"I cannot, in whole conscience, recommend architecture as a profession for girls. I know some women who have done well at it, but the obstacles are so great that it takes an exceptional girl to make a go of it. If she insisted on becoming an architect, I would try to dissuade her. If then, she was still determined, I would give her my blessing–she could be that exceptional one."
– Pietro Belluschi, FAIA from the 1955 New York Life Insurance Company brochure, “Should You Be an Architect?”
With great fanfare, in mid-October 2014 on the opening night of the 6th annual Architecture and Design Film Festival in Manhattan, Festival Director Kyle Bergman announced that the festival’s special focus this year was on women in architecture. “We’ve been wanting to feature women in architecture for a while now,” he told me, “and this year we finally have the films to make that happen,” referring to three new documentaries: Gray Matters (2014), Making Space: 5 Women Changing the Face of Architecture (2014) and Zaha Hadid: Who Dares Wins (2013).
These three films showcase a total of seven women who, to paraphrase Pietro Belluschi, have become some of the “exceptional ones”: Eileen Gray, Annabelle Selldorf, Marianne McKenna, Odile Decq, Farshid Moussavi, Kathryn Gustafson and Zaha Hadid. While all three films approach the question of women in architecture through biography, they compliment each other by highlighting three different classifications of women architects. The world premiere of Gray Matters featured an important historical figure, the elusive pioneering modernist Eileen Gray, examining her disappearance from the history of Modernism and dutifully writing her back in. Making Space, which also had its World Premiere, focused on 5 “rising stars” of the profession whose reputations the film hopes to cement into place. Who Dares Wins, with its US Premiere, had a much different task at hand – to make the most famous woman in the profession appear accessible, and human.
