Breaking Ground on a Theory of Transgender Architecture

An essay which addresses and identifies the issues of gendered segregation, feminism, space and architecture. The aim is to understand whether spaces create borderlines between men and women or do we as humans create them - political, social, cultural or historical. The essay draws attention to the crisis and subsequent victories of patriarchy within the twentieth-century design school, Bauhaus after the First World War. To be able to the “gendering of architecture” although it is difficult to pin-point as the ideologies with architecture itself embodies the status gender-free. I will be evaluating social theorists, marxists, marxist feminists as well as feminist to further support my argument. The emphasis of this essay is to identity the different spatial arrangement in a workplace or educational places where typical female and male working spaces contribute towards gender stratification. How is gender sustained in architecture, despite its direct correlation with patriarchy? How architecture is embedded within gender? Why are spaces defined/framed as “feminine” or “masculine”?

Humanities Diliman, 2007

The notion of masculine hegemony is putatively ingrained in society. The maintenance of patriarchal ideology sends ripples in the production of spaces, particularly in architecture and urban planning. Architecture is consummated by organizing and articulating meaningless Euclidean space to accommodate human habitation and insertion of existential meanings. Hence, architecture transcends the neutrality of geometrically determined and physically defined structure and enclosure to become a site of lived life, where cultural processes, gender transactions, and modus of sexual desire are continually enacted.

architecturaltheory.txt , 2020

Architecture and the Dialectic of Sex deals with the overall question if a feminist architecture does, or respectively, even can exist. Can there be such a thing, or would it remain a mere pipe dream? Within her research, Bettina Siegele connects various concepts and thoughts from the discourse of feminism with architecture, starting with the work of the material feminists at the beginning of the 20th century, across the work of the GDR architect Karola Bloch, and reaching the contemporary discourse through xenofeminism. http://txt.architecturaltheory.eu/?p=2921&lang=en

There are many possible definitions among which to choose with the aim of explaining the significance of architecture being, fortunately, all of them valid as architecture is a broad- meaning field depending on the perception that every single person experiments from it, either as a user or as the creator. "Space (s)" could be one of the chosen words to describe what the meaning of architecture is as briefly as possible; understanding it as surfaces, heights, volumes, communications and the place where lives are developed. But is there space in architecture for the equality of those who dedicate to it or are we facing a clear example of discrimination in both a personal and professional way?

"Sex and the Single Building," is a 20 th -century architectural-history seminar on gender, sexuality, and space. The main intention is to explore a series of real places in which diverse body/space relationships are played out. Our starting point will be the study of highly-charged sites of sexuality: houses, bath houses, spas, hotels, shops, and even university campuses, as well as spaces of specialized body care, such as hospitals, beauty salons, and gymnasia. Students will learn how to analyze space through primary-source documentation and fieldwork, while assessing a range of readings on sexuality and space. Interdisciplinary scholars with expertise in prostitution, gendered space, lesbian urban life, and "maintenance architecture" will be as special guests. Our perspective in the course draws from a feminist architectural history that takes a revolutionary approach to architectural objects and producers. A core aspect of our research method is to understand...

Women Architects and Politics Intersections between Gender, Power Structures and Architecture in the Long 20th Century, 2022

urges a "radical rethinking" of the practice of architecture, away from a knowledge-based endeavor fixated on individual accomplishment, novelty, the dictates of capital and systems of oppressive hierarchies, to one that holds dear the disvalued, "racialized and sexualized" labor of preserving and nurturing life, or "care" work, as a professional paradigm. By extension, 10 Darling/Walker (2017).

How can we challenge the fundamental male dominance in the building industry (that is, as the architecture profession becomes more gender balanced, the building industry at large is characterised by inertia and nontransparent structures), and what could be the result of a balanced field of practice and production? How is a feminist architecture to develop responsible and caring approaches to transforming/making the world in such a way that it will welcome and host all living beings and all existing, imaginable and still-to-beinvented forms of life? Is a nomadic feminist practice that actually affirms different notions of spatiality and subjectivities possible within architectural practice? There is an urgent need for “rethinking the social in architecture” in late modernistic housing areas. In relationship to that I’m interested in posing the question of how feministic city planning could develop a method not only involving the citizens in social pre-studies, but bringing the process further into the design- and conventional planning phase? There is a need for new types of social places that could change the public sphere, that in many examples are dominated by men – but certainly not are attractive to women. Women do not have time to spend in public; they are occupied in domestic life. Is it possible to create ‘hybrid’ spaces with another type of necessary actives, taking more important roles in everyday life in comparison to cafés, shops etc.? One example is Stepwells in India. Could we mix playgrounds with restaurants, laundry with cafés? Or could we take this spatial challenge even further? Could a method be developed to give a strong motif that collaboration between feminism and architecture generates an important tool for “rethinking the social in architecture”?

Deleted Journal, 2017

was held at KTH School of Architecture, Stockholm, between the 17 th to 19 th November in 2016. The conference gathered around 200 participants and included over a hundred paper presentations and performances, as well as two exhibitions. The overwhelming interest in reviving the feminist discourse in architecture gave us the opportunity to reflect on the process of becoming feminist architects. Becoming a feminist architect is a complex process, rife with strategies, tactics, frictions, advances and retreats, that will continue to engage us in the future as it does now. This became clear through the presentations of a wide range of different feminist architectural practices, both historical and contemporary, their diverse theoretical underpinnings and methodological reflections and speculations. The present publication assembles a series of vital discussions that emerged at the event, including accounts of careful and creative ways of becoming feminist architects by "knowing and doing otherwise," 2 "practising 'otherwise'," 3 or doing architecture in other ways, 4 the implication of which is a rethinking and expansion of the conventional scope of architectural practice. With these three publications -this edition of Field Journal, the Architecture and Culture issue "Styles of Queer Feminist Practices and Objects," and the anthology Architecture and Feminisms: Ecologies, Economies, Technologies -we have made an effort to create space for as many of the voices and positions present at the conference as possible. This issue presents a number of practices, as well as processes of formation, taking into account personal becomings and individual actions, and embracing the "dirty resilience" 5 of collaboration, which refuses to be purified into neat categories or binaries. Instead, we have

Architecture and Feminisms, 2017

Set against the background of a 'general crisis' that is environmental, political and social, this book examines a series of specific intersections between architecture and feminisms, understood in the plural. The collected essays and projects that make up the book follow transversal trajectories that criss-cross between ecologies, economies and technologies, exploring specific cases and positions in relation to the themes of the archive, control, work and milieu. This collective intellectual labour can be located amidst a worldwide depletion of material resources, a hollowing out of political power and the degradation of constructed and natural environments. Feminist positions suggest ways of ethically coping with a world that is becoming increasingly unstable and contested. The many voices gathered here are united by the task of putting critical concepts and feminist design tools to use in order to offer experimental approaches to the creation of a more habitable world. Drawing inspiration from the active archives of feminist precursors, existing and re-imagined, and by way of a re-engagement in the histories, theories and projected futures of critical feminist projects, the book presents a collection of twenty-three essays and eight projects, with the aim of taking stock of our current condition and re-engaging in our precarious environment-worlds.

Teaching Design for Values: Concepts, Tools & Practices, 2022

Historically, the work of white Western male architects has dominated architectural history education. In recent decades a large body of scholarship has attempted to critically question this, highlighting and subverting mainstream disciplinary values, which are informed by gendered, racial, classist, and colonial biases. This chapter explores the process of addressing the methodologically and epistemologically gendered blind spots that reinforce structural inequality in the academy. We reflect on our experiences developing two interlinked Architectural History courses on the MSc Architecture, Urbanism and Building Sciences between 2019 and 2021 at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). The chapter explores the challenge of introducing traditionally marginalised forms of architectural knowledge-such as ones coming from feminist theory-within an existing institutional framework, while also interrogating the essential acts of collaboration between students, researchers, and teachers that take place in the process.