ABSTRACT
It could be said that the house is woman's archetypical architecture. Just as Gramsci affirms that there are no "philosophers" since we are all philosophers, we propose that there are no "women architects", for all women connote architect and architecture as an endogenous element. The snail makes the house he carries on his back, it is always at home, wherever it goes, but it is always alone, as woman. The shell is built from the inside, with its own saliva, and it is designed with a helicoidal geometry, the better to resist defensively. Women have traditionally been associated with the interior, with the detailed and the fragmentary. If we de-contextualize Paul Valery's statement that "there are no details in architecture," we can take the terse ambiguity of this aphorism to mean that what is detailed denies architecture, or else that architecture, through its inherent need for integration, denies details.
