Women In Architecture: The Latest Architecture and News

The American Institute of Architects has elected Kimberly Dowdell as the 100th president of the organization, making her the first Black woman to hold the position in AIA’s 165-year history. Delegates at the AIA’s annual meeting voted Dowdell to serve first as vice president for 2023. Afterward, she will become president in 2024.

During her campaign for president, Dowdell has expressed her support for minorities, while also making clear that she wants to be an AIA president for all. Her platform is based on four key areas of interest: supporting architects in practice, creating a sense of belonging and ensuring access to the architectural profession and education, addressing climate concerns, and designing for the future, considering rapid technological advances. “I firmly believe that the AIA has the power and potential to better serve our profession” she declared in a video made prior to the election.

In the field of design and construction, the question of gender is a point of conflict: who has the possibility of building? What are the alternatives for us architecture professionals? These are the questions that Taller General (re)think about. It is from these questions that Femingas, a participatory construction conference with a gender perspective, arose. These are manifested as an alternative to the construction of "mingas", days of joint work between the members of a community to achieve a common good.

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French architect Renée Gailhoustet has been awarded the 2022 Royal Academy Architecture Award for her pioneering work designing public housing and neighborhoods in and around Paris. The award is given annually by London's Royal Academy to individuals or practices whose idea or body of work has positively contributed to the public.

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Running from May 20th to November 26th, 2023 in the Giardini, at the Arsenale, and at various sites around Venice, the 18th International Architecture Exhibition will be titled: The Laboratory of the Future. Announced today by the President of La Biennale di Venezia, Roberto Cicutto, and the Curator of the exhibition, Lesley Lokko, the theme and title of this edition will consider the African continent as the protagonist of the future. “There is one place on this planet where all these questions of equity, race, hope, and fear converge and coalesce. Africa. At an anthropological level, we are all African. And what happens in Africa happens to us all”, explains Lokko.

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The Graham Foundation has announced the award of 56 new grants to individuals exploring ideas that expand contemporary understandings of architecture. The recipients have been selected from an open call that resulted in nearly 500 submissions. The selected projects are led by 81 individuals with diverse backgrounds. The funded projects, including exhibitions, publications, films, and podcasts, among other formats, encourage experimentation and foster critical discourse in architecture.

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Eva Franch I. Gilabert is one of the three artistic directors of Model. Barcelona Architectures Festival, together with Beth Galí I. Camprubí and José Luis de Vicente. The first edition of a project that has taken the city of Barcelona as a place for experimentation and debate.

From the 5th to the 15th of May, they took the public space and transformed it into both a playground and platform for international voices, local architects, policymakers, politicians and citizens, to engage and discuss what the future of Barcelona and other cities could be.

The Danish Architecture Center (DAC) has opened its latest exhibition titled "Women in Architecture", which showcases the contributions made by female architects across the years. The exhibition highlights women in architecture across time, age, and geography, and explores projects designed by Danish architects such as Hanne Kjærholm, Karen Clemmesen, Lene Tranberg, Dorte Mandrup, and others, along with installations by international architectural studios such as Tatiana Bilbao Estudio, Helen & Hard, and Ensamble Studio.

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Architect Mariam Kamara—founder of Niamey, Niger-based firm Atelier Masōmī—is a contrarian of design pedagogy as it is largely practiced today. To Kamara, modern is not synonymous with European forms, architecture is not only for Westerners to define, and the so-called canon of great buildings actually ignores most of the built world. The Niger-based architect's rapidly growing practice informs a series of lectures she has delivered recently at MIT, Columbia University GSAPP, the African Futures Institute in Ghana, and Harvard GSD.

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The digitisation of architecture and design projects has been going on for some time now and has increased even more, largely due to the global pandemic. To hear talk of the metaverse, the NFT or the digital twins seems to be commonplace at this time, when the digital economy is booming and where architects and designers who seek to move from the physical world to the virtual world are beginning to proliferate. But will virtuality be the future of architectural visualisation?

Technical precision combined with environmental concern and exploratory and investigative character make Carla Juaçaba one of the great representatives of Latin American architecture today. Carioca, born in 1976, Carla Juaçaba attended the University of Santa Úrsula and attributes much of her experimental and interdisciplinary style to this educational institution. It is not by chance that during her academic training her great inspiring masters were the architect Sergio Bernardes and the visual artist Lygia Pape, insinuating her interest in the multiple disciplinary branches that can compose architecture. In this sense, while still at graduation, Carla worked together with architect Gisela Magalhães, from Oscar Niemeyer’s generation, in scenography and expography projects.

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This article was originally published on Common Edge.

There’s a famous quote—it’s usually attributed to Winston Churchill—that goes, “History is written by the victors.” This cynical and largely erroneous belief could only be true if history was fixed, settled, static. It never is, and that’s precisely why we have historians. It might be more accurately said that history’s first draft is written by the victors. But first drafts, as any writer will tell you, are famously unreliable. So it is with architectural history. Women have played significant roles in the field since the start of the profession, but that is not how history has recorded it. A new book, The Women Who Changed Architecture (Princeton Architectural Press), a collection of more than 100 mini-biographies of important women architects, covering more than a century, hopes to take a step toward correcting that oversight. Recently, I spoke to Jan Cigliano Hartman, the editor of the volume, about creating the book, important and overlooked figures, and why this isn’t a definitive list.

On the heels of the Eames Office’s 80th anniversary marked by an exhibition and a Ray-inspired sneaker, director Eames Demetrios spoke to Metropolis about the matriarch who continues to inspire design.

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In different parts of the world, women are transforming cities and taking up spaces in urban planning and management as never before. Paris, Barcelona and Rome, for example, in addition to being cities where almost anyone would like to live, are now cities managed by women for the first time in their history, all in their second term. Major changes and currently celebrated plans, such as the “15-minute city” in Paris, the opening of Times Square to the people in New York, and the urban digitization of Barcelona as a smart city, were led by women.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has selected Mexican architect Frida Escobedo to design the new $500 million modern and contemporary art wing. The Met does not have, until now, a thematic area that would house pieces corresponding to this temporality in art.

2017 is in the past. Nevertheless, the year has left us a series of lessons, new wisdom and better tools to help us face the challenges of 2018. What surprises will this year bring us?

We asked our editors at Plataforma Arquitectura (ArchDaily's Spanish arm) to make predictions based on what they've learnt in 2017, and to share with readers the topics they expect to be in the limelight in 2018.

This week marks the first anniversary of the death of Zaha Hadid, the most successful and influential female architect in the architectural discipline. Born in Baghdad (Iraq) in 1950, Hadid became the first woman to receive the Pritzker Prize in 2004, and twelve years later received the gold medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA).

Hadid's untimely death left a fascinating and inspiring legacy. Meanwhile her firm, Zaha Hadid Architects, continues to work on nearly a hundred projects worldwide. To remember her legacy, Spanish company Deimos Imaging has shared a series of photographs focusing on Hadid's work in five countries.

The images were captured by the Deimos-2 satellite, which was launched in 2014 and designed for very high-resolution Earth observation applications, providing multispectral images of just 75 centimeters per pixel. Hadid's incredible works take on a new dimension when you contemplate their proportions from the sky—or rather, from a satellite.

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