The professional role of the architect, that is, his/her tasks, shifted with the societal and technological changes that took place during the 20th century. The act of building became too complex to be authored by a single person, especially in relation to the technical aspects of large-scale commissions, which inherently brought the engineer-expert into the design process. Different constellations between the architect, the client, and the builder became part of the design process. Women entering the workforce, the political and ideological divisions of the Cold War (specifically, the division between socialist and capitalist systems), and the search for new and more horizontal models of practice – all of these shaped a diversified professional landscape.
Dana Cuff, in Architecture: The Story of Practice (1991), proposes to examine the culture of practice, an analysis that “looks closely at people’s everyday lives, their situated actions, as well as what they say and the meanings they construct”. She looks at the act of building as a collective process and at architecture as a social construction. She focuses on everyday knowledge, paying attention to working hierarchies and cultures, shared values, roles, and project and design cycles, in addition to paying attention to the office as a workspace. She mentions four main dialectical dualities of the profession: between the individual and the collective; between art and business (or administration/management); between design as decision-making and design as making sense of a situation; and, finally, between the generalists and the specialists. These dualities are considered in the historical and contemporary best-practice examples.
The position of women reveals a cross-section of architectural power structures within the typology described above. Women started to enter professional architectural practice in larger numbers in the post-war period and made up a significant percentage of architecture students, more so in the East than in the West (30% in the GDR compared to 10.5% in West Germany in 1970). Still, they experienced setbacks in professional life under both capitalism and socialism. The women in husband-and-wife teams also faced discrimination. While in the West these teams gradually received recognition during the 1950s (for example, Charles and Ray Eames, Peter and Alison Smithson), entering the profession was not easy. Denise Scott Brown, who launched a joint practice with her husband Robert Venturi, described the pitfalls she experienced: their joint work was attributed almost solely to Venturi, even in the case of texts and architecture projects authored by Scott Brown, as detailed in Room at the Top? Sexism and the Star System in Architecture (1989). In 1991 Robert Venturi was awarded the Pritzker Prize, which did not mention Scott Brown. Between 1979 and 2004, the Pritzker Prize had no female recipients. The Matrix design collective – a feminist architecture practice founded in the United Kingdom in 1979 – strived to redefine building in a predominantly feminist perspective through more intensive involvement of women, supporting women through the design of women’s centres or refuges. Matrix proposed a horizontal relation with the builders to share skills and technical knowledge and to learn from each other.
The socialist system possibly offered better starting conditions for women to engage in professional practice. The state design institutes provided stable, long-term employment. The status of the author receded into the background and scientific and expert understanding of the profession was emphasised. In addition, legal and societal measures were undertaken by the state to guarantee women a professional career (legal equality in the family, provision of nurseries and kindergartens, public canteens). Women became a distinct presence in large state design offices, performing virtually all typological tasks and contributing to the professional culture. Still, despite the proclaimed professional equality of men and women, women were not admitted in greater numbers to leading roles within architecture studios, nor were they given as many teaching positions or professorships. In Hungary, only four women received the prestigious Miklós Ybl Prize between 1953 and 1989. Many women were overshadowed; their authorship was attributed to their male colleagues, partners, and/or husbands or omitted altogether. Almost all women worked “second shifts” trying to comply with the demands of professional and personal life. The end of socialism of 1989 and the introduction of the neoliberal system in Central and Eastern Europe was a move towards the other extreme – to a freelance profession with the emphasis on individual authorship as per the “hero” or “star” narrative, pushing women aside.
Sources:
Dana Cuff, Architecture: The Story of Practice, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1991.
Harald Engler, Stephanie Herold, and Scarlett Wilks (eds.), Kollektiv und Kollaborativ. Positionen gemeinschaftlichen Arbeitens in der Architektur und Planung vom 20. Jahrhundert bis zu Gegenwart, Bamberg: University of Bamberg Press, 2022.
Eva Franch i Gilabert, Ana Milijački, Ashley Schafer, Michael Kubo, and Amanda Reeser Lawrence (eds.), OfficeUS Agenda, Zurich: Lars Müller, 2014.
Winfried Nerdinger (ed.), Der Architekt: Geschichte und Gegenwart eines Berufsstandes, Munich: Prestel, 2012.
Mary Pepchinski and Mariann Simon (eds.), Ideological Equals: Women Architects in Socialist Europe 1945–1989, New York: Routledge, 2017.
Petr Vorlík (ed.), Rozhovory. Architektura osmdesátých let, Prague: ČVUT, 2020.
Tobias Zervosen, Architekten in der DDR: Realität und Selbstverständnis einer Profession, Bielefeld: transcript, 2016.
“Architektur ohne Architekten”, ARCH+ 103, 1990.
Frances Bradshaw, “Working with Women”, in Jane Rendell, Barbara Penner, and Iain Broden (eds.), Gender, Space, Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction, New York: Routledge, 2003, 282–295.
Beatriz Colomina, “Collaborations: The Private Life of Modern Architecture”, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 58, no. 3, 1999, 462–471
Ana Miljacki and Ann Lui, “Toward a Carrier Bag Theory of Coauthoring”, Log 54, 2022, 9–16.
Henry-Russell Hitchcock, “The Architecture of Bureaucracy and the Architecture of Genius”, Architectural Review 101, no. 601 (January 1947), 3–6.
Jiří Merger, Projektování za totáče, https://www.stavbaweb.cz/projektovani-za-totae-21816/clanek.html, accessed 1. 9. 2023.