Hello, Monika. How are you?

 

I'm good, thanks. 

 

I'm talking to you in the run-up to the launch of an exhibition about the book, '100 Women: Architects in Practice' that you helped put together with Tom Ravenscroft, Dr Harriet Harriss and Naomi House. Can I first ask you how the book came about? But also: the blurb to the book says it showcases the 'largely overlooked' stories of women currently making their mark in the architectural world. Why have they been overlooked? It's a big question, but could you grapple with that one?

 

Okay, well, I think in a sense, women have been overlooked in publishing, because often what happens is that you get what we would call a super token.  When you get a token in architecture, or in any other field, the woman is held up and often is thought good enough to stand for all other women. So, often it makes it very hard to get space for others to be published or recognized. This is, in a sense, what's happened with Zaha Hadid. We've all built our practice on her brilliant work, but the publishing ecosystem around her, and the awards ecosystem has not let many other women come to the fore. So, the answer is to flood the field with as many names of women practitioners from all over the world as possible, to build networks. And of course, in the real feminist world of architectural networks, this is what women have always been doing, and everyone name checks Zaha, but here we are. When Tom went to the RIBA, there was a sense in which they asked us all the names of the ‘starchitects’ that we would like in the book, and Tom and Harriet, who started the project together, said, 'Well, how many female starchitects are there?' That question was for us to fill, not because we want to make a range of other female starchitects, but because we want to make as many women as possible out there household names. So, when it was proposed to the RIBA, they were also very keen to have historical names. They were saying that those are the women who sell books, and then we could have also female practitioners who were less well known. But what Tom and Harriet wanted to do when they proposed the book was really to have living practitioners. They wanted it to be a reality-based book, showing what women everywhere are doing now. And, in a sense, we wanted to speak to the contemporary moment, and that's how this contemporary guide of the book comes about. Everyone's a living practitioner. And what's super interesting is that they may not all be doing 'architect' as we recognize it. So, for instance, some of the women from Syria can't build because of the post-war context.  Some of the women advocate for architecture through curation, so we've included those. So, part of the reality-based notion of the book included trying to show people all the different range of activities that architects do – not just build buildings.

 

What was the selection process like? Was it hard making cuts? It is split across geographies, isn't it, in terms of continents?

 

Yes, that's right. Well, it turns out it's really difficult to divide the world equally! Naomi and I came on board to do the research once we realized that it was really difficult finding 100 women across regions that we didn't know. We'd actually underestimated the work that was to come, and that the idea of 100 was to actually challenge ourselves to find way more women across the world than we thought we originally could. And the RIBA kept saying, 'Well, why not 50?' We chose 100 because we wanted to research hard and much further and outside of our existing networks. So, in terms of dividing the world equally, the decision then was to use the UN geographic region, and that divides the world into sub-regions. So, for instance, Africa has North, South, East, West and Central, and the decision was to have five from each world sub-region. The consequence, therefore, is a sort of upturning of the normal hierarchy. So, for instance, the Americas have North America, South America, Caribbean and Central America, but only five architects in the book are from Northern America. And if I add the 25 from Europe, a third of the book is from the western arena and two-thirds of the book is from the non-western arena, and that's where things get really interesting.

 

This is a bit of a leap, but is there such a thing as female architecture, would you say? It's quite a wide, provocative question!

 

I do love that you've asked this. And a lot have asked us this in relation to the book. The first answer is ‘no’, in the sense that there's nothing that's kind of biologically inherent; you know, the way that women work or think. However, what we found – and I have heard this from a lot of the other architects in interviews – is that the pressures of work, the experiences and the external, contextual challenges that women face are very similar across the world. So, if I name a few – it might be, for instance, being an outsider in their profession, or it might be that they are facing similar post-colonial issues around the world. It might be that they're working in  contexts which have gender and racial discrimination, but it is also because they're operating, for instance, in contexts where climate agendas are some of the most urgent agendas to bring together with social agendas. So, in that sense, because many of the women across the world are dealing with the same battles, often the things that they do are quite similar. And I suppose their position, as outsiders often coming into the profession in a way that is hard-won has taken extra tactics to deliver. That’s what we call in the book, 'women's work'. We show that, yes, a certain kind of women's experience can bring about certain allegiances in their work, and a lot of them we capture in the introduction to the book. But that said, what are the kinds of things that we capture that the women have in common? They work in a very participatory way. They have clear social and climate agendas. They're really interested in low-tech as well as high-tech innovation. You know, they could be true of practitioners across the global south or across practices that are not gender-based, but the women we've chosen do have a lot of these similarities. So, that's my 'yes', but also my 'no'!

 

So, there's nothing as blunt as flicking through the imagery of the book and noticing a certain aesthetic? nothing as obvious as that? That's just too pat, right? 

 

Yes. And I suppose what I would say is that perhaps, if you're flicking through the book, there's a certain bias in our agenda. There's a load of women that we haven't included, and that's probably because we ourselves have been interested in climate agendas or social agendas. So, in a way, perhaps that's what you're seeing as well. But no, there's not a female style. 

 

This is another big, broad question, I do apologize! What can we do about gender imbalance? And indeed, do you see in your milieu in Central Saint Martin's any evidence of improvement in this area?

 

Well, I think I'm always positive. So, what we'd say is, in some areas, if you look at universities on courses, actually, often there are more female students. It's often about what happens when they come out. And when we're listening to the women – and this says something about how difficult it was to find some of them – they're not necessarily going into the big practices. Of course, many of them are; for instance, there are many women in big practices in the book, but what we've really focused on are the ones who go out there and set up their own practices. Often, they're doing that because they find that, for instance, when they've been in the profession a while, women have babies, and childcare issues; they actually make it really difficult to operate in a practice. So, for women, for instance, the crunch point isn't about being a student anymore, and it's not really necessarily about coming out and starting off. It's about the point at which women want to have babies, and how you bring that kind of work-life balance, of bringing up a family, together with working in a practice. Loads of the women who set up their own practices are really looking at the working ethics within their own practice, about how they can help both men and women have work-life balance, and child rearing within their companies. Because the real problem is that women are leaving architecture at this exact point.

 

And that's worse, specifically in our sectors, in the built environment, is it, than others outside of built environment sectors?

 

I can't speak to other sectors, but I think it probably would be true across design, for sure. There's something about the demands of the architectural practice, which is very high, so I think that it's particularly the case within architecture. But in a way, I can't answer your question, because I don't know across other sectors.

 

How did it translate from book to exhibition? Was it a neat transition?

 

Well, yes, that's really interesting. Once the book was published, our hope was that it would be a platform for other conversations, for other network-building, partly because there were so many women that we couldn't have in the book. What we found is that the book has really gained traction. To start with, we threw out the idea that women in the book could set up launch events in their own countries, and a lot of women have picked that up that idea. So far, we've had them in New York, one's coming up in LA, in Johannesburg, in the Caribbean, and we've just been out in Tashkent and Dubai. 

 

Wow!

 

Yeah! So there, the idea was that the idea of network-building amongst women and creating conversations off the back of the book in new contexts with new people, also including architects, not in the book; it's really taken hold. And in that light, what was so exciting about the Roca gallery was that Tom had already worked with Roca, I think, in the past, and Naomi House and Harriet Harriss had worked at the Royal College of Art with Steve Jensen. Steve is the architectural designer who has taken forward a design and concept for the exhibition. We're curating it; he is concept and design, and he's working with a team of graduates from the RCA, and they said, 'We just love the book'. They wanted to do an interpretation of the book in a physical exhibition space to continue the conversation. It's really exciting for us because on the one hand, it shows that a book like this has a lot of traction that other people want to be part of to extend the network and get the news out there. And I suppose what we're quite excited about is that this exhibition is going to present the book in a kind of 3D way, so there'll be some books in the gallery. But Steve, who's a designer and artist, and his team are creating 19 interpretations of buildings for the space. So, in a way, it's taking a 2D book and translating into an exhibition space to attract new audiences to the conversation, but also to showcase the architecture in a new way. We're really excited. And I think that's the hope for the show – new audiences, new ways of relating the book into other formats, and the platform kind of grows.

 

I look forward to the TV mini-series and film to come, and T-shirts! (laughs)

 

 (laughs)

 

And I look forward to meeting you at the exhibition launch. So, thanks for your time! 

 

Okay, thanks David. I look forward to seeing you!