ABSTRACT
Let us return to the example of Lise Meitner mentioned in the Introduction. Since women in those days were not admitted as university students, they were not officially allowed to enter the lecture halls. In the case of that young woman, the university building became ‘separation architecture’ which excluded her from participating in masculine knowledge. Extreme examples of separation architecture are prisons, which – separated by sex as well as type of offense – house individuals whose behaviour the state does not regard as socially acceptable, or hospitals, which offer not only medical care for patients, but also separate sick bodies from healthy bodies. The goal of separation architecture is to segregate individuals because they enjoy either more or less privileges than the rest of society and to support this segregation physically and symbolically. It is clear that sexual or other identities are seldom primarily or exclusively established by spatial structures. Yet spatial or architectural means can be used to represent or stabilize identities and the corresponding social roles.
