Hip Hop + Architecture as Design Justice - Open Call for Submissions
COVID-19 has challenged everyone to re imagine how we will use spaces in a post-Covid-19 society. How will movie theatres operate, what about hospitals, universities, and concert halls? Will live sports allow fans in the stands again? Will employees work from home on a permanent basis, if so, what changes are needed to our homes?
These are all valid questions and explorations and coupled with the consistent injustices faced by African Americans, we challenge everyone to think about a new question. How will spaces look in a Just City? A city which has defeated and dismantled racism? What tools will help us get there?
Michael Ford, The Hip Hop Architect calls Hip Hop, the Post Occupancy Evaluation of Modernism. Meaning, hip hop, especially its music is a critique of the environment. But not only does the music critique the built environment, with a careful ear you can hear lyrical references of future spaces, places, and objects which empower and enable black communities to overcome the current injustices faced in the built environment, including education disparities, environmental injustices and police brutality.
This Open Call for Submissions anticipates submissions in various mediums including, but not limited to drawings, songs, models, mobile app concepts, poems, fashion concepts, technological advances, products, etc. all aimed at displaying a Just City. A City which has defeated and dismantled racism. All proposals are welcome, from the most utopian to the most realistic.
Judges:
Michael Ford - Assoc. AIA, NOMA - The Hip Hop Architecture Camp
Eryk “The Arch-E-Tech” Christian - The Hip Hop Architecture Camp
Woodrow Hoffer - The Hip Hop Architecture Camp
Antoine Bryant - Assoc. AIA, NOMA - Moody Nolan
Pascale Sablan AIA, NOMA - S9 Architects / Beyond The Built
Jason Pugh, AIA, NOMA - Gensler
Camille Mitchell, OAA MRAIC, Gensler / Building Equity in Architecture Toronto
MORE INFORMATION MAY BE FOUND HERE
About Hip Hop Architecture:
The Hip Hop Architecture Camp® uses hip hop culture as a catalyst to introduce underrepresented youth to architecture, urban planning and design.
RAIC EP Open Meeting by the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada
The RAIC Emerging Practitioners Committee invites architectural students, interns, and recently licensed architects to its Open Meeting. The RAIC EP Open Meeting is an opportunity for discussions and information sharing on topics related to emerging practitioners. We look forward to your participation!
The meeting will be conducted over Zoom. For detailed information and instructions on how to access Zoom on various devices and a video tutorial, click here.
A pre-event email with the Zoom link and additional details will be sent to registered participants. Only registered participants will be given access to the room.
Date: Saturday, June 13, 2020
Time: 1:00pm - 3:00pm (EDT)
Canada-Wide Schedule by Time Zone
Pacific: 10 am - 12 pm
Mountain: 11 am - 1 pm
Central: 12 pm - 2 pm
East: 1 pm - 3 pm
Atalntic: 2 pm - 4 pm
Newfoundland: 2:30 pm - 4:30 pm
Location: Online Event
What to Do at IDS Toronto 2020 featuring Vineetha
BEAT Retrospective
A learning experience, Building Equality in Architecture Toronto (BEAT) will look back on their nearly 5 years of serving the cause of equality through architecture. For those who are wondering about how built environments can serve the functioning of community and democracy, this “learning lab” is suggested. According to their website, the organization aims to increase the visibility of women and minorities in the design field through networking events, and perhaps their IDS talk will serve a similar function for those interested in continuing to diversify and strengthen this industry.
Meet the 2020 IDS Contract curatorial team!
The Interior Design Show is Canada’s design fair. Since the doors first opened in 1999, IDS has been visited by over 700,000 design professionals, design-savvy consumers and media. It has served as a design industry hub providing a unique and unrivalled business opportunity for thousands of design-driven businesses. Each year, world-renowned designers and architects participate as keynote speakers and create inspiring feature exhibits. Located in the city of Toronto, Canada’s economic engine, IDS provides an annual catalyst for millions of dollars spent on design and has positioned Toronto as a frontrunner in the global design scene.
Last year IDS Toronto expanded to include IDS Contract, a hyper-curated exposition and trade platform focused on all verticals of design, including workplace, healthcare, hospitality, retail, education, public space, and government. This exciting 2.5-day B2B interactive addresses the future of design in a more in-depth, business-focused space while complimenting the overall energy of the fair. This year's IDS Contract curatorial team will include Joanne Chan, Kelly Cray and BEAT Executive Camille Mitchell!
More information about the show may be found be found here:
https://toronto.interiordesignshow.com/en/home.html
![BEAT Executive Member, Ramona Adlakha co-edits "Women [RE]Build: Stories, Polemics, Futures"](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66c293855b783b51968a9735/1724027863522-ICG3G9D5DJHWVU25L42L/Ramona%2BAdlakha%2BLinkedIN%2B-%2BIL1_8023.jpg)
BEAT Executive Member, Ramona Adlakha co-edits "Women [RE]Build: Stories, Polemics, Futures"
BEAT is pleased to introduce Women [RE]Build: Stories, Polemics, Futures (Applied Research + Design, ORO editions), co-edited by BEAT Executive Member, Ramona Adlakha.
Published by ORO Editions/AR+D, Women Re[Build] discusses contemporary, topical, and important subjects related to gender, architectural education, and practice. It includes original essays and four interviews/conversations with leading international practitioners, educators, and feminist scholars including BEAT advisory member Shirley Blumberg. The majority of contributions are in the nature of position statements and advocacy. While the voices are diverse, the overall tone is intentionally polemical and activist; the editors believe that such a book is much needed in our field today and that this sense of urgency distinguishes it from contemporary and previous publications by and about women architects.
Women [Re]Build: Stories, Polemic, Futures is exemplary in its mission to combine in one resource reflections on the renewal of feminist thought in architecture (Framing Stories), challenges to practice made possible by activism (Shaping Polemics), and portrayals of inspiring practitioners who pave the way for future women architects (Building Futures). The goal of this edited book is to increase the visibility and voice of women who everyday challenge the definition and practice of architecture. Women [Re]Build gathers words and projects of leading women thinkers, activists, designers, and builders who have dared to ask, “where are the women?” Where are the women whose architectural work should be celebrated and recognized for its courage and impact; who have cultivated female leadership while challenging the very principles of the discipline they represent; and who’ve asked the most difficult and rigorous of questions of those who build their visions?
About the authors:
Ramona Adlakha currently lives in Toronto and practices architecture at Diamond Schmitt Architects. She was born in Calcutta, India, speaks five languages and has been lucky enough to call multiple places across the globe her home. Ramona holds a Master of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania where she co-founded Penn Women in Architecture (PWIA), received the Alpha Ro Chi Medal for professional merit and the William Melhorn Scholarship in architectural history and theory. Ramona holds a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture, Fine Art and Literary Studies from the University of Toronto where she was the recipient of the Government of Canada’s Millennium Provincial Laureate scholarship awarded for exhibited excellence in community involvement, innovation, and leadership. Ramona is an executive member of Building Equality in Architecture Toronto (BEAT) – a national movement across Canada promoting equity in design, a board member of the Penn-Wharton Club of Toronto and a LEED accredited professional. Ramona is deeply committed to promoting the incidence and visibility of women in design.
Ramune Bartuskaite holds a Masters of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture with a minor in Marketing from Miami University. During her studies, she also had the privilege of participating in exchange programs in Copenhagen, Denmark and the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, U.K. At Penn, she co-founded Penn Women in Architecture (PWIA) and was a recipient of the Alpha Rho Chi Medal for leadership, willing service, and promise of professional merit. She practices architecture at JKRP Architects in Philadelphia and serves as Chief Creative Director of Rise First—a non-profit for first—generation students. She is actively involved in the Philadelphia Urban Land Institute (ULI) and Philadelphia’s Green Building United. She hopes to be an advocate for more equitable, diverse and inclusive development within our cities.
Dr. Franca Trubiano is associate professor in Architecture at Weitzman School of Design of the University of Pennsylvania and a registered architect with l’Ordre des Architectes du Québec. Her research on “Fossil Fuels, the Building Industry, and Human Health” is sponsored by the Kleinman Energy Center. Her edited book Design and Construction of High-Performance Homes: Building Envelopes, Renewable Energies and Integrated Practice (Routledge Press, 2012), was translated into Korean and winner of the 2015 Sejong Outstanding Scholarly Book Award. She is presently completing a manuscript Building Theories (Routledge) which challenges late 20th-century definitions and practices of architectural theory. Franca was president of the Building Technology Educators Society (BTES) (2015); and a member of the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE) (2013-2016).
Other Contributors
Joan Ockman, Ila Berman, Mary McLeod, Despina Stratigakos, Marion Weiss, Sadie Morgan, Samantha Hardingham, Manijeh Verghese, Lori Brown, Julie Moskovitz, Annelise Pitts, Shirley Blumberg, Nicole Dosso, Winka Dubbeldam, Billie Tsien, Jeanne Gang, Margaret Cavenagh, Penn Women in Architecture (PWIA)
BEAT X University of Guelph: Supporting Diversity & Growing Equality in the Design Professions
BEAT executive members Fotini Pitoglou, Safoura Zahedi, Persis Lam and Vineetha Sivathasan along with Pam Cook who is a member of a London, Ontario based non-profit group 'Women in Landscaping’, have been invited to participate in a panel at the University of Guelph centered around the topic of diversity on Tuesday, November 19th.
For those interested, here is some information about the topics as curated by the panel and some wonderful questions the students at Guelph are starting to think about.
PANEL STRUCTURE:
Part 1: ISSUES - Identifying challenges and defining terms
Part 2: STRATEGIES - Sharing findings / discussing initiatives
Part 3: EXPERIENCES - Sharing personal anecdotes
QUESTIONS:
How do we grow the design professions to better reflect the diversity in the communities we serve?
How do we support practitioners of all backgrounds to build meaningful and impactful careers within the field?
BEAT Executive Member, Maya Desai presents at two major conferences in California
BEAT executive member Maya Desai, Senior Urban Designer (Moriyama Teshima Architects) and Chair of Environmental Design (OCAD University) co-presented on-going research (with Angelika Seeschaaf-Veres and Nancy Snow): “Designing for Inclusive Excellence” at the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts at University of California, Irvine on November 7, 2019 (https://litsciarts.org/slsa19/) and “Hybridized Cultural Backgrounds and Lived Experiences in Studio Pedagogy” at the 2019 AICAD Symposium at Otis College of Art and Design in California on November 8, 2019 (https://www.aicad.org/aicad_free_areas/aicad-symposium-2018/)
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BEAT Advisory Committee Member, Elsa Lam co-edits "Canadian Modern Architecture, 1967 to the present"
Introducing “Canadian Modern Architecture, 1967 to the present” (Princeton Architectural Press and Canadian Architect), co-edited by Elsa Lam (BEAT Advisory Board), editor of Canadian Architect magazine, and Graham Livesey, professor at the University of Calgary. The book is the first comprehensive review of Canadian architecture in many years, and includes fifteen original essays and five hundred photographs and drawings.
Below are upcoming events presented in conjunction with the book launch:
NOV 13 | Fireside Chat: George Baird and Larry Wayne Richards
by Canadian Architect magazine
Daniels School of Architecture, Landscape, and Design
NOV 21 | Canadian Architecture and the Climate Crisis
by Canadian Architect magazine
Panel: Peter Busby, Susan Fitzgerald, Elsa Lam, Steven Mannell
Halifax Central Library
NOV 27 | Building With Nature? | Canadian Modern Architecture book launch
by Design Talk Consulting
Panel: James KM Cheng, Elsa Lam, Sherry McKay, John Patkau
Vancouver Central Library
StopGap Foundation's Annual FUNraiser - Ramp Up 2019
StopGap Foundation’s Ramp Up 2019! event will take place on Thursday, November 21, 2019 from 6-10 pm. It will be at Artscape Wychwood Barns, a century-old streetcar facility, redesigned and transformed. The venue will be a beautiful backdrop for the silent art ramp auction featuring more than 40 talented local artists, a live Art Battle, delicious food, an open beverage bar and so much more!
Book Panel | Breaking Ground: Architecture by Women
BEAT is pleased to introduce the book, Breaking Ground: Architecture by Women written by Jane Hall and published by Phaidon which includes work by BEAT advisory committee members Shirley Blumberg and Brigitte Shim. There will be a panel discussion for this book on Friday October 18, 2019 at The Frederick P. Rose Auditorium at the Cooper Union in New York city.
Breaking Ground: Architecture by Women
“Breaking Ground: Architecture by Women (Phaidon, 2019) is a timely record of the extraordinary contribution women architects have made to the profession. Documenting more than 200 significant buildings designed by women all over the world, this publication is a visual manifesto of outstanding architecture. Marking the celebration of this new book's release will be a panel discussion including Toshiko Mori, AR '76, Mónica Ponce de León, Brigitte Shim, Hilary Sample, and Marion Weiss.
The panel will be introduced and moderated by School of Architecture's Hayley Eber and Lorena del Rio.
This program is part of Archtober. Copies of Breaking Ground will be available for sale by The Strand. This event is co-sponsored by Phaidon, the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union, and the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation.
This event is free and open to the public. General public should reserve a space. Please note seating is on a first come basis; an RSVP does not guarantee admission as we generally overbook to ensure a full house.”
BEAT Executive Member, Fotini Pitoglou appointed Vice-Chair of the RAIC EP Committee
The RAIC EP Committee is pleased to announce the appointment of Fotini Pitoglou as the vice-chair.
Biography
Fotini Pitoglou is a licensed architect in the UK and Greece and is currently working her way to licensure in Toronto, ON. She is a designer with KPMB Architects and has a broad work experience ranging from high-profile institutional to high-rise residential projects. She holds master's degrees from the University of Waterloo and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, where she conducted extensive research on waterfront design, and community building. Her work has been published on various websites in the architecture industry and presented at the Changing Cities conference.
Additionally, Fotini is actively involved within the architectural community through various organizations, including Building Equality in Architecture, Toronto (BEAT) and Lawrence Heights Arts Centre, as well as through mentoring students and young architects. Most recently, she has been developing a non-profit organization that focuses on empowering vulnerable communities impacted by tourism.
Statement
As the incoming vice-chair of the RAIC EP Committee, I am determined to create an open and inspiring community of young practitioners and encourage minorities to complete their licensing and stay in the profession. Furthermore, I aim to promote and educate the new era of architects on sustainable design and be part of RAIC EP continuing education programs.
Matrix 360: The Colour Code
The Conversation continues!
BEAT’s Managing Director, Camille Mitchell, joined an incredible panel with a broad range of experience for the Matrix360 and International Women’s Day discussion on Race, Colour and Gender within the Real Estate Industry!
People notice race and colour. There is no alternative to getting around this fact. Many senior and executive leadership teams avoid conversations about race and colour out of fear of saying the wrong thing. Many people of colour avoid these conversations in the workplace out of fear of being seen as a com-plainer, disruptor — or worse. But pretending that the elephant in the room isn’t there won’t make the current challenges and barriers faced by many in the workplace go away.
What we know is despite Toronto’s demographic composition of being comprised of over 52% people of colour, there are less than 15% in senior and executive leadership positions. Racial and ethnic diversity in the workplace – from recruitment to the advancement of people of colour – continues to progress at an unimpressive pace. The needle is moving so slowly that it appears to be broken.
With organizational culture being so critical, it is the responsibility of senior and executive leadership teams to create an environment that fosters success among employees from all backgrounds.
Therefore, striving to establish an equitable and inclusive organizational culture just may be the single most crucial factor in building a diverse workforce.
A meaningful conversation on the importance of partnerships between men and women focused on race, colour and gender equity. While most IWD events have showcased women only themes, our intent is to spotlight how men are required to be included in the conversation, recognizing that inclusion and the advancement of equity in leadership is not a women’s issue, it is a collective opportunity to elevate business strategy.
BEAT Advisory Committee Members Among Azure's "30 (More) Essential Women in Architecture and Design"
In honour of International Women’s Day, Azure Magazine celebrates 30 outstanding women in architecture and design. See their list of must-know women architects -including BEAT’s own Advisory Committee Members.
Read article here.
BEAT Executive Member, Safoura Zahedi's installation at Gladstone Hotel
New for Gladstone Hotel this year, the launch of a permanent installation by BEAT Executive Member Safoura Zahedi, entitled 'Connect', that will be active for one year. The immersive installation will exhibit during Come Upto My Room and then transform into an artist designed meeting room available for private bookings.
'Connect', is part of an independent experimental design series entitled 'Beyond the Surface', exploring geometry and its potential as a contemporary universal design language. These explorations use two-dimensional geometry to create three-dimensional spatial experiences through principles of fractal geometry. 'Connect' unites the subtle and meaningful order of our universe by reflecting the unseen. The design series seeks to reflect the universal language of Unity as derived from multiplicity, and transport the viewer from immersion in the mundane to serene contemplation.
Safoura Zahedi is a Toronto-based architectural designer whose work explores geometry through a process of merging traditional analogue design methods with contemporary digital technology and fabrication.
Take part in the 2018 SDA Salary and Compensation Survey!
The Society for Design Administration Canada (SDA) provides education, best management practices and seminars in areas such as finance, marketing, human resources and project management for the Architectural, Engineering and Interior Design industries (AED).
Our membership across Canada is comprised of Owners, Principals, administration, finance, marketing, human resources and those members who are looking to advance their career in the AED industry.
We are excited to announce our 2019 initiative regarding salary and compensation in the AED industries. We will be distributing the new SDA Salary and Compensation Survey for your participation and are pleased that the OAA will be helping to facilitate the distribution of our salary and compensation survey to their membership. If we receive the interest we anticipate, we would like to issue this survey annually or semi-annually. We hope to have all the survey results compiled by January 31, 2019 and produce the completed results for purchase by the end of February 2019.
If you would like a direct survey invite sent to you, please send an email to salarysurvey@sdacanada.com and request one or more of the following surveys. There is no cost to participate in the surveys.
Architecture - https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/SDA2018architecture
Engineering - https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/SDA2018engineering
Interior Design - https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/SDA2018interiordesign
Landscape Architecture - https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/SDA2018landscape
Multi-disciplinary - https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/SDA2018multidisciplinary
Thank you for taking part in the 2018 SDA Salary and Compensation Survey!
Where Are All the Female Architects?
Click here to view The New York Times
To get a sense of the state of opportunity for women in architecture, consider that the firm getting the most high-profile architectural commissions in the world right now has just one female principal and this web address: big.dk.
Yes, BIG (for Bjarke Ingels Group) is based in Denmark (hence the “dk”), but the firm’s use of this cheeky address just about sums up the situation facing many women in the architectural profession today.
Until 1972 and the advent of Title IX, which forbade gender discrimination in federally funded education programs, most American architecture schools refused to admit women. The last major survey of the field found that women account for half of graduates from architecture programs in this country, but they make up about 20 percent of licensed architects and 17 percent of partners or principals in architecture firms.
There is no single — or simple — explanation for this. Nor is there an easy fix. The challenge, said Ila Berman, dean of the University of Virginia School of Architecture (and one of just a few female deans in the field), is to “change a culture that will only be changed through representation, when 50 percent of the people in the room are women.”
The — tentative — good news is that it’s happening.
Architecture has had some semblance of a #MeToo moment. An online list of male architects accused of harassing colleagues, similar to a list that circulated in the media industry, appeared this year. One of the field’s elder statesmen, Richard Meier, stepped down in March from a leadership role at his firm after allegations of sexual harassment by five women. “Voices of Women,” a manifesto calling for an end to “pervasive prejudices and disrespectful behavior that appears to be systemic in our culture and discipline,” was introduced by a group of female architects at a flash mob at the Venice Architecture Biennale over the summer.
The American Institute of Architects-led Equity by Design initiative has been working to address “pinch points” (hiring, glass ceiling) in the profession and to promote best practices in recruitment, retention and promotion in the field. In November, the initiative released the results of a survey of 14,360 respondents in every state and across six continents. Among its findings: female and minority architects and designers earn lower salaries than their white male peers and are less likely to hold positions of leadership; mothers in particular lose out on career and salary advancements; and firms have been slow to follow best practices regarding equity and worker well-being.
I was struck in particular by how many men versus women reported feeling strongly that their work made a difference; this perhaps connected to the finding that female architects felt recognized for working hard rather than for the work itself.
Outside of the A.I.A., others are spearheading efforts to change what many consider to be a toxic culture. “We are not victims, we are targets,” said Caroline James, a graduate of Harvard’s architecture program and founder of the advocacy group Design for Equality. “Let’s give women tools they can use. Mentorship. Access to information. The sharing of salary info. It’s time to ID the problem and what we need to do moving forward.”
Women are underrepresented in architecture not just at the top of the field but at all levels of practice. In 2015 and 2016, only 31 percent of full- or part-time faculty members in architecture were women. Even as women have been gradually increasing their numbers, they’ve mostly done so at lower rungs of both academia and the profession.
Not surprisingly, then, the percentage of women in architecture radically decreases as one moves up the ladder toward more senior positions and prestigious honors. Female mentors and role models are in scarce supply. (Apart from Zaha Hadid, how many female architects can you name?) And though women might be growing in numbers in the lecture hall, they’re underrepresented on course syllabuses, which can send a message that women aren’t valued participants.
The Pipeline Is Not the Problem
It would seem obvious: If you want more female architects, teach more women to be architects. Other fields where women are underrepresented speak of a pipeline problem, the belief that a lack of diversity stems from a scarcity of available talent. But nearly half of architecture students are women, so why are so few sticking with the industry after graduation?
Even in 2018, assumptions that women would quit to marry, that they would be unable to command authority on job sites, or even that their creativity was not up to par, have persisted, resulting in unequal pay, recognition and access to opportunities. Every woman I spoke to on this topic has a story (or more likely, many stories) of men questioning their competency and qualifications, of not believing they were actually in charge of a project.
Several women said clients often assume that a female architect in a room is there to take notes or serve coffee. One woman was asked in a meeting if she had PMS; another recounted the time when a group of male colleagues complained to the head of the firm that they could not take orders from a woman; still another describes losing a promotion after becoming pregnant.
Several of the country’s most prestigious architectural programs, including Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, the University of Virginia and the University of California, Berkeley, have in recent years appointed women as deans or directors. It would be unreasonable to put the onus of transformation on a handful of women — and it’s insulting to all women to assume that these talented and capable architects were hired solely because of their gender. But those appointments do begin to change the balance of power.
“It is meaningful both symbolically and substantially that I’m a woman dean at Yale,” said Deborah Berke, dean of architecture at Yale and principal of her own firm. “We won’t see the culture change immediately. But we will see the results.”
In architecture, peer review dominates. When tenure decisions are made by committees made up of men, consist of interviews with mostly male candidates, and are sent to male provosts for approval, the system perpetuates itself. Female architects make less than their male counterparts at every level of experience.
To put it plainly, men are still the face of the profession.
“Every single woman architect I know would, I think, say the same thing,” Ms. Berke said. “‘I want to be a good architect who has a meaningful impact. I don’t want to be known for being a good womanarchitect.’ Architecture needs to look like the world it serves — and that’s everybody.”
Redefining Success
The architects most of us hear about — Gehry, Foster, Ingels — are often commissioned to design skyscrapers, museums and high-tech corporate campuses, and it is those buildings that are seen as the pinnacle of success, the projects to which others should aspire. There are women who want to design skyscrapers, too, but this represents an awfully limited view of what architecture could be. Part of what might account for the low numbers of female graduates continuing in their field may be their interest in forging a different path.
Key to greater equality of opportunity is rethinking what success means in architecture. “There is so much available to be reinvented,” says Amale Andraos, dean of architecture at Columbia, who like many of her female peers left a large male-led firm to found her own shop, WORKac, with her husband, the architect Dan Wood. “Housing, low-income housing, gardens, questions of public space, architectural criticism. You can change culture, knowledge and history by designing an app, engaging in social activism or mapping family-friendly spaces. The definition of success is up for grabs.”
Liz Ogbu, who trained as an architect at the Harvard Graduate School of Design but describes herself as a “designer, social innovator and urbanist,” certainly sees it that way. Ms. Ogbu’s career — she has designed shelters for immigrant day laborers and collaborated on a social enterprise that provides safe, hygienic and convenient sanitation to the homes of low-income urban dwellers in Ghana — points to a much broader definition of what an “architect” might be and do.
As she explained to me in an email: “In many ways, architecture is a profession that has been the epitome of the dominant white patriarchy, from most of the celebrated starchitects to the all too frequent obsession with buildings that are better known for the beauty of the object than the quality of life that they enable. I’m black and female; my existence is the exact opposite of that system. So perhaps it is no accident that as I’ve built my own path in this field, I’ve been committed to a design practice that is rooted in elevating the stories of those who have most often been neglected or silenced.”
One Easy Fix
The problem discussed here is more a societal problem than an architectural one. Transformation won’t come overnight, but there’s one thing all firms could do right now: pay men and women the same.
That’s what the architect and MacArthur fellow Jeanne Gang did for her own firm, Studio Gang, which designs the sort of high-profile projects not typically given to firms led by women.
“It’s obvious,” she wrote in a recent essay about promoting gender equality in the field. “We can start by looking to the fundamental issue of respect in the workplace — pay. Unlike other measures of value, pay is a number. It’s tangible and objective.”
It’s an essential first step toward equality that will let the profession move forward, together, to address the more complex challenges that await.
École Polytechnique massacre 'left a scar,' says first woman to have engineering school named after her
When a gunman killed 14 women at École Polytechnique in Montreal, Que. in 1989, Gina Parvaneh Cody learned the news in horror at nearby Concordia University.
"It left a scar," said Cody, an Iranian immigrant who moved to Canada in 1979 to pursue her dream of getting a PhD in engineering.
Cody graduated with her doctorate the same year as the Montreal Massacre.
She told The Current's Anna Maria Tremonti that after the attack — which many saw as a misogynistic act of violence — she wanted to "make a future where women are allowed in engineering."
According to a Stats Canada study, while young women represent the majority of recent university graduates they are still underrepresented in STEM fields.
Thirty years after graduating, Concordia has renamed a department in her honour: the Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science. It is the first time a Canadian engineering school has been named after a woman.
The accolade comes after Cody gifted $15 million to the university's engineering program. Her career progressed from being the only female crane inspector in Toronto, to becoming the former executive chair and principal shareholder of CCI Group, a large engineering firm in the city.
Cody says that while her mother married young and never finished high school, she often impressed upon her daughters how important it was to get an education.
"Her message to me and my sister — who became a dentist — was as a woman, to be independent, you have to pursue higher education."
Natalie Portman: Variety's "Power of Women"
As with many women and men across the country (and world), Natalie Portman has officially had it with the pervasive and inescapable nature of rape culture. Whether its rearing its ugly head in the form of Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination, the whole of Donald Trump's presidency, or the ongoing list of Hollywood predators, the ways our society is structured to protect abusers is downright exhausting.
On Friday, during a speech at Variety's "Power of Women" event, Portman delivered a powerful speech indicting the ways the entertainment industry gaslights women, but also, ways the culture at large needs to stop empowering abusers and perpetuating sexist narratives.
She kicks off the speech by indicting serial sexual abuser Harvey Weinstein and the ways the justice system has protected him.
"Harvey Weinstein, the man whose name has become synonymous with 'serial rapist,' might never suffer any legal consequences," she said, referencing the fact that a charge was recently dropped from his case.
She then went on to shut down the common myth that women are excluded from positions of power solely because they choose to be mothers and caretakers (and not because of intimidation, boys' club mentality and institutionalized sexism).
Portman then listed a handful of ways the entertainment industry can work harder to eradicate and fight back against a culture of violence against women. Her game plan placed an emphasis on increasing diversity in writer's rooms, taking a year off depicting violence against women in media, refusing to work with abusers, and more.
This is a great speech to send to anyone who needs a thorough explanation of why women are so angry and tired, but also, to bookmark for when you need a boost.
Snubbed, cheated, erased: the scandal of architecture's invisible women
Click here to view The Guardian
They are among the most talented architects of their age. Yet the credit, praise and awards have gone to the men instead. Meet the women who are tired of being written out of history
Denise Scott Brown was an associate professor when she married Robert Venturi in 1967. She had taught at the universities of Pennsylvania and Berkeley, and initiated the first programme in the new school of architecture at the University of California. She had a substantial publication record, enthusiastic students, and the respect of her colleagues.
The first sign that marriage had changed things came when an architect whose work she had reviewed said: “We at the office think it was Bob writing, using your name.” It was an indication of what was to come for the rest of her career. Scott Brown was relegated to being the wife of the famous postmodern architect Bob Venturi – who died last month – rather than one half of an equal creative and intellectual partnership that changed the world of architecture as we know it.
As she recounted in her 1989 essay, Room at the Top? Sexism and the Star System in Architecture, there would be celebratory dinners where she was left out “because we’re not inviting wives”; job interviews where she was excluded because the presence of “the architect’s wife” distressed the board; countless meetings that began “So you’re the architect!” to Venturi, followed by: “And you’re an architect too?” To crown it all, when the 1991 Pritzker prize jury described how their body of work had “expanded and redefined the limits of the art of architecture in this century, as perhaps no other has”, the accolade was awarded to Venturi alone.
In 2013, two students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design began an online petition to demand that her contribution be recognised. It now has more than 20,000 signatures. “They owe me not a Pritzker prize but a Pritzker inclusion ceremony,” Scott Brown said. “Let’s salute the notion of joint creativity.” Lord Peter Palumbo, chair of the prize, politely declined. “A later jury cannot reopen, or second-guess, the work of an earlier jury,” he wrote in response, before thanking the petitioners for “calling directly to our attention a more general problem, namely that of assuring women a fair and equal place within the profession”. Only a year earlier, his jury had awarded the gong to Chinese architect Wang Shu, overlooking the fact that his practice has always been a joint partnership with his architect wife, Lu Wenyu.
This month marks a small righting of past wrongs when Denise Scott Brown, now 87, will be awarded the 2018 Soane medal. She is the second recipient of an annual award given to architects who have made a major contribution to their field. I was part of the jury this year, and as soon as Scott Brown’s name was mentioned, all the other competition fell away. It was the most unanimous decision of any such deliberations I have witnessed.
The individual contributions of creative partnerships are always difficult to disentangle. However, it is clear that Learning from Las Vegas, the “gentle manifesto” published in 1972 that championed billboards and hot dog stands as worthy of architects’ attention, would never have happened without Scott Brown. She had already made several pilgrimages to the Vegas Strip by the time she took Venturi there in 1966, drawn by a fascination with roadside vernaculars and pop culture that she had developed growing up in South Africa. It also resonated with ideas she had learned in London from Alison and Peter Smithson, while studying at the Architectural Association, the Strip in effect being a very large “as-found” object.
Scott Brown chose Las Vegas as the subject she would teach at Yale with Venturi and Steven Izenour in 1968. She also coined the term “duck” to refer to buildings that act as sculptural, symbolic objects (in reference to a duck-shaped egg-stand on Long Island), set in opposition to the “decorated shed”, a functional box with ornament applied independently of what’s going on inside. The term has been popularised over the decades, often now referred to as the “Venturian duck”. Scott Brown once wrote to an editor to correct the attribution. Her letter was printed under the title “Less is a Bore”, a quotation from her husband.
Scott Brown is not alone. A deeply institutionalised invisibility cloak has long obscured the women in successful architectural partnerships, whether it’s MJ Long’s work on the British Library, a project usually credited to her husband Colin St John Wilson, or Su Rogers and Wendy Foster’s work on early projects with their husbands, Richard and Norman (though Rogers feels she was always equally credited for her work and says she’s never suffered any discrimination from being a woman working in architecture). Patty Hopkins, co-founder of Hopkins Architects, was quite literally erased from history when she was Photoshopped out of a group of male hi-tech architectsto promote the 2014 BBC series, The Brits Who Built the Modern World. The global success of Daniel Libeskind, meanwhile, owes a huge amount to his wife, Nina, a fearsome political negotiator who has handled every aspect of the company’s management.
Dutch artist Madelon Vriesendorp has been long accustomed to the lack of credit to the wives of maverick male architects. In the early 1970s, when she moved to New York with her husband, Rem Koolhaas, she began to paint a series of images inspired by the architecture of Manhattan. Her eerie dreamscapes pictured the Statue of Liberty in states of undress, the New York skyline being gobbled up by a monster, and the Empire State Building in bed with the Chrysler Building, caught in the act by the Rockefeller Center. This last painting, Flagrant Délit, would become the cover of Koolhaas’s polemical book, Delirious New York, and would take on a mythology of its own. It was used on the cover of other books without permission, and was retrospectively captioned as being “commissioned by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture”, the architecture practice Vriesendorp co-founded.
“I don’t want to make a fuss,” she says, sitting at the kitchen table of the flat in Hampstead where she formed OMA with Koolhaas and Elia and Zoe Zenghelis. “But there have been a lot of historical misprints, which continue to be repeated.”
When she was awarded the Ada Louise Huxtable prize earlier this year by the Architectural Review, she mentioned the #MeToo movement. But she stressed that, “more often, and more insidious, is the way that women are ignored, written out of the script, and invisible to the nakedly ambitious self-promoting eyes”. For these women, she quipped, “I would like to start a counter-movement, called ‘Me Neither’.”
She says it was “a bit of a joke”, not intended to diminish #MeToo, and she downplays her role in the early days of OMA as “just colouring in”. The kind of colouring in that MoMA has collected, that is. “Me and Zoe were the sidekicks,” she claims. “I did the watercolours, she did the acrylics, and we packed everything up and took it to the post office when the men were too tired at the end of a deadline.”
But the early OMA schemes show Vriesendorp’s influence. From the seminal Exodus project, an imagined walled city of which she made mesmerising collages, to the competitions for the Dutch parliament, the house for the Irish prime minister and the Parc de la Villette in Paris, her distinctively surreal hand shines through in them all.
Like Scott Brown, she has found the architectural establishment’s casual misogyny to be par for the course. One prominent dean of a US architecture school, when introduced to her by Koolhaas, refused to shake her hand. “I don’t believe in that feminist crap,” he said, as he turned away.
“We accepted everything,” she says. “All the bum-pinching and the clumsy advances. There was this idea that men, poor things, have this urge, they just can’t help themselves.” Then there were the wives who had to put up with their famous husbands’ philandering. “Everyone was having boyfriends and girlfriends,” says Vriesendorp, “but it was easier for men because they didn’t have kids. They didn’t have to go home and have no sleep for the night.”
She cites having children and the cost of childcare as the reasons many women end up being sidelined. “Having kids totally limited my involvement in OMA,” she says. “It’s so tiring, being up all night, and having no time to do anything.” It is perhaps no coincidence that many of the world’s prominent women architects – Zaha Hadid, Liz Diller, Kazuyo Sejima – didn’t have children. According to a Women in Architecture survey conducted by the Architects’ Journal, more than 90% of female architects in the UK believe motherhood hinders their careers. More than half of the respondents said they had experienced sexual discrimination, while another survey found that women occupy only 10% of the highest-ranking jobs at the world’s leading architecture firms. There’s still a very long way to go before architecture reaches anything like equality. The lack of repercussions after the fleeting online publication of a “Shitty Men in Architecture” list, detailing alleged incidents of bullying and sexual abuse by a large number of prominent male architects, shows just how tightly men retain their grip on the profession.
As Vriesendorp put it in a recent interview: “What do they say? Behind every successful man is a surprised woman. Or now is it behind every successful woman is an angry man?”
POP // CAN // CRIT 2018
The Business of Architecture in Canada is a national, panel-based, architecture symposium that brings together leading voices in architecture practice, academia and related fields, who are changing the way we see and understand architecture.
This year's event will explore the business of architecture through a series of panel discussions in a day-long symposium on October 19, 2018 in Vancouver. Panel discussions will focus on how business topics are being taught in architecture schools in Canada, how the art and business of architecture come together, how women architects are finding success as both architectural and business leaders, as well as how and whether architecture firms are succession planning - and what does that mean for the future of architecture in Canada.
What: POP // CAN // CRIT 2018: The Business of Architecture in Canada
Date: October 19, 2018
Time: 8:30am - 4:30pm PDT
Location: Simon Fraser University, Djavad Mowafaghian World Art Centre, Room 2555, Vancouver
Attendance: In Person or Online (LIVE WEBINAR!)
Registration: spacing.ca/popcancrit
POP // CAN // CRIT is an excellent opportunity to:
network with peers,
receive relevant and exciting information on the practice of architecture and design,
receive Continuing Education Learning hours.
We are pleased to say that this year we will be doing a LIVE webcast of the event. So no matter where you are you can join in on the conversation.
Attendees are also eligible to receive structured continuing education learning hours. Continuing Education Certificates of Attendance will be issued by the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada.