Book Discussion – Desiring Practices

During one of our lectures, the question came: How, as architect, can we design spaces for everyone ? Are the spaces that we create based on the binary system (male/female) caracterising our societies ? How can we make sure that we create “safe spaces” ?

We discussed it long but somehow could not come to one simple explanation / solution. How can we, in one project, solve the multiplicity of the human lives ? Why do we think that it is our role as architect to “cure” society ?

While reading “Desiring practices”, which presents a selection of 19 essays on the relationship between architecture and gender, one aspect was often recurring, the myth of the “heroic and potent architect”, that the Modernist movement brought back to life.   As a matter of fact, the modernist architect’s aim was to solve society’s problem through architecture. They believed that by building better, thus in a very rational way, people’s lives will improve.

However, in all this discourse, one element is missing: “the Other”. The modernist looked at the world with what they considered a “neutral gaze”, allowing them to make “universal” projects. But can a gaze really be neutral ? and especially whose gaze was that ? Well, truth to be told, this gaze was the one of the “white man”.

– “They were deeply well-meaning but blind to the specificity of their own discourses which were taken to be obvious, r rational, and universal, and blind to, and often dismissive of, the interpretations of Others” –

Jos Boys – “Neutral Gazes and Knowable Objects”

How can one language represent the diversity of multiple languageS ? One of the main critic against the modernist was the fact that people could no longer relate to it. Built on the concept of the “tabula rasa”, by deleting every link to the context, people could no longer identify themselves to it. A universal vision was being imposed. It was a revolution instead of an evolution.

This critic enables us to understand why, as architect, we may have the feeling that our projects should answer all issues in one and be efficient in solving the world’s problem. However, accepting that as architect we are never neutral (same with clients and societies) and that the gaze with which we are looking at thing is our and not a universal and partial one is already making one step forward in answering the  questions above. There is not one solution as there is so much diversity out there.

– “The failure of the architectural profession to address the reality of the environmental and social as they are experiences and not as they are theoretically sacrilised” –

Judi Farren Bradley – “Architecture and Obstetrics: Buildings as Babies”

Regarding the other texts, they offer a variety of aspects on the theme “architecture and gender”, for instance the architecture studies or the “closet concept” and homosexuality, as briefly mentioned here in this blog.

Even though the book was published in 1995, thus more than 20 years ago, the questions are still up to date in our society and the discomfort about architecture and gender still remain.

Source: McCordquodale, Duncan, et al., Desiring practices – Architecture, Gender, and the Interdisciplinary, Black Dog, 1995.