This debate, ‘On the Edge’: Is the Role of Women Changing in Architecture?, brings together practitioners and scholars of architectural design for a critical discussion on gender and architecture. The event accompanies Zaha Hadid: Reimagining London, an exhibition curated by The Courtauld MA Curating the Art Museum cohort in collaboration with the Zaha Hadid Foundation. The debate is hosted in collaboration with The Courtauld’s Research Forum.
Women architects often face marginalisation and exclusion in the male-dominated industry of Architecture. Statistical inequalities are constantly visible. Structural and institutional biases not only obstruct women architects’ career development but also deny the significance of their voices and practices. The marginalisation of women has fundamental impacts on the built space we occupy: ‘We live in the city of men’ (Leslie Kern, Feminist City, 2019).
Inspired by Zaha Hadid’s statement that ‘As a woman in architecture you’re always an outsider. It’s OK, I like being on the edge’, this debate will explore the ways in which women architects challenge the male-dominated field, and interrogate the existing definition of architecture. The discussion will consider the potential for more inclusive ways of thinking about architecture.
Organised by The Courtauld’s MA Curating the Art Museum cohort.
Chair:
Dr Emily Mann
Dr Emily Mann’s research centres on the relationship between visual culture and European expansion in the world through the growth of trading networks and territorial settlements, c.1550 to c.1800. At the same time as investigating historical processes and production, she is concerned with postcolonial/decolonial approaches and attitudes to empire’s material legacy. Her research to date has involved archival and field work in the Caribbean, North America, West Africa and India as well as Europe, and collaborative work with archaeologists and historians approaching the subject from other disciplinary perspectives.
Panellists
Ann de Graft-Johnson
Ann de Graft-Johnson is an educator, researcher and architect with particular focus on inclusive practice covering gender, culture, race and ethnicity, disability. Throughout her career she has worked for greater equality. From 1985 to 1996 she was a member/director of Matrix Feminist Cooperative. Matrix was nominated for the 2021 RIBA Royal Gold Medal. A Matrix archive has been set up. Ann has particularly been involved in advancing participatory and inclusive learning vehicles for students. She jointly runs a Live Project Design Studio where students work with real clients and communities who could not otherwise afford to resource their projects. (See: http://www.hands-on-bristol.co.uk/.)
Rim Kalsoum
Rim Kalsoum is a British Syrian architectural designer based in London. Co-founder of Muslim Women in Architecture, Rim completed her PART II at the University of Westminster where she was Vice President of the Westminster Architecture Society and currently serves as Visiting Lecturer/Tutor. She also works for Architecture Doing Place and is a researcher for Palestine Regeneration Team (PART). Her work arches from examining methods of urban landscape annihilation in conflict areas to erosions of public spaces.
Sarah Wigglesworth
Sarah Wigglesworth is director of her London-based architectural practice which she founded in 1994. Acknowledged as a pioneering influence in British Architecture, her practice works in the public sector and focuses on exploring ecological building solutions, for which it has won many awards. Sarah was granted the title Royal Designer for Industry in 2012 and awarded an MBE in 2003.
Thandi Loewenson
Thandi Loewenson is an architectural designer/researcher who mobilises design, fiction and performance to stoke embers of emancipatory political thought and fires of collective action, and to feel for the contours of other, possible worlds. Using fiction as a design tool and tactic, and operating in the overlapping realms of the weird, the tender, the earthly and the airborne, Thandi engages in projects which provoke questioning of the status-quo, whilst working with communities, policy makers, unions, artists and architects towards acting on those provocations. Thandi is a Tutor at the Royal College of Art, a co-curator of the platform Race, Space & Architecture and a co-foundress of architecture and research collectives Fiction, Feeling, Frame, and BREAK//LINE.
