Articles Tagged with ''women in architecture''

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 complexion of America’s architects has been a subject of introspection and discussion since at least 1968, when Whitney Young, Jr., president of the National Urban League, chastised attendees at the AIA’s national convention for the scarcity of African-American and women practitioners.

If you go by newspapers and monthly consumer magazines, you might think there is only one female architect designing significant buildings today—Zaha Hadid. To be sure, the London-based, Iraqi-born architect deserves acclaim for her inventive assortment of zoomy structures completed in the last few years. But what about the rest? Aren’t there other talented women architects out there, who, like Hadid, run their own design practices?