Abstract
There is no history without women as there is no culture without women, and architecture is not an exception to this norm. This research is focused on revealing how official historiographic mechanisms in architecture omitted women architects’ contributions in the twenties, thirties, and forties. It aroused from the verification of the lack of female models existing in the collective imagination of professional and academic groups on an international level. This situation has strengthened the belief that women architects did not belong to modernity and have not been prominent enough to be published, but when they were so considered, it was assumed that they performed a secondary role as the inspiration, contributors, or leaders of minor arts. This setting lacking female models is the main consequence of the identity that architecture has assigned to women in the historiographical records of modern architecture. We must assume a non-narrated history, and a female identity based on exclusionary narratives. In fact, it is not the main objective of this research to develop in depth women’s contribution to modern architecture, it is however to prove how it was concealed by the analysis of those narratives. Therefore, the review of the most influential textbooks in architectural culture of the twenty century is considered through the lens of gender difference. This sexual difference was not addressed through biological features, nor as the feminist theory of difference, but rather from a gender perspective whose distribution has led social and cultural processes resulting in the construction and praise of particular values and ways of representation. As a proposed approach, a theoretical frame from a feminist perspective is suggested, placing socio cultural and professional context as well as, significance and origins of discrimination of women architects in the modern period. Power, language, and assigned spaces according to gender have been, as in other disciplines, the developers of differences and responsible for the identitarian conformation in the profession. Individualist and heroic discourses are still prevailing in the collective imagination of the academic and the masses as the only historiographic version. Traditional mechanisms used in narrative construction are identified, and tools for the deconstruction of the hegemonic discourse are proposed through the consideration of gender as an analytic category. Methodologically, this work clarifies and defines the criteria to make possible the revision of some of the referential texts in theory and history of the modern architecture that scarred the twenty century. The approach is a bibliographical revision of these texts where the narratives of discrimination in contributions of women architects of modernity are explored. For this, a series of categories used as analytical tools are defined: exclusion, invisibility, pseudo inclusion, and inclusion. An open proposal, whose purpose is emphasizing other ways of interpreting and detecting prejudices in order to build an inclusive historiography. This review gives an account of the subtle yet deep inequality in the treatment towards women architects and designers. At the same time, it demonstrates how formal and linguistic narratives have been constituted, organized, and consolidated on the basis of the male supremacy in this profession. The findings of the analysis reinforce the suggested hypothesis, confirming the generalized exclusion of women works as well as their frequent constraint to subordinate or traditionally secondary roles within the profession.
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