If one were to think “Brazilian 20th-century modernist genius”, one might alight on Oscar Niemeyer, but see also the Italian émigré Lina Bo Bardi, who developed an Italian-style modernism with a Brazilian accent in her adopted homeland. Her Teatro Oficina, in São Paulo, was named by this paper as the best theatre in the world.
Five hundred miles away is one of my favourite residential buildings, A la Ronde; an eccentric 16-sided home in Exmouth, Devon. It was designed in 1796 by Jane and Mary Parminter (two “spinster” cousins, in the words of the National Trust) and relative John Lowder. The cousins, who were not professionals, had been inspired by their Grand Tour of Europe (an unusual undertaking for women at the time) and, in particular, the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy. The critic Lucinda Lambton described the cottage orné with Byzantine inflection as embodying “a magical strangeness that one might dream of only as a child”.
‘Magical strangeness’ … A la Ronde. Photograph: Markfromexter/Wikimedia Commons
I thought of Bo Bardi and the Parminters when reading the recent report by the Royal Institute of British Architects (the RIBA) which found that “stark displays of sexism” were pushing women out of the profession, stalling their progress within it, or putting them off entering it altogether. The RIBA’s chief executive officer, Dr Valerie Vaughan-Dick – the first woman CEO in the organisation’s almost 200-year-old history – said that the report, which documented sexual harassment (including stalking and groping), unequal pay (a 16% gender gap), unsociable hours, and pervasive power imbalances, makes for “uncomfortable reading”.
It comes two decades after a seminal 2003 review explored an exodus of women from architecture. Clearly, the industry hasn’t sufficiently renovated itself. More women are studying the subject at university, but just 31% of architects registered with the Architects’ Registration Board (2022) and under a quarter of RIBA chartered members are female. Increasingly, the retention issue overshadows the recruitment one. In a 2017 survey by Dezeen, just 10% of senior positions in the 100 largest architecture firms worldwide were held by women. The result is the unfortunate truth that the achievements of some of our finest architects are made even more impressive on the basis of their sex.
There’s Kazuyo Sejima and her confident but mercurial buildings which mirror the moods of their natural surroundings: aluminium coruscates in the bright sun and shimmers in the rain; the considered “reflective cloud” of her 2009 Serpentine Gallery pavilion (with Ryue Nishizawa) seamlessly integrated with Hyde Park. Mariam Issoufou, a Niger-born architect works with sustainable local materials and resources – compressed earth bricks, rubber wood, palm leaves – to produce handsome libraries and housing estates in her native country and elsewhere.
Holding its own against flashier neighbours … The Broad Museum in Los Angeles, designed by Liz Diller. Photograph: Kevork Djansezian/Reuters
Liz Diller’s work is porous and community-focused – her greatest triumph, in my opinion, is New York’s extremely popular High Line, a 2km elevated linear park along an abandoned freight viaduct. Meanwhile, her Broad Museum in Los Angeles holds its own across the street from Frank Gehry’s better known Walt Disney Concert Hall.
Architecture has long been considered one of the most misogynistic of fields, whether it’s due to the stereotype of mathematics being for boys or women are solely suited to soft furnishings. This is reflected in day-to-day praxis: on-site PPE which is too large, rarefied cliques, and emails which begin with the salutation “gentleman”. As one of the best architects of the past 30 years, the late Zaha Hadid once put it: “I am not part of this boys’ network … there are places men can go and women can’t, like those gentlemen’s clubs, or guys asking each other to play golf.”
Of course, buildings have long been built by and for men. Le Corbusier’s famed Unité d’habitation, as stunning as the typology is, was designed according to his ideal figure of anthropometric scale. He called this “the Modulor Man” – inspired somewhat by Da Vinci’s Vitruvian man – except Le Corbusier based his on a “6ft British policeman” (despite never building anything in Britain). This imaginary PC Plod dictated everything from the heights of handles to the dimensions of staircases.
Zaha Hadid’s Phaeno Science Center in Wolfsburg. Photograph: Colin Walton/Alamy
It isn’t just that buildings’ functionality was designed with men in mind, but that they adhered to ostensibly inherently “male” qualities of form and character – hard steel, austere wood-panelling, the rawness of Béton brut. The most obvious example is phallic skyscrapers; certainly more common than Hadid’s football stadium in Qatar which was mocked for resembling a vulva (she disagreed, but honestly: it does. Then again, so does a stadium in the same country by Albert Speer Jr).
Accordingly, mainstream cultural depictions of architects are mainly hyper-masculine; the brooding Adrien Brody with sleeves rolled up in the three-hour epic The Brutalist, for instance. The protagonist of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, Howard Roark, is an early archetype of the egotistical starchitect (or bro-chitect). Here’s an excerpt channelling Roark: “These rocks, he thought, are here for me: waiting for the drill, the dynamite and my voice; waiting to be split, ripped, pounded, reborn; waiting for the shape my hands will give them.”
The hypothesis that unadorned concrete or clean lines are “male” by default is, of course, reductive. Denys Lasdun is one of my favourite architects, and this is not because I think of structural clarity as a signifier of a “male” propensity to lucidity. I’m afraid the (gorgeous) work of Mies van der Rohe does not call to mind the defined pecs of Doryphoros. Likewise, though Oscar Niemeyer once said his gorgeous, fluent curves were partly inspired by “the body of the beloved woman”, I imagine a flesh-and-blood woman with the same proportions might topple over. Hadid, often called the “queen of the curve” had her designs compared to the female form, even though she frequently referenced the abstract art of Kazimir Malevich as an influence and not Jessica Rabbit.
So does the sex of an architect even matter, aside from the obvious failure of equity? Yes. More women in the profession means that buildings and urban environments increasingly reflect the lived experience of women, style aside. In the 1980s, the women of the London-based activist collective Matrix, tired of struggling with prams up steps or hurrying through unlit underpasses, campaigned for and realised a cityscape more attuned to the way women lived.
It isn’t that childcare and shopping and domestic labour should be the domains of women, but while these inequities and disparities exist they should be acknowledged and catered for (and that goes for the needs of older people, or those with disabilities or neurodivergence, too).
There is also research which shows that companies with greater gender diversity on boards tend to generate higher profits. When it comes to architecture specifically – though it’s salient to avoid the diametric of the gender stereotype that resulted in hard, cold crystalline surfaces supposedly reflecting the temperament of men – roundtables from within the industry do suggest that women’s key strengths include working more collaboratively and inclusively, and communicating in a more effective way with clients.
In the past, even where female and non-binary architects’ contributions have been foundational to acclaimed projects, their input has been overlooked. Two of the most recognised architects in the UK, Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, cut their teeth with a firm co-established in 1963 alongside three women. One of whom, as the only licensed architect at that time among the group, was the sole reason the firm was allowed to practice. But few know the names of Georgie Wolton, Su Brumwell and Wendy Cheesman (or assistant Sally Appleby).
Frank Lloyd Wright is one of the world’s most lionised architects – for good reason, the guy built multiple masterpiece iterations of my dream home – but the Prairie School style was heavily reliant on his first employee, Marion Mahony Griffin. Half of the lithographs in Lloyd Wright’s Wasmuth Portfolio are the work of Mahony Griffin, despite Lloyd Wright’s attempts to claim otherwise.
The work of Georgie Wolton, who co-founded an early practice with Norman Foster and Richard Rogers. Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer
Eileen Gray’s iconic E-1027 house on the shores of Cape Martin in France, meanwhile, filled with her original and innovative furniture designs, was left to fall into disrepair – and not before Le Corbusier himself had vandalised it. (Le Corbusier and Lloyd Wright: excellent buildings, unbearable personalities.)
In 2013, a petition failed in its attempt to have Denise Scott Brown retroactively awarded the Pritzker prize; it had been awarded solely to her husband Robert Venturi in 1991, despite the fact Scott Brown had been co-principal at the practice for 22 years. (Just six women have won the prize in its history, including Sejima and Hadid.) And I’ve lost count of the number of people who think both of the Eameses were men.
Denise Scott Brown, photographed in 1978. Photograph: Lynn Gilbert
The preponderance of women architects needs to improve then, not just to give due credit for, and make tangible, the aesthetic creativeness and beauty of their designs, but to facilitate the real-life actualities of half of the human population. The gradual culture shift within the field that fosters teamwork, better dialogue with clients and considerations of inclusivity, is testament to the fact that more women following in the footsteps of the great Norma Merrick Sklarek and her fellow trailblazers is important. Women are increasingly advancing in other workplaces thanks to flexible and remote working, mentorship programmes, hiring reforms and the changing nature of networking events. Architecture must build on that.