "Introduction to Section 5: Architecture's Double Bind". Charles Green, The Third Hand: Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Fowler and Wilson, "Women Architects and Their Discontents", 116. Fowler and Wilson, "Women Architects and Their Discontents", 109–110. Valian, Why So Slow?, 47–66. Fowler and Wilson, "Women Architects and Their Discontents", 115. Valian, Why So Slow?, 165. Interview with Dagmar Richter, in Kullack, Architecture, 169. Nishat Awan, Tatjana Schneider and Jeremy Till (eds), Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture, London: Routledge, 2011.