Feminine and Plural: Women Architects and Designers Paths and Projects

1. TVAD RESEARCH SEMINARS Feminine and Plural Women Architects and Designers Paths and Projects Ana Gabriela Godinho Lima February, 2014

2. TVAD RESEARCH SEMINARS Equipe de pesquisa Profa. Ms. Fanny Schroeder de Freitas Araujo (DoutorandaFAUMACK) Arquiteta Agnes Del Comune Arquiteto Márcio Barbosa Fontão Alunos de Pós-graduação FAUMACK
Ms. Andraci Maria AtiqueMarianna dal Canton Martignago 
 Alunos de graduação
Daniela Risso de Barros
Fernando Romano Equipe Professora Coordenadora: Profa. Dra. Ana Gabriela Godinho Lima (FAUMACK) Pesquisadores consultores: Profa. Dra. Cecília Rodrigues dos Santos (FAUMACK)Profa. Dra.Maria Alice Junqueira Bastos
Prof. Dr. Michael Biggs (University of Hertfordshire)
Prof. Dr. Rafael Perrone (FAUMACK/FAUUSP)
Profa. Dra. Ruth Verde Zein (FAUMACK)

3. Nevertheless, the initial conclusions point out that the gender perspective, within the design process, seems not to interfere directly in the ways women design. The initial conclusions draws on Nigel Cross’ reasoning in his seminal article “Designerly Ways of Knowing” (1982/2001). Here the authors claims the existence of a third area of knowledge “design”, standing side by side with “science” and humanities”. Feminine and Plural: Women Architects and Designers Paths and Projects This research project investigated architectural and design processes from the perspective of gender. It employed a combination of literature review and interviews with women architects and designers, in order to identify and describe how gender affects the way women design. It has been assumed that design practice, as a cultural practice, carries the identity marks of the person who does it, gender among them.

4. Feminine and Plural: Women Architects and Designers Paths and Projects Gender and Architecture have been mainly out of the Brazilian academic agenda for the last decades. Previous academic works on the theme are rare and result of individual efforts. Recently, the debate seems to be receiving more attention, in Brazil and worldwide. Episodes as the online petition in support of recognizing Denise Scott Brown for her work in Robert Venturi’s 1991 Pritzker Prize, illustrate a renovated interest in discussing the issues relating architecture and gender. Events, publications and exhibitions nowadays claim that women still are less recognized and less paid for the same work in architecture. In addition, social difficulties such as various types of harassment are the main topics addressed by academic research.

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6. Feminine and Plural: Women Architects and Designers Paths and Projects “The low number of women architects in decision-making positions and running offices is the evidence of an unequal professional situation that has not been addressed properly.” Call for papers - 1st Symposium on Architecture and Gender 
ETSASevilla, Universidad de Sevilla 20-21.03.2014 The Pi group works in São Paulo since 2009 with a variety of languages: performance, theatre, dance, photography… Integrated by women, they work mainly in the city spaces – streets, sidewalks, squares, etc..

7. The test for this essay, however, is not in the scientific persuasiveness of the evidence but in the degree to which the descriptions resonate with women’s own experiences in architecture and in everyday life. One goal is to help women in architecture to identify qualities and concerns in themselves that are often unrecognized and suppressed in architectural education, research and practice. A second goal is to celebrate these qualities and concerns; a third is to work toward a profession that is more hospitable to feminist practitioners and that produces an environment more attuned to people’s needs.. Feminine and Plural: Women Architects and Designers Paths and Projects Franck, Karen A. A Feminist Approach to Architecture: Acknowledging Women’s Way of Knowing. In: Jane Rendell, Barbara Penner and Iain Borden. Gender Space Architecture: An interdisciplinary introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. (Originally from Ellen Perry Berkeley, Architecture: A Place for Women, 1989) The qualities that seem to characterize women’s way of knowing and analyzing appear variously in social-architectural research conducted by women, in alternative communities proposed by women, and in projects designed by women. Evidence that such qualities exist or that they distinguish women from men is suggestive at best.

8. Feminine and Plural: Women Architects and Designers Paths and Projects Connectedness and Inclusiveness Ethic of Care and Value of Everyday Life Value of Subjectivity and Feelings Value of Complexity and Flexibility

9. Feminine and Plural: Women Architects and Designers Paths and Projects Montessori School Delft, 1960-66 Herman Hertzberger Herman Hertzberger http://www.e-architect.co.uk/architects/herman-hertzberger

10. Feminine and Plural: Women Architects and Designers Paths and Projects /

11. There is no inner truth awaiting ‘authentic’ or ‘proper’ realization in bodily as material acts. Gender is always lived, gestural, corporeal, culturally mediated and historically constituted. It is not that we have a core, essential, unambiguous femininity or masculinity struggling to get out, or to find appropriate expression. Rather, there are cultural dictates, according to which subjects construct themselves, by appropriating and sometimes reinventing or subverting historically situated gender codes. Feminine and Plural: Women Architects and Designers Paths and Projects Tina Chanter. Gênero: Conceitos-Chave em Filosofia. Porto Alegre: Artmed, 2011. (Gender: Key Concepts in Philosophy. London, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006. Contrary to this dualistic model, good postmodernists that we are, we have learned that there is no Cartesian-style inner essence of gender (mind/spirit) that the body expresses, rather there is only a series of performative acts which signify and resignify gender. Gender is not something that is ‘inside’, a pre-existent essence, waiting to find bodily expression.

12. Feminine and Plural: Women Architects and Designers Paths and Projects Penny Sparke. As Long as it’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste. The Press of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 2010. Given that the majority of the goods we consume have been mass produced or “mediated” by the processes of industrial manufacture and commercial distribution, our private, interior spaces – and often our public spaces – are not only part of a spatial, material, and visual reality but are also, perhaps more significantly, representations of idealized environments that are “mediated” through lifestyle and interior magazines, shop windows, exhibitions, and voyeuristic television programmes. These idealized environments, like feminism, are intrinsically linked to and defined by the media.

13. Feminine and Plural: Women Architects and Designers Paths and Projects Francesca Hughes. The Architect: Reconstructing her Practice. Massachussets Institute of Technology, 1996. At a moment when the architectural profession is beginning to shift from its traditionally male domination, The Architect: Reconstructing Her Practice examines how the introduction of women to the main body of architecture might bring about a reconstruction of the orders that pervade architectural production and consumption.In a collection of autobiographical essays in which practice is both the site and the vehicle for change, twelve American and European architects reflect on the nature of critical practice and its relation to architecture. The contributors were chosen not only for the distinguished quality of their work, but also for the range of architectural practices they collectively encompass--from the intersection of theory and philosophy to the intersection of building process and industry. Together, they present a compelling and provocative critique of architectural culture. All show a willingness to transgress the various mediums and territories of architecture, to recover and reopen certain discussions lost in the architectural discourse they have inherited.

14. Feminine and Plural: Women Architects and Designers Paths and Projects 9 women architects have been Interviewed in a 6 months period. Our attention have been focused on their discourses when describing a project selected and designed by her. What emerge more strongly was a “professional discourse”, rather than a “gender discourse”.

15. Feminine and Plural: Women Architects and Designers Paths and Projects Projects The 6 architects selected projects themes were: 4 residential projects 1 Store 1 Urban design The 3 designers selected projects were: 1 Stained glass design restoration 2 Package Design 3 Artistic path

16. Feminine and Plural: Women Architects and Designers Paths and Projects Interview Architect Maria Augusta Pisani | Project: residential project https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvVLjwAZlAE

17. Feminine and Plural: Women Architects and Designers Paths and Projects Interview Architect Daniela Getlinger | Project: residential project https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bma8TQFvJZk

18. Feminine and Plural: Women Architects and Designers Paths and Projects Interview Architect Vera Osse| Project: Cloth Store https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYfguBbrHI4

19. Feminine and Plural: Women Architects and Designers Paths and Projects Interview Architect Denise Polonio | Project: residential project https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFfvXKw6Fs8

20. Feminine and Plural: Women Architects and Designers Paths and Projects Interview Architect Silvia Chile| Project: residential project https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWgv2e6lxto

21. Feminine and Plural: Women Architects and Designers Paths and Projects Interview Architect Maria Assunção Franco| Project: urban design https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maOXpleIb9E

22. Feminine and Plural: Women Architects and Designers Paths and Projects Interview Designer Regina Lara | Project: Stained glass design restoration https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8_FfKWo_-I

23. Feminine and Plural: Women Architects and Designers Paths and Projects Interview Designer Grace Kishimoto | Project: package design https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSwLErIR9cY

24. Feminine and Plural: Women Architects and Designers Paths and Projects Interview Designer Fanny Feigenson | Project: artistic path https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5QSWs2mfuA

25. “These acts of citation shape our perceptions of ourselves and of others as we negotiate, helped by these narratives, subjective identities and acceptable socialization scenarios. In architecture, sketches, for instance, may well consist in examples of acts of citation.” Feminine and Plural: Women Architects and Designers Paths and Projects The initial conclusions point out that women architects and designers do not seem to have a gender consciousness* that guide their projects. On the other hand, we may suggest that throughout the design process, women sustain internal dialogues, with internal voices that are not necessarily “gendered”. As we have referred in a previous article (Lima, 2009), during the design process, architects and designers, women and men, “cite” other voices.

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27. Feminine and Plural: Women Architects and Designers Paths and Projects Museu da Cachaça, Salinas, 2006. Jô Vasconcellos J House, Jun Aoki, Japan, 2007. Av Houses, CorsiHirano, Avaré, 2011. Kate Otten, Olifantsfontein Library, Olifantsfontein, South Africa. Casa Campos do Jordão, 1986, Anne Marie Sumner. BT House, Guilherme Torres, Maringá, 2013.

28. LINA BO BARDI arquiteto (1914-92) Feminine and Plural: Women Architects and Designers Paths and Projects

29. Nigel Cross, 1982. Designerly ways of knowing. Design Studies, 3 (4): 221-227. Each culture is dedicated to study, reflect and analyze a category of phenomena. If sciences are devoted to the natural world and the humanities addresses the human experience, in design we are interested in the man-made world. As a consequence, the appropriate methods to investigate relevant events in each culture emerge from this reasoning, leading to the proposition that each field would be more acquainted with a set of methods. In the sciences, for instance, the more suitable investigation procedures involve controlled experiment, classification and analysis. Humanities works better with methods employing analogies, metaphors, criticism and evaluation. Design, in its turn, engages its researchers in activities like modeling, pattern-formation and synthesis. Feminine and Plural: Women Architects and Designers Paths and Projects

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33. Feminine and Plural: Women Architects and Designers Paths and Projects Thanks! godinholima.ag@gmail.com femininoeplural.wordpress.com