Course Syllabus

women_25.docx

 

Columbia University

GSAPP, Architecture

A6930, Fall 2025

Thursday 11–1

408 Avery Hall

Mary McLeod

 

Women, Gender, and Modern Architecture

 

Away with your man-visions! Woman propose to

reject them all, and begin to dream dreams for

themselves.

—Susan B. Anthony

 

Oh! the Home is utterly perfect!

And all its works within,

To say a word about it—

To criticize or doubt it—

To seek to mend or move it—

To venture to improve it—

Is the unpardonable sin!

—Charlotte Perkins Gilman

 

In order for [sexual] difference to be thought and lived, we have to reconsider the whole problematic of space and time . . . A change of epoch requires a mutation in the perception of space-time, the inhabitation of place and the envelopes of identity.

—Luce Irigaray.

 

This class explores the intersections between gender, women, and modern architecture, examining themes such as domestic reform, images of the New Woman, transformations in life style, institutional changes in the architectural profession, fashion and surface, the question of a “feminist” or queer aesthetic, and technology and feminism.  This course will focus on the period 1920 to 1980, but it will also consider how the developments in this period have influenced gender constructions and institutional changes in the profession up to the present.  After an introductory lecture about recasting architecture history to include further women and gender issues, the class will examine several primary (historical) texts raising issues relative to women and space.  It will then investigate several topics in modern architecture that concern gender and women’s institutional and social status in the past century, and how both the profession and architectural history might be recast to further include women and LGBTQ subjects.  These topics include: an expansion of what architectural historians have traditionally considered the boundaries of architecture to encompass areas where women have traditionally been engaged, such as domestic reform, interior design, and housing reform; an examination of gender connotations in the rhetoric in architectural theory and criticism; a focus on institutional parameters that have limited, shaped, or even encouraged women’s practice and participation in the profession; studies of women patrons and users; and attention to different forms of collaboration in architectural practice.  The course will conclude with a brief consideration of intersectionality and its implications for architectural history, as well as a discussion of new approaches for addressing gender issues.  While the focus will be on women and the implications of a feminist perspective in architecture, it is hoped that many of the issues raised will also be relevant to LGBTQ issues in architecture.

 

In addition to seminar discussions and presentations, there will also be several guest speakers who will discuss subjects directly related to the course.  These talks will either occur within the class session or immediately following the class. 

 

Assignments

All students will be asked to make at least two oral class presentations during the semester, which should include a visual presentation when appropriate (discussion of theoretical readings  will not require images).  In addition, there will be two assignments.  One will involve a biographical account of a woman architect, which may take the form of a website entry, a podcast, or even an oral history (transcribed) with shorter paper.  The other will be a longer essay (10–12 pages) related to a theme in the course.  It might be a book or exhibition review or a research paper.  A list of potential topics will be provided but students are also free to chose their own topic as long as it has been discussed with the instructor.  If a student wishes to take the class for South/East credit, their paper should deal with a topic outside of North America or Europe. 

 

Students will also be expected to attend any supplemental lectures related to the class (sometimes held during class hours, other times t.b.d.).  

 

Readings

All readings are to be done before the class meeting.  Shorter readings less than 40 pages will be posted on Courseworks or a link provided.  Longer readings will be available in Avery Library on a seminar shelf, as well as be available for purchase at Book Culture (111th Street) if still in print.  

 

Students should read the first two chapters (at least) of Despina Statigakos’s book Where Are the Women Architects? before the first class meeting.  

 

Note: If at all possible, students are encouraged to visit the exhibition “Fantasizing Design: Phyllis Birkby Builds Lesbian Feminist Architecture” at the Center for Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Place, before it closes September 2.

 

Class Schedule 

Note: This is a tentative schedule.  Depending on the availability of guest speakers and student travel, the schedule may need to be revised.

 

1 (September 4).  Introduction: Where are the women architects?  Where are women architects in architectural history?  (McLeod talk)

 

2 (September 11).  Historical perspectives: Virginia Woolf, Betty Friedan, Linda Nochlin

 

3 (September 18).  Expansion of the Boundaries of Architecture: Domestic Reform, Furniture, Housing, Preservation, etc. (McLeod talk)

 

 

4 (September 25).  Extension of the Boundaries of Architecture, Part 2 

 

5 (October 2).  Beyond Names: Biographies, Monographs, Exhibitions 

 

6 (October 9).  Beyond Names: Biographies, Monographs, Exhibitions, Part 2 

 

7 (October 16).  Collaboration/Organizations 

 

8 (October 23).  Rhetoric and Gender Construction

 

9 (October 30).  Patronage

 

10 (November 6).  Intersectionality 

 

11 (November 13).  New approaches: Architecture as care, Queer and Trans approaches, Embodied experience

 

12 (November 20).  Research presentations

 

Readings

 

Books with an * have been ordered for purchase at Book Culture.

 

Week 1: Introduction (talk by Mary McLeod)

*Despina Stratigakos, Where Art the Women Architects? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).  The ebook is available through CLIO, Columbia’s library system.

https://clio.columbia.edu/catalog/12947993?counter=1

 

Week 2: Historical Perspectives

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929; New York: Harvest Book/Harcourt, 2005), chap. 1.

Betty Friedan, “The Problem That Has No Name,” in the Feminine Mystique (orig. 1963; New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), pp. 15–32.

Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (1971), in Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), pp. 145–78.

Leslie Kanes Wiseman, “Women’s Environmental Rights: A Manifesto,” in Heresies, Making Room: Women and Architecture, no. 11 (1981): 6–8.  I would encourage students to browse through the whole issue, which is on Courseworks.

 

Week 3: Expansion of the Boundaries of Architecture: Domestic Reform, Furniture, Housing, Preservation, etc. (talk by Mary McLeod)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Passing of the Home in Great American Cities,” Cosmopolitan (December 1904), reprinted in Making Room: Women and Architecture, issue of Heresies, no. 11 (1981): 53–55.  Available online: 

http://heresiesfilmproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/heresies11.pdf

Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), pp. 1–63; 182–205.  

Susan Henderson, “A Revolution in the Woman’s Sphere,” in Architecture and Feminism, ed. Debra Coleman, Elizabeth Danze, and Carol Henderson (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), 221–53.

Irene Cheng, “Domestic Reform,” manuscript for Architecture After 1900, ed. Mary McLeod, Robin Middleton, and Joan Ockman for Thames & Hudson. 

Recommended:

S.E. Esterer, “One Day Walking Into Freedom,” Log 54 (Winter/Spring): 17–26.

 

Week 4:  Expansion of the Boundaries of Architecture, Part 2

Elizabeth Darling, “The Modern Flat,” in Reforming Britain: Narratives of Modernity before Reconstruction (London: Routledge, 2007), chap. 5, 137–74.  This book is available online through CLIO:

https://www-taylorfrancis-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/books/mono/10.4324/9780203414620/re-forming-britain-elizabeth-darling

Elizabeth Darling, “‘The House that is a Woman’s Book come True’: The All-Europe House and Four Women’s Spatial Practices in Inter-War Europe,” in Women and the Making of Built Space in England, 1870–1950, ed. Elizabeth Darling and Lesley Whitworth (Aldershot, Gants: Ashgate, 2007), 123–40.

https://www-taylorfrancis-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/books/edit/10.4324/9781315233826/women-making-built-space-england-1870%E2%80%931950-elizabeth-darling-lesley-whitworth

Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, “Crafting the Archive: Minette Da Silva, Architecture and History,” Journal of Architecture 22, no. 8  (   ): 1299–336.  This article might better fit with the material of the following week, but since Anooradha Siddiqi has generously offered to come to the class to discuss the article I’ve assigned it as reading for this week.  Please also listen to her keynote talk if you have the chance at:  

https://wda.princeton.edu/conference/2021/minnette-de-silva-constructive-dialogues

Video at the end of the page on the web entry.

Recommended: 

Barbara Penner, “Foreword: Housing is More Than Houses,” introduction to Modern Housing by Catherine Bauer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020; orig. Book by Bauer, 1934), vii–xliv.

 

Week 5: Beyond Names (Part 1)

Please read at least three entries on the Pioneering Women of American Architecture website and listen to two podcasts for Weeks 5 and 6. 

Despina Stratigakos, “Gerdy Troost: Hitler’s Other Chosen Architect,” in Hitler at Home (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 107–46, 326–32.  The whole book is also available online through CLIO. For comparison purposes and discussion, please also read: Despina Stratigakos, “Nazi Architecture Bros: The Young Men in Albert Speer’s Office,” Architect Magazine, April 7, 2001.

https://www.architectmagazine.com/design/culture/nazi-architecture-bros-the-young-men-in-albert-speers-office_o

Abigail A. Van Slyck, “Women in Architecture and the Problems of Biography,” Gender and Design, Special Issue, Design Book Review 25 (Summer 1992): 19–22. (This essay, representative of attitudes in the early 1990s largely rejects biography as a form of feminist practice.  However, the past two decades there has been a renewed interest in biography, in part influenced by identity politics.

https://nywac.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/design-book-review.pdf

Karen Burns and Lori Brown, “Telling Transactional Histories of Women in Architecture, 1960–2015,” Architectural Histories 8, no. 1 (2020), 1-27.  See especially the section devoted to biography, pages 14–18.  This essay takes a more positive, strategic approach to biography, considering “intersectional” approaches. 

https://journal.eahn.org/article/id/7606/

Recommended

Barbara Caine, “Feminist Biography and Feminist History,” Women’s History Review 3, no. 2 (1994), 247–61. This article makes a strong case for feminist biography.

 

Week 6: Beyond Names (Part 2)

Please continue reading website entries from Pioneering Women of American Architecture and listening to podcasts.

Stephen Vider, “Fantasy is the Beginning of Creation”: Imagining Lesbian Feminist Architecture,” in The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity after World War II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 106–40, 262–69.

 

Week 7: Collaboration/Organizations

Alice T. Friedman with Maristella Casciato, “Family Matters: The Schröder House, by Gerritt  Rietveld and Truus Schröder,” in Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998), 64–91.  You are encouraged to read other chapters in the book when we discuss patronage.

Katie Lloyd Thomas, “This Strange Interloper: Building Products and the Emergence of the Architect-Shopper in 1930s Britain,” in Suffragette City: Women, Politics, and the Built Environment, ed. Elizabeth Darling and Nathaniel Robert Walker (London: Routledge, 2020), 110–35. This article relates to Alexandra Quantrill's presentation.

 

Week 8: Rhetoric and Gender Construction

Adrian Forty, “On Differance: Masculine and Feminine,” in Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 42–61.

Mary McLeod, “Undressing Architecture: Fashion, Gender, and Modernity,” in Architecture in Fashion, ed. Deborah Fausch et al. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), 38–123.

Henry Urbach, “Closets, Clothes, DisClosure,” Assemblage, no. 30 (August 1996): 62–73.

 

Week 9: Patronage

Alice T. Friedman, “No Ordinary House: Frank Lloyd Wright, Aline Barnsdall, and Hollyhock House,” and “People Who Live in Glass Houses: Edith Farnsworth, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Philip Johnson,” in Women and the Making of the Modern House, 32–63 and 126–59.

 

Week 10: Intersectionality 

Jacqueline Taylor, “Amaza’s Azurest: Modern Architecture and the ‘New Negro’ Woman,” in Suffragette City: Women, Politics, and the Built Environment (London: Routledge, 2020), 33–56. This book is available online through CLIO: 

https://www-taylorfrancis-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/books/edit/10.4324/9780203702628/suffragette-city-nathaniel-walker-elizabeth-darling

Charles Davis, “Race, Rhetoric and Revision: June Jordan as Utopian Architect,”

ACSA Proceedings, 2014.

https://www.acsa-arch.org/proceedings/International%20Proceedings/ACSA.Intl.2014/ACSA.Intl.2014.41.pdf 

or (for a shorter piece)

Charles Davis, “Black Spaces Matter,” Aggregate 3 (March 2015).  

https://www.we-aggregate.org/piece/black-spaces-matter

María C. Lugones and Elizabeth V. Spelman, “Have We Got a Theory for YOU!  Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism and the Demand for ‘The Woman’s Voice,’” Women’s Studies International Forum 6, no. 6 (1983): 573–81 (already discussed earlier). 

 

Week 11: New Approaches: Architecture as Care, Queer and Trans Approaches, Embodied Experience

José Esteban Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence,” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (January 1, 1996): 5–16.  Available online:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/arena-attachments/733705/0c37f9af0b4d92718e5e9fd3b814b7d2.pdfs

Jack Halberstam, “Unbuilding Gender: Trans* Anarchitectures In and Beyond the Work of Gordon Matta-Clark,” Places Journal (October 2018).

https://placesjournal.org/article/unbuilding-gender/

Dolores Hayden, “Domestic Revolutions: Spaces of Care, Then and Now,” podcast, National Building Museum, Washington, D.C., 2022

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0BOOTC-TuY (you can skip the introductions and award ceremony)

Recommended:

Beatriz [Paul] Preciado, “Architecture as Practice of Biopolitic Disobedience,” Log 25 (Summer 2012): 123–36.

Matthew Gandy, “Queer Ecology: Nature, Sexuality and Heterotic Alliances,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30, no. 4 (August 2012): 727–47.  Available online through CLIO.