With or Without You

Materializing the Ghosts of Architecture

Women architects are often poorly acknowledged in contrast to their male counterparts, and sometimes they aren’t credited at all. Beatriz Colomina in her lecture on ‘The Secret Life of Modern Architecture’ stated that “Women are the ghosts of architecture” citing the example of the Barcelona Pavilion designed by Mies van der Rohe for which he was solely credited while Lily Reich, his partner in planning, was forgotten. Despite playing a key role in designing and erecting the structure, her contribution is not recognized.

Mies van der Rohe’s collaborative project with Lily Reich for the Exposition de la Mode in Berlin was definitive for his later projects. It was Lily’s input that led to the draperies of velvet and silk hanging from metal rods which defined the space; a key feature of the project which seemed to have made such a significant impact on van der Rohe that those draperies became his trademark as delineated in his project Tugendhat House and the Barcelona Pavilion of 1929.

There is a gap between the words ‘and’ and ‘with’. The former implies “partnerships and equality”, representing diversity and complexity, while the latter speaks of a “helper or secondary source of energy”. The contributions of women are often reduced to insignificance despite playing key roles in bringing these projects to life. In stead of being recognized as a partner, they are strategically shoved behind and over time, their legacy forgotten. 

There is a mutual and silent admittance that this lack of representation exists like "a dirty, little secret that everyone sees and hears, but no one wants to talk about it." Like ghosts, we see and hear them and yet, somehow we see through them and pretend not to have heard them at all.

“The post war period inaugurated a new kind of collaborative practice that has become increasingly difficult to ignore or to subsume between a heroic conception of an individual figure”. 

Nowadays, credit is being given to all those crucial for the designing, erection and publicizing the project. The architects, designers, structural consultants, landscape architects, graphic designers, builders, even photographers are duly acknowledged. The clients, who were earlier seen as a problem for architecture are now being considered more than just witnesses to the effects of architecture, but as active collaborators and yet, women in crucial positions are being pushed away into obscurity. 

The firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill displayed a more anonymous collective at the exhibition of 1950. But when the names were finally put to paper, very systematically, the architect Natalie de Blois was left out. All the male names appeared but Natalie’s even though she was the one behind the design of important projects like the Leber House, the Pepsi Build and the Hilton International in Istanbul. Her contributions remained so unacknowledged that at one point, she left the firm.

Women are truly the ghosts of architecture meant to haunt our fields forever with unnamed gravestones littered over almost every project. It is not just a matter of adding a few names or “correcting the record”; it is about accepting the fact that architecture is deeply collaborative. It goes deeper than historical accuracy or justice, it is a means to fully decode architectural design and its complexities that eventually lead to the realization of these ideas. Without the acceptance of everything that leads to a design, it's interpretation will forever be based on conjecture; it's true meaning, forgotten, like half of those who conceived it.