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