Session Four: Feminism

Perhaps I should call this reading 'Post- Structuralist Feminism' or maybe just 'Women Writers' but both sound unfortunately inadequate. We shall at least approach the subject broadly, with two texts for you to choose between; Jane Rendell's chapter in Occupying Architecture (1998) 'doing it, (un) doing it, (over) doing it yourself- Rhetorics of Architectural Abuse' and Beatriz Colomina's 'The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism' from Sexuality and Space (1992). I suggest both mark a time when our pre-occupations rather shifted from making architecture to interpreting it, from production to consumption, aside from any feminist debate.

Above is that canonical picture of Carolyn Butterworth licking the Barcelona Pavillion in 1992, first published (to my knowledge) in Occupying Architecture.

I am keen to periodise these pieces within some concept of the history of the recent past, one where I cannot extricate myself from the proceedings. The current debate may well have moved on somewhere else entirely, and should be represented in the publication of 'A Gendered Profession' under the wing of the RIBA publications, to be launched at the RCA on 8th November this year.

Students intrigued by this reading might like to look at my blog: Architecture & Other Habits Too, where two consecutive posts, 'Serendipity' and 'Reading Between the Lines' concern themselves in some way with the texts by Jane Rendell and Beatriz Colomina respectively.