Textbooks in Focus: Women in Architecture Survey

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The first roundtable of the SAH Women in Architecture Affiliate Group aims to give voice to the discussion illuminating scholarship and teaching materials on women in architecture. A remarkable number of trailblazing studies have manifested this extensive legacy. The textbooks in focus accord with the mission of the SAH Women in Architecture Affiliate Group and highlight the significant yet still scarcely explored professional contributions of women who, to a great extent, shaped the discipline around the world. Our aspiration is to introduce the volumes recently published or in production, and emphasize the names of pioneering women in architecture, who have inspired and built cultural, spiritual, and physical environments across time and place. The novelty of our vision is in presenting not only a collection of readings but in broadening the field by advancing a more incisive overview of the topic as a whole, and by intertwining an approach to the professional standing of women in architecture with the more explicit attention to related themes.

By examining architectural practice, and including the craftsmanship of landscape and interior design, architectural theory, artistry and collecting, and academic and social initiatives and criticism, the presented research sets out debates, questions, and projects around women in architecture, and stimulates broader studies and discussions in emerging areas. Furthermore, it becomes a powerful catalyst for future publications on the subject and for academic surveys worldwide envisioned to educate, empower, and craft the future of the profession. The books are introduced by their authors and editors. This roundtable provides a platform for panelists to present and discuss their research and how it relates to our constantly expanding field.

Moderators

Anna Sokolina
Chair, SAH Women in Architecture Affiliate Group

Anna Sokolina, PhD is a founding chair of SAH Women in Architecture Affiliate Group, also serving on advisory boards of the International Archive of Women in Architecture and Bloomsbury Global Encyclopedia of Women in Architecture (2021). Her research is focused on women’s narratives in architecture and on transformative trends in architecture that ignite a cross-disciplinary discourse. She edited the anthology Architecture and Anthroposophy (2001, 2010, 2019) and currently works on her book Building Utopia: Architecture of the GDR,and edits the book of the founder of the International Archive, Milka Bliznakov, The Great Experiment in Architecture 1917–1932; and The Routledge Companion to Women in Architecture (2021), envisioned as a catalyst for new academic surveys and other modules and publications around women in architecture.

Rebecca Siefert
Assistant Professor, Governors State University, IL, SAH Women in Architecture Affiliate Group Administrator

Rebecca Siefert is Assistant Professor of Art History at Governors State University in University Park, Illinois, USA. She earned her PhD in art history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (2018) where she focused on the history of twentieth-century art, architecture, and film. Her primary area of research comprises women in architecture who have been overlooked by mainstream scholarship, especially those involved in the debates surrounding public housing. She has contributed to The Bloomsbury Global Encyclopedia of Women in Architecture, and her monograph on the contemporary architect and artist Lauretta Vinciarelli, Into the Light: The Art and Architecture of Lauretta Vinciarelli, was published by Lund Humphries in 2020.

Panelists

Harriet Harriss
Dean, Pratt Institute, School of Architecture, Brooklyn, New York
A Gendered Profession (RIBA Books, 2016); Women Write Architecture Reading List (2017) 

Dr. Harriet Harriss (RIBA, PFHEA, PhD) is a qualified architect and Dean of the Pratt School of Architecture in Brooklyn, New York. Her teaching, research and writing focus upon pioneering new pedagogic models for design education, as captured in Radical Pedagogies: Architectural Education & the British Tradition, and for widening participation in architecture to ensure it remains as diverse as the society it seeks to serve, a subject she interrogates in her book, A Gendered Profession. Dean Harriss is also recognized as an advocate for diversity and inclusion within design education and was nominated by Dezeen as a champion for women in architecture and design in 2019. Her latest book, Architects After Architecture (2020), considers the multi-sector impact of an architectural qualification.

Carmen Espegel
Professor, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
Women Architects in the Modern Movement (Routledge, 2018) 

Carmen Espegel is Doctor Architect and Full Professor at the Design Department of the School of Architecture, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain. Her research focus: Women in Architecture, Housing, and Modern Heritage. She has lectured at national and international universities, and she leads her firm, espegel arquitectos, which has been recognized with numerous awards. The introduced book, Women Architects in the Modern Movement (Routledge, 2018) aims to rewrite the history of the 20th century’s Modern Architecture. It provides an overview of the development of women's roles in society, from traditional settings to the beginning of European modernity, and the analyses of the work of Eileen Gray, Lilly Reich, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, and Charlotte Perriand. 

Shelley E. Roff
Associate Professor, University of Texas, San Antonio
“’Appropriate to Her Sex?’ Women’s Participation on the Construction Site in Medieval and Early Modern Europe” in Women and Wealth in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Theresa Earenfight (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) 

Shelley E. Roff is an associate professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, and associate chair of the SAH Women in Architecture Affiliate Group. Her research addresses the architecture of medieval and early modern Spain, Spanish colonial America, and pre-modern women engaged in architectural design, the building trades and construction labor in Europe. Her forthcoming book, entitled Treasure of the City: The Public Sphere and Civic Urbanism in Late Medieval Barcelona, investigates the politics of civic construction in the medieval city. Her publications include “Appropriate to Her Sex? Women’s Participation on the Construction Site in Medieval and Early Modern Europe” (2010) and “Did Women Design or Build Before the Industrial Age?” (forthcoming, 2021). Dr. Roff received numerous fellowships, including the 2019 NEH Faculty Award for Hispanic-serving Institutions, the Bogliasco Study Center for the Arts and Humanities, and the Fulbright Foundation. http://cacp.utsa.edu/faculty-and-staff/shelley-roff/

Mary Anne Hunting
Independent Scholar, NYC
“The Forgotten Art of Florence Hope Luscomb”in The Routledge Companion to Women in Architecture, ed. Anna Sokolina (Routledge, 2021)

Dr. Mary Anne Hunting is an architectural historian in New York City. She holds a PhD from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a master’s degree in the history of decorative arts from Parsons School of Design, NYC. She is recognized for her book, Edward Durell Stone: Modernism’s Populist Architect (W.W. Norton, 2013) and is co-author, with Dr. Kevin Murphy, of the book, Women Architects in Practice: Pathways in American Modernism (Princeton University Press, in progress).

Kevin D. Murphy
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN

Kevin D. Murphy, PhD, is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Humanities and professor and chair in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He is the author of books, articles, and edited volumes in European and American architecture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the coauthor, with Dr. Mary Anne Hunting, of Women Architects in Practice: Pathways in American Modernism (Princeton University Press, in progress).

Margaret Birney Vickery 
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Translations: Architecture/Art of Sigrid Miller Pollin (ORO Editions, 2020)

Meg Birney Vickery, PhD, is the recent author of Landscape and Infrastructure: Re-Imagining the Pastoral Paradigm for the 21st Century (2019) and (Translations) Architecture/Art: Works of Sigrid Miller Pollin (ORO Publications, 2020). She also has a chapter, “Collaborations: The Architecture and Art of Sigrid Miller Pollin” in The Routledge Companion to Women in Architecture (2021). Her first book, Buildings for Bluestockings: The Architecture and Social History of Women’s Colleges in Late Victorian England (2000), addressed the intersections of architecture, education, and gender. She is acting secretary-treasurer of the Women in Architecture Affiliate Group of the Society of Architectural Historians. At the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, she serves as lecturer and undergraduate program director. Recent courses include “Architecture Now: A History of Sustainable Architecture” and “Women in Architecture.”