ABSTRACT
Over the past thirty years, the study of women and architecture has not only expanded our knowledge of the myriad contributions made by women-as architects, designers, clients and consumers-to the history of building and design, but it has also heightened our awareness of the complex mechanisms of culture and ideology which shape the environment in which design decisions are made and carried out. Whereas the earliest studies in the field focused mainly, and of necessity, on problems of attribution and revisionist history, bringing to light little-known works by women and assigning credit to women practitioners whose contributions had been neglected or actively suppressed, more recent interdisciplinary researches have emphasised the significance of gender (understood as a historically and culturally determined constellation of ideas and values that shape expectations about women’s and men’s roles in all aspects of society) and of other social factors within the design professions and in the making of built environments. In particular, feminist scholarship has called attention to the ways in which building types and programmes have been shaped not only by aesthetic criteria and formal conventions but also by cultural values and norms: social organisation and customs, etiquette, and gender ideology play as much of a role in the process as architectural style, consumer preferences and taste.
