Architect Judith Edelman, 91, died on October 4, in New York City where she left a profound mark, both on the built environment and as a role model for younger women architects.
Celebrating design leadership in a culture of collaboration. Recently we've seen, in print and online, a reprise of old debates about starchitects. The critic Witold Rybczynski complained that big-name architects don't design their best work in cities that are foreign to them, because they don't understand the context. He proposed turning to local architects, whom he called “locatects.” Not long afterward, the architect and Yale professor Peggy Deamer wrote to The New York Times, arguing that several high-profile architects, through news coverage of various controversies, were giving architecture a bad name.
For several months now, we've been reaching out to architects to talk about the status of women in the profession. Even before the Architects' Journal published its scathing survey of how women in architecture are treated in the U.K.—and well before two students at Harvard's Graduate School of Design launched their petition to pressure the Pritzker Prize committee to recognize architect and planner Denise Scott Brown, who was excluded from the 1991 award bestowed on her partner, Robert Venturi—we had begun to report on the inequities that persist in the field.
In the 45 years since Denise Scott Brown came on the scene, female architects have come a long way. Or have they? An essay by Sarah Williams Goldhagen investigates the serious obstacles that remain.
In the 45 years since Denise Scott Brown came on the scene, female architects have come a long way. Or have they? An essay by Sarah Williams Goldhagen investigates the serious obstacles that remain.
What began as architects Catherine Johnson and Rebecca Rudolph’s provocative response to the question “What is architecture?,” posed by the American Institute of Architects Los Angeles chapter as part of a 2010 competition, became the ethos of the duo’s collaboration: “It is design, bitches” was their answer.
Nearly 200 women converged on New Haven in early December for the first ever reunion of Yale Women in Architecture. They came from as far away as Taiwan for two days of discussions about education, careers, families, satisfactions, disappointments, and aspirations.
We may be in the era of the end of men (as recent headlines and Atlantic writer Hanna Rosin’s zeitgeisty book suggest), but it’s hard to imagine that the field of architecture will ever run out of them. Though roughly 41 percent of U.S. architecture students are women, they account for only about 17 percent of firm principals and partners, according to a membership study by the American Institute of Architects.
Architecture isn’t always an equal opportunity profession. Later this month, the Pritzker Architecture Prize will be awarded to the Chinese architect Wang Shu at a ceremony in Beijing. It’s an exciting choice—though it’s worth noting that the prize did not include Lu Wenyu, his wife and architectural partner in the firm they founded together, Amateur Architecture Studio, in Hangzhou.
The University of Pennsylvania plans to announce today that Marilyn Jordan Taylor, FAIA, a long-time partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, will be the new dean of its School of Design.