dearq 20. MUJERES EN ARQUITECTURA
Ana María Pinzón Editor in chief A57 ana@a57.org Andrea J Merrett B.Sc.Arch, M.Arch. Phd Candidate GSAPP. Columbia University ajm2167@columbia.edu Guest editors
1 www.architectural-review.com/rethink/results-of-the-2016-women-inarchitecture-survey-revealed/10003314.article. 2 ead.lib.virginia.edu/vivaxtf/view?docId=vt/viblbv00055.xml. 3 http://www.wdchoc.org/. 4 http://www.wds.org.uk/. 5
A showcase of this new work was presented at the 2016 AHRA conference, “Architecture and Feminisms,” http://architecturefeminisms. org/.
6 archiparlour.org/. 7 architexx.org/. 8 eqxdesign.com/. 9 www.facebook.com/arquitetasinvisiveis/. 10 undiaunaarquitecta.wordpress.com/. 11 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikiproject_Women_Wikipedia_ Design. 12 placesjournal.org/article/unforgetting-women-architects-from-thepritzker-to-wikipedia/#0.
[ 10 ] Julio de 2017. ISSN 2011-3188. E-ISSN 2215-969X. Bogotá, pp. 70-76. http://dearq.uniandes.edu.co
After a period of dormancy, the topic of women in architecture has once again become salient. Globally, women have made significant gains in the profession, but as recent reports attest, they have yet to reach professional equity. In an international survey published on February 26th, 2016, The Architectural Review found that only fifteen percent of respondents thought that women’s authority has been accepted by the building industry. Forty percent of female respondents thought they were paid less than their male colleagues, and seventy-two percent had experienced harassment or discrimination at work.1 These statistics provide just a snapshot of the issues women face when pursuing careers in architecture. Women’s participation in architecture dates back to at least the nineteenth century in both Europe and North America and to the beginning of the twentieth century in Latin America, Spain, and Brazil. But it was not until the 1960s in Europe and North America, and even more recently in the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking world, that women embraced feminist tactics to improve their professional status. In Europe, Solange d'Herbez de La Tour launched the Union Internationale des Femmes Architectes in 1963.2 In the United States, female architects formed their own professional organizations from the early 1970s onwards and began to research women’s historic contributions to architecture. Projects like Susana Torre’s 1977 groundbreaking exhibition and book, Women in American Architecture, introduced the historic and contemporary work of female architects to a larger audience. Other groups addressed how redesigning the built environment could improve women’s lives, for example the US-based Women’s Development Corporation (1979)3 and the UK-based Women’s Design Service(1984).4 In the 1990s, another wave of scholars, located mainly in the US and the UK, gave conferences and published articles including: Sexuality and Space, The Sex of Architecture, and Desiring Practices; the culmination was the invaluable anthology Gender, Space, Architecture published in 2000 by Jane Rendell, Barbara Penner, and Iain Borden. As Nuria Álvarez Lombardero points out in her article, the global economic crisis of 2008 increased unemployment amongst