Why feminism is essential to architecture

[Music]

hey

[Music]

as we all have noticed over the past

couple of years

the world has gone more and more complex

wouldn’t you agree our identities have

become more complex

and our everyday lives have become more

politicized than ever

and although we often come together in

places

in the city that’s where we come

together

cities now are rapidly gentrifying and

they’re becoming

more and more homogenic in their makeup

and at the same time more universal in

their design

so how can architects myself included

take into account the realities and the

complexities

of everyday life over the past

few years these complexities have

inspired me to take an intersectional

feminist approach to my work as an

architect

it has been one of the most significant

shifts in my work

and i truly believe that there is a lens

that we can all use to view

the build environment and the spaces

around us

if you hear intersectional feminism of

course

you think yeah okay intersectional

feminism and architecture

what do these two have have to do with

each other

i mean i had the same a first impression

so let me start by taking you on the

journey that i took

about eight years ago i was asked to

speak at a conference on female

architecture

at first i thought female architecture

is there even such a thing as female

architecture

this led me to the to explore feminism

and architecture i had not even

considered the two

go together and yes i am a female and

yes i’m also an architect

and i know that there are not a lot of

women in the profession

we actually start out 50 50 in

architecture school

and then around 10 years later you know

10 to 20 percent of women remain

and even fewer go on to have senior

positions or to even have their own

office

i hadn’t really considered any any of

this up until this point

but of course i wanted to give

this amazing talk so i totally dove into

this subject

one of the first hits i got when i was

googling on a female architecture

was this building in australia this high

rise and the architects who built it

said they were inspired by beyonce’s

curves when they built it

i mean really her body beyonce of course

beyonce is amazing

but to translate her body literally into

a building

is that female architecture this was the

opening of a rabbit hole

and i discovered so many women who had

been

doing amazing things throughout

throughout the centuries

but i had never heard of them i had

never been thought about them in

architecture school

and just the sheer number of women in

architecture who had been ignored and or

erased from history was just

mind-boggling to me

but the rabbit hall led me to

intersectional feminism

and i can imagine that some of you

watching tonight

know what intersectional feminism

actually is

but also that there are a lot of people

who might not know who

like me know the word or heard about it

kimberly crenshaw a american law

professor she coined the term in the 80s

and basically she explained

intersectional feminism

as a lens a lens for seeing the way in

which various forms of

inequality operate together so

a person’s political or social identity

creates different modes of

you know privilege or discrimination as

for instance your gender

your sex your race class

list goes on you don’t have to be a

woman or

even someone who has experienced

inequality

to go by the principles that

intersectional feminism

gives us this brings me

to the heart of what i would like to

talk to you about

today architecture has not been applying

principles of intersectionality to up to

this point

and it is crucial and critical that we

do so

why because public spaces

need to be a reflection of all its

residents

and up until very recently they have not

been

at all architecture is the build variant

of culture and it often represents

national identity

and the most direct example of this are

public spaces

so the general idea of public space is

that it’s

open and accessible to everybody

regardless of race

gender age ability 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 definitely

not for people who are not seen as

normative

most public spaces are built through a

lens of mostly white

older privileged men

and we have some wonderful public spaces

of course

but they have not been built with the

experiences and the voices of many

marginalized groups in our society

this is grounded in the way we are

trained as architects we have been

trained

to design in this tradition of kind of

universality you know this universal

vitruvius man who stands like this

and maybe at best for this middle class

family white family

so going forward it’s essential that we

understand

the people the communities the complex

identities and

all of these underground cultures that

we’re building for

to do so first thing is to look at your

your own privileged individual

position as a designer and to go beyond

what you were taught

i’d like to share some examples of my

work after this very long

introduction to show you what

intersectional feminism

can bring to architecture

here this is this is the kraskar in

rotterdam it’s really one of the most

multicultural streets

in one of the most multicultural cities

in the netherlands

this street has inspired me to imagine

buildings that were directly inspired by

the very

people the very local cultures that were

on the street

and after immersing myself for over a

year in the street

i designed this high-rise building

that really celebrated the people the

communities of that street

the kraskate is a place where the whole

world comes to do their shopping

but it’s also a world that is not known

by architects and planners

and if they do know it’s kind of in a

negative context

where sometimes something has to be done

to make it better

or cleaner or more gentrified

this building was a drive-in driving

high street with public spaces

overlooking the center of rotterdam and

the building

showed me what it could look like when

design

from real people and real life

uh is at the core of your design

practice

in the last two years together with

different uh groups of women i’ve been

developing this summer pavilion in

stockholm or near stockholm

and i wanted to take the needs and the

wishes and the dreams of women

in this city as a starting point to

create this public space

what amazed me was that many of the

women especially of the younger women

were very very conscious that men

were designing the spaces that they were

supposed to enjoy

as for instance the community center or

the playground

and that in doing so assumptions were

being made about what these women would

like or would not like or should like

this video gives you a quick glance of

the summer pavilion

the summer pavilion is set

to be built in the spring of 2021

and the people inside have all been body

scanned

and 3d body scanned and are actual

people who live

in this city

this is an exhibition space i designed

for the dutch pavilion in the venice

biennale

i designed the space for jacqueline dion

she’s a dutch female artist

who was the only female member of the

situationist international

a very famous group of avant-garde

artists

in her 80s now she’s finally celebrated

but she was almost written out of

history

and my aim was not to show her work in

this very white and

rational space designed by ritvald but

also

to to make her presence felt to make it

wild and amazing

for me personally working on the

boundary of art and architecture

is where i found the freedom to explore

new form languages

and to see that what kind of beauty i

could formulate

outside of the standard beauty that was

that is formulated

by dead architects like le corbusier

and also to question what beauty really

is and also what is culture

what is culture in spatial form what can

it look like

when we take complex identities as a

starting point

once again architecture is a cultural

practice

and it is central to our imagination and

our concrete relationship to space

and this is why we need to understand

intersectionality as we build

because otherwise we will be trying to

solve 21st century problems

with 10 21st century tools