ABSTRACT

Set against the background of a ‘general crisis’ that is environmental, political and social, this book examines a series of specific intersections between architecture and feminisms, understood in the plural. The collected essays and projects that make up the book follow transversal trajectories that criss-cross between ecologies, economies and technologies, exploring specific cases and positions in relation to the themes of the archive, control, work and milieu. This collective intellectual labour can be located amidst a worldwide depletion of material resources, a hollowing out of political power and the degradation of constructed and natural environments. Feminist positions suggest ways of ethically coping with a world that is becoming increasingly unstable and contested. The many voices gathered here are united by the task of putting critical concepts and feminist design tools to use in order to offer experimental approaches to the creation of a more habitable world. Drawing inspiration from the active archives of feminist precursors, existing and re-imagined, and by way of a re-engagement in the histories, theories and projected futures of critical feminist projects, the book presents a collection of twenty-three essays and eight projects, with the aim of taking stock of our current condition and re-engaging in our precarious environment-worlds.

chapter Introduction|7 pages

Architecture and feminisms

Ecologies, economies, technologies

part |71 pages

Archive

chapter 1|14 pages

Feminist theory and praxis, 1991–2003

Questions from the archive

chapter Project 1|4 pages

Searching for cyborgs

chapter 2|9 pages

The role played by women linked to the CIAM

The case of Frieda Fluck, 1897–1974

chapter 3|10 pages

A feminist in disguise?

Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s histories of architecture and the environment

chapter Project 2|5 pages

Overpainting that jostles

chapter 4|12 pages

The architect as shopper

Women, electricity, building products and the interwar ‘proprietary turn’ in the UK

chapter 5|13 pages

Between landscape and confinement

Situating the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft

part |71 pages

Control

chapter 6|10 pages

Remodelling the Führer

Hitler’s domestic spaces as propaganda

chapter 7|8 pages

Architectural preservation as taxidermy

Patriarchy and boredom

chapter Project 3|6 pages

A cortege of ghostly bodies

Abstraction, prothesis, and the logic of the mannequin

chapter 9|10 pages

Digital technology and the safety of women and girls in urban space

Personal safety Apps or crowd-sourced activism tools?

chapter 10|10 pages

Machinic architectural ecologies

An uncertain ground

chapter Project 4|8 pages

Gender and anonymous peer review

chapter 11|10 pages

In captivity

The real estate of co-living

part |79 pages

Milieu

chapter 12|10 pages

Material and rational feminisms

A contribution to humane architectures

chapter 13|11 pages

Academic capitalism in architecture schools

A feminist critique of employability, 24/7 work and entrepreneurship

chapter 15|10 pages

Feminisms in conflict

‘Feminist urban planning’ in Husby, Sweden

chapter 16|10 pages

Abandoned architectures

Some dirty narratives

chapter Project 6|5 pages

Infrastructural love

part |74 pages

Work

chapter 18|9 pages

Reproductive commons

From within and beyond the kitchen

chapter 20|9 pages

The garage

Maintenance and gender

chapter Project 8|4 pages

Fatima’s shop: A kind of homeplace

chapter 21|11 pages

Invisibility work?

How starting from dis/ability challenges normative social, spatial and material practices

chapter 22|11 pages

On the critiques

Abortion clinics

chapter 23|11 pages

The entrepreneurial self