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

Expanding Agency: Women, Race and the Dissemination of Modern Architecture is a five-year research project funded by a European Research Council Advanced Grant. It explores the role that women and members of ethnic minorities, primarily African Americans, played in transmitting modern architecture and design internationally between 1920 and 1970.  Strands devoted to patronage, journalism, entrepreneurship, and institution building offer alternatives to accounts that focus primarily on architects. This approach expands our understanding of who had agency in this important story and more generally in shaping the built environment. Taking a global view that stresses comparisons across continents also helps build a more nuanced history of how architecture, landscape architecture, interior decoration, and the design of furnishing were transformed by new ideas that emanated from a multiplicity of sources.  This in turn can help support a more diverse profession that, in the wake of #metoo and Black Lives Matter, is better prepared to engage with a broad public, including to address such social challenges as sustainability and the integration of migrants.

“To write women back into history”, is an often-used phrase in recent feminist discourse. More and more scholars work to increase the visibility of those women who took charge of design projects in the recent and not so recent past. While crucial, such efforts are, in the paradox way of how privilege works, to an extent counterproductive: presenting these women (and other, historically marginalised figures) as exceptions from the rule – as eccentric trailblazers  - implies the majority of their female (or Black, indigenous, queer, other ...) contemporaries had no influence within (white, male) architectural practices. This position paper argues that we also need to look for other practices that enabled women (and others) in greater numbers to gain agency. Writing is one such practice: the recording of experience, critiques, and instructions to appropriate the designed, ascribing meaning to architectures and landscapes. Locating architectural agency in a practice that, while presuming some privilege, was much more open to marginalised groups than that of the architect, enables us to look at the past more inclusively: to write gendered histories that open up spaces for those that were there, in fact.

The award-winning Spanish architect and educator Izaskun Chinchilla exemplifies the focus of this special issue of Zarch about Women, feminist practices, and alternative practitioners in architecture. On December 28, 2021, co-editors Lucía C. Pérez-Moreno and Ann E. Komara interviewed Chinchilla. The following essay presents that conversation, edited for clarity and flow, highlighting their discussion of key thematic topics in this issue.  

María Auxiliadora Gálvez PérezDescampados. Caminar los paisajes revolucionarios en la ciudad somáticaMadrid: Ediciones Asimétricas, 2022. 160 pp. Softcover. Language: Spanish. 25 €ISBN: 978-84-19050-21-2

Finland lived, in the 1920s and 1930s, through an ephemeral time of peace and enthusiastic ideas in which it began to forge itself as a modern nation. Its borders still unstable, the country used its landscape as a social unifier and an element of national identity. Finland’s incipient welfare state, institutionalised holidays and the democratised consumer goods encouraged a new leisure lifestyle in natural settings. This article studies the recreational housing programme that responded to that demand. The new typology, later called mökki in Finland, was developed during the rise of Nordic functionalism (funkkis in Finnish) – the revision of the romantic villa and the traditional rural housing model, together with the emergence of prefabrication techniques. Among the architectural competitions and drawing albums published on the subject, this article studies the competition run by the Enso-Gutzeit paper company in 1932. Other studies have analysed this competition from constructive, stylistic or historical perspectives. This paper provides a different view by explaining that the competition was a testing ground where one of modern Finnish architecture’s distinctive features was forged: tuning into a constructed idea of nature. This fact is revealed through a graphical analysis of the competition’s proposals, as well as through the incipient personal traits in the work of the promising, young Finnish architects who participated in the competition.

The story of public housing in Chicago, and the rest of the United States for that matter, tends to fixate on negative images of housing projects built between c. 1940-1960, like Cabrini-Green or Wentworth Gardens. Now that so many of the buildings have been demolished (or “redeveloped”) and scholars, institutions, and the general public have begun to untangle the complexity of the history of public housing in the U.S., it is time to move beyond the damaging narratives and negative imagery to better understand how women persevered and adapted to ensure they and their families not only had basic needs met, but also had access to safe spaces, key facilities, and opportunities for community-building, joy, and pride in their home. This paper explores connections between issues of architecture and the impact of women on the design and reform of Cabrini-Green, Wentworth Gardens, and other key examples, to demonstrate how women residents helped shape the built environment of public housing in Chicago through organizing, activism, and the appropriation of space based on everyday needs and use. Through an analysis of photographs documenting the interiors of Cabrini-Green and using a theoretical framework that combines feminist theorist bell hooks’ notion of the ‘homeplace’ as a ‘site of resistance’ (1990) with architectural historian Dell Upton’s concept of the ‘cultural landscape’ (1991), this paper proposes that we modify our current definition of an “Architect” and in fact consider these public housing residents ‘architects of their own homeplace’.

Nature plays a prominent role in Fuencarral's Programmed Settlement, enriching the remarkable architecture conceived by José Luis Romany in 1956. The neighborhood, designed by the architect at the beginning of his professional career, reflects well his vital moment, by combining the sensitivity developed when he studied in situ the gardens of Granada, with the rationality, the economy or the constructive precision of the social housing projects developed  with the design team of Hogar del Empleado building company (CBHE). The conception of the neighborhood, fundamentally a pedestrian island with single-family houses inside, surrounded by a sinuous perimeter road around which the linear blocks of houses are arranged, led to working on two different scales in the use of vegetation. The patios of the single-family houses established a spatial continuity between interior and exterior, made easier the adaptation of the new neighbors from rural world to urban world and facilitated the transition with the space of the street and its appropriation, in the Mediterranean way. The trees of the neighborhood not only fulfilled a landscaping work, but also “instrumental”, optimizing the energy balance of the block housing. Pavements and stone retaining walls helped to single out the public space and enrich the neighborhood's great vegetal heritage, an urban nature whose lessons are still valid.

A very common theme in the architecture of northern Portugal is paying attention to the relationship with the place and with nature. Some of the early works by Távora, Siza and Souto de Moura allow a lecture on inherited approaches, either shared, adapted or reconverted, which exemplify the evolution of architecture in this theme in the second half of the twentieth century. To this end, we are going to talk about nature appropriation in both physical and cultural terms, and about the appropriate both from the point of view of what is proper and of what has become one's own. In this journey, we will see how Távora synthesises tradition and modern architecture in the Ofir house, starting from the conditions of the natural surroundings as parameters that adjust the compositional tools of architecture when it comes to appropriating the place. We will also see how Siza takes up the notion of a fragment of enclosed nature that delimits an exterior space with the precise conditions for the gaze and the relationship with the interior, in which the precision of the geometry and the exact positioning in the territory are fundamental for the appropriation of nature. And finally, we will see how Souto de Moura transforms these approaches from a pragmatic operative of the appropriation of a delimited and predefined natural space, also including the ruin as an available natural material with which to work.

The prehistorics structures documented in the Parcela 5 of the site “La Orden-Seminario” of Huelva are set chronologically in the transitionNeolithic- Chalcolithic(final IV Millennium- early III millennium BP). This phase is the first of occupation that’s stated inside the site La Orden-Seminario of Huelva and it’s outlined as oneof the most important of the zone, as much for its area as for the condition of preservation that present the deposits and located structures.