ABSTRACT

Issues of authorship, agency and authority have been central to critical writing and theory across a wide range of academic disciplines.2 A major focus of the project of second wave feminism within the academy has laid claim to the authorial subject, to individual women as speaking subjects and subjects of history, which encompasses women as producers of architecture and the built environment. Since the early 1970s, the history of architecture has been investigated and rewritten from a feminist perspective, while lively, often fearless, debates have exposed the phallocentric stance of architectural culture, questioning how architecture is practised and the values of a maledominated profession.3 Conventionally, however, in architectural history and in architectural practice (as well as in the general public’s perception), the idea of a female architect has been considered at best exceptional, but, more usually, a contradiction in terms, in spite of two decades of feminist research and writing. Meanwhile women’s place in architecture remains generally on the lower and middle rungs of the professional ladder. In this chapter, I want to consider the implications of gender on evaluations of architects and architecture and how gender operates to affect our understanding of history and historical importance. Extending the argument to how these series of judgements and their scale of merit are represented by the highly selected canonical works of architectural history, I want to focus on how this history is structured and organised by gender, mediated by disciplinary practices and valences both within architectural culture and appropriated from art history, through attribution and œuvre, quality and hierarchies, professionalism and visibility. Taking Eileen Gray as a case study, this chapter will examine the implications of gender for architectural history, assessing Eileen Gray’s career, reputation and place in history as depicted by her contemporaries, by modernist historians and by feminist revisionists. Through re-reading a selection of historical and critical texts, this reassessment seeks to engage with sexual stereotypes and issues of difference, in positionality, age, class and race, as well

as gender, to explain their cultural work and impact on critical reception and on the production of an authorial and historical subject. In this chapter there is also an awareness of our own position as latterday viewers of Gray’s work, as readers and writers of history and I will attempt to tease out our investment in Eileen Gray’s work-and in Gray herself. Why do we respond so strongly to to her and to her work? Has she become the feminists’ heroine?