She Stoops to Conquer

So I was going to write a “Love Letter to Dead Architect” today and then I realized that my letters generally lack subjects of the female persuasion and I felt I should address the issue.

Women and Architecture, it’s always a tough subject. As far as I can tell in the world of construction there are two kinds of negative male to female relationships.

Option #1: Listen Girly, I may want to bang you, but I’m certainly not going to take your advice seriously.

Option #2: Aww, look at you, all cute and build-y.

There are of course many different variations on this theme but it’s hard when you want to be taken seriously and you have to navigate the waters in-between objectification and patronizing advice. If we look at fields in which women have been involved a little longer, for example, Law. The solution to this problem presents itself in a two-fold process.

Step 1: Just be better than those who would judge you. Stay sharp and if you can’t beat someone with experience or technical knowledge, beat them with desire and energy. You can never expect someone to see you differently until you give them reason to. Whatever you do, try not to play into the stereotypes of either “bitch” or “bimbo”. Not to be too Machiavellian, but if you have to choose whether to be feared or loved, pick fear, pick respect. This does not mean going out of your way to act tough, real inner strength is much harder to come by and much kinder to those around them.

Step 2: Wait. Just wait. This may be harder to withstand, but attitudes and cultures are fluid and with Step 1 firmly in place, the mortal coil will be shed and the environment will change. It just takes time.

Step 2 may be really irritating but let’s remember; Women have only been in the field officially for about 40 years, so I think the biggest hurdle we have to overcome is not the attitude of the people we work with, as much is it our gender’s lack of precedent. Without any laurels to rest on, that means having a lot of work to do. Starting from scratch has both benefits and pitfalls. On the plus side, women can define themselves not as accessories to male architects, but as their own embodiments. On the downside, there’s going to be a lot of Gina Davis in “Fletch”-type branding. Women can be there, but they can’t be the star. The best to expect: a token example of diversity. The novelty of a female architect will fade only when they are equal in number to their male counterparts. But until then, the perception of strangeness has to tolerated, an extreme example of this is in Zaha Hadid.

Zaha has brought a lot positive strength to aspiring female architects, but I have to wonder: would she be the driving force she is if she was a man? Like many starchitects she relies too heavily on her own style until it’s almost self parody, and yet she remains unscathed from the kind of criticism that in continuously chucked at Frank Ghery, who does basically the same thing. Not that she doesn’t receive that kind of criticism, but it has a tendency to be played down.

When does being a woman, designing like a woman or thinking like a woman become a shield or a crutch?

Personally, while I think that women and men are wired differently from one another, I don’t think it changes how a building gets put together. Steel is still steel and brick is still brick. Men and women will do different things with them, and I’ve heard arguments that state there are clear differences in how the two genders design and it could be my own ignorance, but I just don’t see it.

Finally, there’s one more part I want to discuss for female architects, and that’s how to balance biological instinct vs. career. I hate to say it, but most of the female architects I respect are either woefully unmarried or defiantly single and don’t see that changing in the foreseeable future. Maybe something about buildings kills the desire to reproduce and that’s why there is so little desire to marry. Buildings, after all, are meant to last forever as a testament to human endeavor; children are less reliable and may just wind up hating you. Unfortunately, one thing is clear; neither of them calls as often as they should.

Point is, I don’t have an answer to any of these questions, but I think it’s an interesting couple of trends.


alternate title for this post:
All the Single Ladies. (Put a Roof On It)