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; represented in the publication of 'A Gendered Profession' (RIBA publications) published last 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.
Notes for Dissertation 6:
I waved a copy of Chris Jeffcoate's excellent dissertation at this weeks session, titled 'Mies was from Mars; Women are from Venus'. It looked at Mies's personal life from the perspective of relationships as they appear to stand today; a place of relative equality, a physical place somewhere in Essex, with jobs that pay the mortgage and so on. This proves an excellent antidote to the 'heroism' or Faustian imperative demonstrated in Reading 5.
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