Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

   

   

Miho Hamaguchi (1915-1988) was the first woman to be a licensed architect in Japan. A pioneer in domestic design during the postwar period, she built and consulted on thousands of houses throughout her prolific career. However, she is a little-known figure both in Japan and in the international debate. Her representation in architectural historiography is limited to her influence on kitchen design, but her writings and work go far beyond. Hamaguchi's legacy is one of bold residential architecture that embodied democratic ideas in spatial configurations. She promoted the house as a fundamental tool for gender equality, leaving behind a feudal and patriarchal system. At the end of her career, she found in Costa del Sol the perfect place to carry out a residential project as a cultural exchange. "Kaiyo Club" became a set of three houses since the first design in 1974 until the subsequent extensions were completed in 1987. Throughout its different stages, the project shows a striking Spanish-Japanese transfer where different architectural languages coexist. The white-walled exterior dialogues with the vernacular, while its interior unfolds Japanese patterns with tatami-floored rooms or ofuro-style bathrooms. These dwellings present a unique hybrid materialization, displaying Hamaguchi's design from a humanistic stance, blending of locally rooted modernist spatial principles and reinterpreted traditions.

In developing a more inclusive architectural history, using oral history as a methodology for accessing silenced experiences, sharing forgotten knowledge, and transcending the drawn or build construct can be enlightening. It is possible by exploring a crucial but largely overlooked question: the role of the interview in architectural practice —not interviews of architects but interviews by architects—. In particular, the interview Relearning from Las Vegas (2000), conducted by Rem Koolhaas in collaboration with Hans Ulrich Obrist to Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. It is no coincidence that Koolhaas's beginnings as an interviewer took place at the Haagse Post, with editing processes that were a tool for assembling transcripts focused on the unpopular as a critical exercise. The edited orality allows him to redesign the character, emphasize what interests him, and eliminate what does not build the desired profile. Revalue some of Scott Brown's answers means providing an essayistic and speculative value to the spoken and informal content as a legitimate source to vindicate contributions of the interviewee. These editorial practices will contrast positions by entering into the slippery territories of a discipline that evades an outspoken realism to face the future with some critical stance.

Compared to other places, the province of Alicante is an exceptional case in the Spanish architectural scene at the end of the 20th century for both the quantity and the quality of women’s works. Well-known Alicante-based architects and internationally renowned female authors come together in this area, all of them working as a team, as a duo, but also on their own, in the most diverse disciplines and scales, from landscaping to interior design, from urban facilities to residential architecture. This article focuses on a particularly effervescent period in the construction of the (post)modernist identity of the Alicante coastline, the decade of 1990, which was crucial in the definition of both of the ways of doing and the accounts that explain or have forgotten the contribution of women to the development of the local architectural culture. The objective is triple: first a historiographic criticism of that moment from gender and generation perspectives; secondly, a cartography of women architects and their practices; and, finally, the analysis of some projects exposing differential features in their production. To do so, this paper investigates the case of the only two architects who, at the time, were already practicing alone in Alicante, Lola Alonso and Carmen Rivera. Such an inquiry reveals the parameters of an obstinate exercise of bitextuality, that is, of appropriation of the androcentric discourse, but also their unquestionable commitment to architecture.

Within the Spanish territory, the distant location of the Canary Islands poses an additional problem for the visibility of the work of its women architects. This article carries out analysis with a gender perspective on the professional context of women architects from the Canary Islands in the years following the Franco regime. The remoteness and island nature of the territory brought with it peculiarities which affected the way in which its professionals were trained, caused changes derived from the formation of the autonomous regions and led the professional association of architects of the Canary Islands to drive certain initiatives in a bid to promote discipline. These initiatives include the publication of the Basa journal (1982-2008) and the Manuel Oráa Architecture Prize, which marked a window of opportunity for recognition of women architects from the Canary Islands. The early careers of Magüi González and Maribel Correa, who graduated during the Transition, are useful for evaluating their thoughts on the idea of the architectural project and carrying out metacritical analysis on the way in which some of their work was received within the discourse of the prevailing narratives of the time.

In June 1955, several reviews were published in Madrid in magazines and newspapers about an exhibition of watercolors at the Biosca galleries. The author has an unknown name: Lois Langhorst; and the watercolor presented a marked and innovative abstract character. Among the names of the artists who exhibited in this gallery they hardly appear foreigners. The story behind this exhibition takes us to the construction of the American bases in Spain and from there to the trajectory of one of the pioneering American woman architects in the profession. This article aims to clarify the unknowns that this exhibition presents, delving into the complexity of being a female architect at the time. It seeks to expose Lois Langhorst's stay in Spain and the contacts that she and her husband, Frederick Langhorst, had with Spanish society in mid-century Madrid.

This paper explores the role of women’s struggle within residents’ movements in the production and transformation of space in Porto during the PREC (the Portuguese Revolutionary Process of 1974-1976), analysing the spaces where these movements started, the issues they focused on, and how it related and acted within explicit and implicit views of family and gender relations in institutional approaches to housing development. It also considers how these were mirrored in housing policy options and design paradigms. In this way, by shifting the focus to women’s struggle at the grassroots, looking at those who were both the recipients of houses and actors of an ongoing struggle, this research explores the intersection between class and gender in the processes of housing and urban development.

The paper explores the meaning of social architecture based on the analysis of the thought and work of the Barcelona-based architect Itziar González Virós (1967). The main aim consists of reflecting on the characteristics of design of processes focused on democratic construction of space from a double valence: on the one hand from the affinities with feminist thought, on the other, from the identification of feminine leadership traits. Based on the case study justification and the methodological approach, two architect’s career key projects are presented to exemplify social architecture practices: “Another Lesseps square is possible” (2002) and “Les Rambles” (2017-2018). The discussion on social architecture will continue to scrutinize the mentioned double valence through reflections on design towards egalitarian forms of relationship; the agency capacity to accompany change; community value as a key element; and the barriers and potentials derived from feminine leadership traits. Thus, it concludes with the review and nuance of the initially raised hypotheses about the notion of social architecture.

The architect Karola Bloch, who was working for the Deutsche Bauakademie in the GDR after World War II, aimed to meet the goal of gender equality according to socialist principles by realising numerous crèches and kindergartens through the development of schematic plans and guidelines for building construction. For the newly founded socialist state of the GDR, this was a way to free women from domestic unpaid care work in order to integrate them into wage-earning labour, which was considered crucial for women to become equal members of society. The implementation of a nationwide network of childcare centres via typification and standardisation promised to realise these ambitious goals quickly and cost-effectively.