We Have Looked for 4,000 Years; Now We Have Seen!

Join SAH's Women in Architecture affiliate group for a special event celebrating Women's History Month.

Date: Mar 27, 2025

Location:

United States Online webinar

March 27, 2025, 11:00 AM–12:30 PM (CST). 
Join via Zoom

Meeting ID: 852 5945 1814

In her 1970 manifesto Female Revolt, art critic Carla Lonzi underscores a pivotal shift: women, no longer confined to the role of passive observers, break free as active protagonists capable of charting new directions for the present and the future. “We have looked for 4,000 years; now we have seen!”, she announced.

SAH's Women in Architecture affiliate group invite researchers, scholars, and practitioners to a special event exploring how women embraced the transformative shift from passive “looking” to active “seeing” critically interrogating their roles in reshaping architectural narratives. Panelists examine the multifaceted ways in which women—writers, historians, theorists, editors, curators, directors, archivists—have redefined the way we discuss, interpret, and see architecture.

Presentations without temporal or geographical restrictions address the following themes: the efforts by women to confront and disrupt canonical and dominant historical narratives; the impact of feminist paradigms on historiography through approaches based on difference, equality, constructionist and intersectional thinking; the redefinition of authorship and authority within architectural histories; the expansion of the architecture canon to include diverse and pluralistic voices. We are particularly interested in understanding how these objectives have been pursued through both public and uncredited roles, disseminated through varied and unconventional outputs (such as exhibitions, anthologies, autobiographical publications, personal journals, etc.). Contributions explore individual or collective initiatives, and the subversive use of sources (oral histories, archives) to revolt against established norms and narratives. Ultimately, we seek examples that demonstrate the possibility of “seeing” as a critical project, able to guide us through the redefinition of what it means “architecture” today.

Session Chairs: 

• Silvia Groaz PhD, EPFL 2021, ENSA Paris-EST, Université de Liège
• Bianca Felicori, author, curator, UC Louvain
• Beatrice Lampariello PhD, EPFL 2013, UC Louvain

Moderator: Rebecca Siefert PhD, SAH WiA AG Associate Chair

Introduction by Anna Sokolina PhD, SAH WiA AG Founding Chair

Speakers: 

• Anne Massey, School of Architecture and Design at the University for the Creative Arts, Canterbury
• Léa-Catherine Szacka,University of Manchester
• Women Writing Architecture Editors Helen Thomas, Emilie Appercé, Jaehee Shin, Estelle Gagliardi.
  

This program is presented by the SAH Women in Architecture Affiliate Group. Please consider joining SAH as a member to contribute to this group. Learn more at sah.org/membership. 

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Presentations

Behind the Scene. Anne Massey

This presentation explores the agency of women in architecture, the ways in which history can be rewritten with women at the centre. It begins with an account of my mother, who fulfilled the role of architect’s wife before seeking a divorce and finding her own career as a museum professional. She was the inspiration behind my book, Women in Design (Thames & Hudson, 2022) where I not only explored women as architects in their own right, but also the problems of the designer couple for women’s visibility in history. The book challenges the star architect phenomena, where women are celebrated as lone creative geniuses, equal to men, by looking at women who worked behind the scenes. This then leads to a consideration of the first Director of the ICA, Dorothy Morland, who worked tirelessly and anonymously to establish and enhance the careers of architects and writers such as Alison and Peter Smithson, Reyner Banham and members of Archigram. I then finish with a mention of my two latest projects, Craft-Design: Women’s Empowerment in the Global South and the intersection between the working-class avant-garde and gender in post-war London at the ICA.

Crossed Histories: Gae Aulenti, Ada Louise Huxtable and Phyllis Lambert on Architecture and the City. Léa-Catherine Szacka

Gae Aulenti (1927–2012), Ada Louise Huxtable (1921–2013) and Phyllis Lambert (b. 1927) evolved in different contexts—one in Europe, the other two in North America—but belonged to the same generation. Born in the 1920s, roughly a century ago, they were from ‘families that allowed a liberal education and prepared them to grow into professional careers whose profiles they could invent themselves’. Reimagining what architecture could be and working in environments where they were not expected, these women were able to innovate and break the glass ceiling. Their agency on architecture and the city can be distilled through three common threads across their otherwise diverse paths. First, all three women were active during the shift between modernism and postmodernism and adopted an ambivalent position, a nuance that characterized their modus operadi; second, they had a common sensibility towards history and have been, in one way or the other, instrumental in the debate over building conservation; third, they all shared a belief in the need for public engagement in the creation of the city—both through public spaces and through public voices. Using these three lines of inquiry, this presentation explores the professional and personal trajectories of three pioneers of the XX century to challenge canonical architectural and urban historiographies of the postwar period and writes women back into history.

Women Writing Architecture. Helen Thomas, Emilie Appercé, Jaehee Shin, Estelle Gagliardi

Women Writing Architecture (wwa) operates as a collective effort to redefine architectural discourse through a feminist, community-driven approach to creating an annotated bibliography. Historically, architectural writing has been shaped by a dominant, patriarchal voice, one that privileges singular authorship, institutional validation, and hierarchical knowledge production. In contrast, wwa seeks to gather sources from a wide field without prejudice, in a method that relies on recommendation rather than self-promotion as a measure of value and validity. Three representatives of the editorial team will reflect critically on the possibility of wwa’s transformative impact as an ongoing and evolving process. The presentation begins with an exploration of the platform’s origins and intention to seek an alternative, not a replacement, to established narratives while fostering encouragement and opportunity for under-represented voices in architecture. Addressing the role of friendship and collaboration as feminist methodologies, we will consider how collective authorship, and shared discourses create new forms of value and meaning. Finally, an examination of the granular process of inviting contributors and curating texts will show how the slow, deliberate craft of shared learning enables the active practice of ‘seeing’ and reimagining what it means to write and to be seen in architecture practice today.

We express our gratitude for support to the Society of Architectural Historians for providing the SAH Google Platform for Affiliate Groups, and to Christopher Kirbabas, SAH Director of Programs, for continuous support of our Virtual events.