“One of the first hits I got when I was googling about female architecture was a high-rise building in Australia, whose architects said that they had been inspired by Beyoncé’s curves when they built it,” exclaimed the Dutch architect Afaina de Jong in her last talk for TEDxAmsterdamWomen in 2021. “I mean, really? Her body? Beyoncé? Of course, she is amazing, but to translate her body literally in a building… Is that female architecture?”, she continued indignantly.
De Jong is the founder of AFARAI studio, where she works with an interdisciplinary methodology combining theory and research with design. She considers her studio as “a feminist practice that encourages change on social and spatial issues and that accommodates differences,” so Afaina is likely familiar with the concept of 'intersectionality'.
The term was coined in 1989 by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor from the United States, who later re-defined it as 'intersectional feminism', "a prism for seeing how various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other”. In her theory, she studied the overlapping or junction of social identities and related systems of discrimination, oppression, or domination, and its goal was to understand the inequalities and relationships among these social groups.
Crenshaw has explained that people often talk about race inequality separately from disparities based on gender, sexuality, immigrant status, or class, not recognizing that some people may be affected by all – or most – of them. “All inequality is not created equal,” Crenshaw once declared. And the urban and architectural spaces in which we live are a clear example of this.
As a case in point, the standardization of furniture and equipment in both public and private spaces –once a strength of industrialization– has been raising some concerns. After achieving a general level of equality, attention was diverted to those excluded by these conventions. For example, the Mirra 2 Chair from Hermann Miller can be adapted to individual body sizes and postures, along with other adjustable furniture such as tables. But in the field of transport, for example, people still struggle with the width of airplane seats and the legroom in cars. And in public buildings, private residences, or commercial spaces, it is easy to come across inadequate footprint depth on staircases, for example, or find toilets with uncomfortably minimal dimensions. All of them cause discomfort for the user and, in extreme cases, can even result in them being excluded entirely.
“The general idea of public spaces is that they are open and accessible to everybody regardless of race, gender, age, abilities,” described de Jong in her presentation. “But the actual reality is that public space is not the ideal of freedom of expression and freedom of assembly. It’s not a given for all. And it is not for people who are not seen as normative,” stated later.
AFARAI's founder accepted that even though there are “some wonderful public spaces” all over the world, they have not been built – not even thought out – considering “the voices of the many marginalized groups in our societies”. She looked back on her days at architecture school and could highlight three key points: the 'intersectionality' concept was not taught to her – and was not mainstream yet, the omnipresent ideas of tradition and universality that tend to encourage designing for only one type of user, namely, the middle-class, white family, and that many important female professionals had been invisibilized from the history of architecture that she learned.
To avoid perpetuating this lack of recognition of women in academia, as posited by de Jong, Lizzie Malcolm created Women Writing Architecture (WWA), an organization committed to the transformation of architectural academia. She is a Scottish designer, developer, and the co-founder of Rectangle, a graphic and interaction design studio, and teacher in a master's program at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague. WWA is a website with an open-access bibliography about architecture written by women, allowing visitors to find new writers or get an insight into the latest topics of interest to females within the industry. And as it is made collaboratively, it grows through conversations, citations, and suggestions among its users.
Malcolm explained in WWA's Rationale that the terms ‘architecture’ and ‘female’ remain open and flexible – as is the ‘intersectionality’ tool, as it includes more than the feminist collective – because “the intention is to bring together different activist groups into the conversation.” Besides, rather than encouraging a dispute between varied groups, her website “creates not a bridge between two opposites (the center and the edge), but a safe, desirable and encouraging place that provides an alternative to this binary, in which dialogue can flourish.”
The invisibility of women that de Jong and Malcolm discuss is noticeable when the time comes to honor the work of a studio. For example, in 1991, Robert Venturi won the Pritzker Prize but his partner, Denise Scott Brown, did not. After almost two decades of reflection and cultural change, Kazuyo Sejima (from SANAA) was awarded by the same academy, as was her studio partner Ryue Nishizawa. In 2012 there were intentions to award the prize to Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu (from Amateur Architecture Studio), but she rejected it – despite her partner and husband's insistence that she be recognized as well – because she "never wanted a Pritzker".
Another "alternative to the binary", as Malcolm defined it, is inviting new collectives and activists into the design process. Participatory design is the opportunity for the community to question, design, and build a project that responds exclusively to their needs. This way, intersectionality is ensured as the user is involved from the very beginning. So far most participatory projects are cultural or educational spaces or small urban installations. If this practice continues, it could be scaled up and take on larger projects in cities.
“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody,” declared Jane Jacobs, the American-Canadian urbanist and activist from the 20th century. She considered the city as an "organized complexity", a mix of dynamic interrelationships of systems and self-organization. Jacobs argued that the lack of diversity guarantees more stratification and that it is necessary to seek an interconnected interplay of relationships – facilitated by diversification strategies – and not just single-variable solutions.
In architecture and urbanism, the path of intersectionality implies inviting new and diverse voices to plan, design, and nourish our environments. These changes and new interactions along the design process will undoubtedly bring new spatial forms, as well as solutions that are still yet to be discovered, for everyone.
This article is part of the ArchDaily Topics: Women in Architecture presented by Sky-Frame.
Sky-Frame is characterized by its empathic ability to take on different perspectives and points of view. We are interested in people and their visions, whether in architecture or in a social context. We deeply care about creating living spaces and in doing so we also question the role of women in architecture. From the arts to the sciences, women shape our society. We want to shed more light on this role, increase the visibility of Women in Architecture and empower/encourage them to realize their full potential.
Initiated by Sky-Frame, the “Women in Architecture” documentary is an impulse for inspiration, discussion, and reflection. The film's release is on 3 November 2022.
