Introduction

The vision of the painter and poet Paul Scheerbart of a culture elevated through the use of glass was to give the coup de grace to an official stratum devoted to imitating the most outdated styles. Yet this democratization of architecture, reflecting the evolution of society, brought with it an immodest transparency, a manifest obscenity, where nothing could be hidden, nothing could grow, not even the most profound and spiritual needs of human beings. Women architects of the twenties and thirties focused their research precisely on this apparently irreconcilable contradiction between a diaphanous, transparent, dynamic and modern architecture, promoted by the Modern Movement, and the human being's requirement for habitability, intimacy and spirituality. One can assert that women architects of the heroic period are determined to make inhabitable spaces out of the cold and abstract architecture of the "new objectivity," because, in the words of Walter Benjamin, they design projects to "win the energies of intoxication for the revolution."