ANY MAGAZINE #4

Xx Voto

ANY 4, Architecture and the Feminine: Mop-Up Work, January/February 1994.

WRITTEN AFTER WORK: A DESCRIPTIVE HISTORY OF ANY MAGAZINE #4

March 20th 2018

“Dear ANY #4,

Forgive me for not writing sooner. It has been decades now, and I’d like to place you into context, but as you may know, we architects still tend to stay very late at work these days, and it’s a challenge to find a quiet conference room to write. So here I am after today’s site visit to a mis-poured stair on level 62, canopy redesign meeting, and a number of rather hasty submittal returns. I’ve had my Pad Thai delivered to my desk (please excuse the honesty of young architect’s domestic sphere here) and am ready to “historically describe” your contributions. I expect you are not too surprised by my delay since, as you made evident, and I am here to report, there has been so much work done but still far more that must come.”

In the early 1990s, a deluge of texts examined and tested the relationships that gender and sexuality had to architecture. The movement built on adopted conceptual schemas from postmodernist and post-structuralist French theorists of the 1970s. Helene Cixous explored the relationship between sexuality and language, Luce Irigaray made the inherent masculine philosophies in our language visible, and Julia Kristeva used physchoanaltics to explore the individual and the body.

Gender studies formalized in the 1970s, emerging from women’s studies and feminism to give space in the academy for writing and thinking on the subject and set the stage for a pluralistic feminisms to emerge.¹ Early texts ranged from liberal to radical, from a focus on equal representation in the discipline—as in the 1976 “Architecture and Urban Planning” by Dolores Hayden and Gwendolyn Wright—to demands to topple the patriarchy—as in Shulamith Firestone’s 1970 book The Dialectics of Sex. Interdisciplinary applications of these new feminist ideas questioned grand narratives and forged new paths of inquiry. Although not yet architectural, an early example of this future thinking is the 1984 “A Cyborg Manifesto” by Donna Haraway, a posthumanist metaphor that reconceived of the decorporealized self through the emergence of a newly connected digital realm. Architecture beyond built work emphasized the contribution that architectural thought can contribute to culture at large.

New emphasis on works of architecture included writing and language in the early ’90s (particularly academics the northeast architecture schools), which put philosophy from Derrida, Deleuze, and Guattari into dialogue in search of meaning between space and semiotics. Projects like Sexuality and Space by Beatriz Colomina deployed feminist interpretive techniques to reread the masters, introduced a new intersection with feminist thought, and laid to foundations for collectives including Assemblage and ANY Magazine to continue the inquiry.

ANY #4’s “Architecture and the Feminine: Mop-up Work” amplified the many voices within architecture, philosophy, classics and gender studies and edified post-structuralist, postmodern, and deconstructivist feminist thought in the architecture academy. The issue contained a correspondence between contributor and editor, included a set of critical essays, displayed exemplars of work in architecture and the feminine, and documented a resulting symposium dialogue “In Any Event” at DIA on November 20, 1993. As a platform for displaying substantive work being done on the issue, guest editor Jennifer Bloomer described the issues as more of a “bag that conforms to the contents” of what is within it than a proscriptive collection. This loose conceptual framework resists categorization in favor for each piece’s subjectivity individually.² Jennifer Bloomer explored the metaphors and metonymy at play in gender and architecture. With language as a loose scheme, her intent to overcome the simplifications, gut associations, and continual metaphorizing within the field goes directly to the overarching action items presented within the magazine and the conference. In a presentation, she described the issue’s intent to give a platform to the wide range of paradigms of working within architecture and the feminine.

Perched courageously in the front of the issue, the series of letters between editor, guest editor, and contributor reveal a dialogue on the discipline’s discomfort with the topic. This correspondence offered readers a generous look at the messy business of championing a topic historically ignored, but it also embraces the difficulties (and elusion) of articulating a grand narrative regarding the conceptual curation being done. As noted by Cynthia Davidson in her Letter to the Reader:

“Why is the idea of the feminine problematic for architecture? What is it about a discussion of the feminine in architecture that for many women still feels like a ghettoization of a cultural issue? Where does the feminine find its site?”

What can ultimately be gleaned from a brief encounter with a journal from 1994 on architecture and the feminine? The project requires a rigor of inquiry and critique akin to that given to the radius of the nosing of the stair, which will keep those in the future from tripping. One must study the difference between painted aluminum and plate bronze as well as the substantive differences in chora by Grosz and by Eisenman. For a practitioner such as myself, it is a reminder to specify all of the above in my practice daily, and to continue to educate myself in all available work. It is a reminder to study the work of Claire Robinson, Michelle Kaufmann, Durham Crout, and Liquid, Inc.; to read and discuss George Hersey, Diana Argest, Elizabeth Grosz, Ann Bergren, and Jennifer Bloomer. The details and complexities of each work are best explored in their original production. To reiterate the action items set forth by Ann Bergren, ANY #4: “Mop-up Work” is a reminder to practitioners of the polyvalence of feminisms at work.

“Anyone who wants to begin this discovery—a discovery as difficult as resisting the force of reality as we have known it—should return to Sheila’s and Frano’s bridges and to your [Jennifer Bloomer] Tabbles of Bower, studying every detail for insight into the principles of an architecture not ‘beyond’ or ‘outside’ the feminine but rather ‘beside’ it, the para-feminine architecture that all three of you have already built.”³

¹ For a more comprehensive survey of shifts in the discourse around feminism and architecture, see Jane Rendell, “Tendencies and Trajectories: Feminist Approaches in Architecture,”in The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory, edited by C. Greig Crysler, Stephen Cairns & Hilde Heynen (Sage, 2012), 85-97..

² Sherry Ahrentzen speaks to the implications of the conceptual clarity of collections at the time, see Sherry Ahrentzen, “The Space between the Studs: Feminism and Architecture” Signs, Vol. 29 No. 1 (Autumn 2003): 179-206.

³ Ann Bergren, “Dear Jennifer” ANY #4 - Architecture and the Feminine: Mop-Up Work (January/February 1994).

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Xx Voto is a licensed architect with a demonstrated history of work in all phases of NYC large-scale mixed-use design and construction. She holds a B.Arch from Cornell University.

The Modern Architecture Network

Laura Foxman

Wireframe sketch, map view. The Modern Architecture Network. Courtesy of Laura Foxman.

Challenging the Canon

The history of modern architecture runs parallel to that of globalization, to an expanded market of international exchange. The Modern Architecture Network outlines the extensive mobility of modern and contemporary architects and diagrams events that brought about a conflux of innovative minds. By diagramming networks of learning, collaboration, movements, world expos, and exhibitions in architecture dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, The Modern Architecture Network’s web-based platform challenges the canon by offering new perspectives on the development of contemporary architecture practice and constitutes a rich tool for evaluating concepts as they emerge and mutate. A user will be able to easily explore and critically interpret each practitioner’s trajectory and draw one’s own conclusions regarding influence and innovation. Since the project’s founding, however, the primary objectives have remained and include:

1) Foregrounding architects who have been marginalized because of gender, race, or location, and whose significance is often overshadowed;

2) Diagramming networks finely embedded within predominant historical narratives so as to uncover threads of great significance and intrigue;

3) Ushering the history of architecture into a new era of big data;

4) Visualizing history as a work in progress, which is both constructed and fragmented;

4) Creating new knowledge.

Practitioners, scholars, and the larger public would all benefit from more robust histories based on interrelation rather than singular feats of mastery. This project promises to be as illuminating for the serious scholar as the curious web surfer, with information sure to prompt as many “ah-ha!”s as “ha-ha!”s. The Modern Architecture Network takes inspiration from projects like Charles Jencks’ diagram, titled The Century is Over, Evolutionary Tree of Twentieth Century Architecture, and Henry and Elsie Withey’s Biographical Dictionary of American Architects (Deceased), but also from questions that have trailed from our own research. Where are all the women and people of color working on their own terms, in their own ways, who have shaken the architectural genealogical tree? Might we include philanthropists like Museum of Modern Art founder Abby Rockefeller for making design accessible and appreciable? What do artists like Rachel Whiteread, Vik Muniz, and Jenny Holzer see in monuments that escapes those entrenched in a stricter disciplinary understanding? Haven’t performance artists such as Adrian Piper and William Pope. L meaningfully challenged boundaries of what does and doesn’t qualify as common space? How about environmentalist Rachel Carson, whose activism has greatly impacted systems thinking? And when we talk about material culture, might we include Coco Chanel and Zelda Wynn Valdes along with Art Smith and Charlotte Perriand? Why not broaden our scope in order to magnify architecture's aegis while engaging a larger public for the sociocultural good? The Modern Architecture Network offers an interactive archival framework that aims to equalize the playing field and challenge disciplinary boundaries.

A comprehensive visual and computational analysis or genealogy of modern architecture has never yet been formalized. The Modern Architecture Network, formerly The Modern Architecture Genealogy, aims to accomplish just that. This project is premised on the belief that a collection of historical documents and accounts can not only provide a reliable record of events, but can also serve as a potent source of energy for what is yet to come.

The difficulty posed by conventional historical projects is that they tend to reinforce existing narratives without questioning them. The Modern Architecture Network instead presents a means to explore latent and potential chronologies that have, for a number of reasons, escaped attention. This interactive archive rewards the curiosity of a user interested in multiple approaches to a subject. By observing and linking patterns, the researcher encounters new perspectives as well as new problems worth considering.

The Modern Architecture Network's primary platform is an interactive website, an online archive that charts the extensive mobility of architects and diagrams their convergences. It begins with the first World Expo, The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, held in London in 1851. This date marks the conjunction of design innovation and globalization. Tracing from this crucial point, where the history of dramatically expanding markets and international trade emerges in consort with the history of modern architecture, the research platform is invaluable to scholars in countless fields including economics, business, and sociology as well.

The Modern Architecture Network encodes complex data sets into easy-to-use models including maps, statistics, timelines, an image archive, and a library of written resources. By diagramming trajectories of pedagogy, collaboration, migrations, and exhibitions in architecture, the platform invites users to critically interpret work and draw their own conclusions on matters of influence and innovation. The Modern Architecture Network is just as much an effort to fortify the legacy of visual histories (such as catalogs, encyclopedias, dictionaries, textbooks, and atlases) as it is to provide a contextual tool for understanding them as part of a continuum—a living, and therefore incomplete, statement.

Since the project's founding, its primary objectives have remained the same: to diagram networks finely embedded within predominant historical narratives so as to uncover threads of great significance and intrigue; to usher the history of architecture into the data frontier where new knowledge can be extracted; and, most importantly, to foreground marginalized figures who, because of gender, race, or location, have been unjustly overshadowed.

When architectural history becomes more inclusive and more honest about its generations of unacknowledged participants, architecture's agency expands. Architecture’s disciplinary fundamentals are challenged and strengthened by engaging the real histories of the creative networks that shape the built environment and its discourses—by duly acknowledging the contributions of lesser-known architects and non-architects.  Indeed, The Modern Architecture Network recognizes contributors, such as patrons, curators, and allied professionals who have collaborated in formulating urban and domestic design schemas, infrastructure, and material culture to the present day.

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Laura Foxman is a Detroit-based architect, information artist, teacher and researcher. She leads the interdisciplinary architecture studio WE ARE ALL COLLAGE. Her projects include architectures, environments, and cultural archives and explore the materiality of place, information, and experience. Foxman is a licensed architect in Michigan and New York.
l.foxman@weareallcollage.com /weareallcollage.com

Queer Space

Olivier Vallerand

Poster of Queer Space exhibition, 1994, at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York. Courtesy Storefront for Art and Architecture.

The emergence of queer theory and its challenges to normative understandings of sexual and gender categories has changed a wide number of disciplines, but its impact on architecture has been quite limited compared to other fields, such as art, art history, geography, or planning. Most queer scholarship in architecture appeared in the mid-1990s. It emerged from two different streams: feminist histories and critiques of the built environment and a larger interest in theory across architecture, including post-structuralist French theory, an important source in the development of queer theory. Building on these diverging sources, queer scholarship in architecture approached different themes with varying objectives.

An important number of these works focused on the issue of visibility, be it in contemporary representations or in architectural history. Aaron Betsky, in one of the most well-known books on the topic, presented a history of spaces designed or used by queer people—mostly gay white men—that he connected with his personal experience of clubs.¹ A similar impulse to make gay and lesbian people visible—a reclaiming of history that is also present in other disciplines—sustained, for example, Alice Friedman’s discussion of Philip Johnson’s Glass House or Katarina Bonnevier and Justine Rault’s analysis of Eileen Gray’s E.1027.² While most of these projects focused on domestic spaces, Maxine Wolfe’s article on lesbian bars, “Invisible Women in Invisible Places,” made clear that the issue of visibility also applied to spaces considered public. Other thinkers looked at how queer people were represented in the profession or in architecture magazines—in one instance, Henry Urbach showed how magazines such as Architectural Digest at once reveal and conceal queer couples by insisting on showing two separate bedrooms in their photographic features, among other strategies.³ Discussions of both historical and contemporary examples, however, often fell into the trap of focusing on privileged gay white males at the expense of more marginalized people (women, transgender people, and people of color being among them) or of trying to identify a “queer design aesthetic,” to use Jonathan Boorstein’s terms.⁴

The focus on visibility of much queer scholarship in architecture aligns itself more with earlier gay and lesbian studies than with the political challenge to categories that underlines queer theory, even if making marginalized people visible is itself a political endeavor. Some architects have, however, built on this political aspect. By the mid-1990s, feminist thinkers had already begun to challenge the gendered assumptions that supported the design and experience of the built environment by focusing on women’s place in it, both as designers and as users. Queer theory pushed for a further rethinking of the ways sexuality and gender intersect with space by questioning the role that architecture plays in the construction of male identity, as exemplified by the essays in the collection Stud: Architectures of Masculinity, edited by Joel Sanders. The political potential of queer space theory has also developed from the shifting focus of architectural history and theory through a discussion of minor architecture, as in John Paul Ricco’s analysis of sex spaces inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s theory of minor literature,⁵ or more broadly through an analysis of cruising spaces, bathhouses, and sexualized bars and clubs.⁶ Others have built from the performative aspect of queer theory to suggest that queer space is, in Christopher Reed’s words, “imminent, [. . .] in the process of, literally, taking place, of claiming territory.”⁷ Similarly, Henry Urbach discussed the ante-closet—the space created by the opening of a closet door—as an ephemeral space where “private and social realms interpenetrate” and as a space where the line between what one hides and what one shows breaks down.⁸ Bridging between disciplines, including architecture, the edited collection Queers in Space: Communities, Public Places, Sites of Resistance explored the interactions between queer identity, activism, and public spaces, underlining the relationship between physical spaces and the political potential of social visibility.⁹

In addition to more traditional essays, scholarship on queer space also materialized in exhibitions such as Queer Space, held at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York in 1994. Organized around the question, “What exactly is queer space?” the projects exemplified many of the approaches discussed here—highlighting the complexity of a concept like queer space but also the importance of thinking about space as layered in a way that acknowledges the diverging political and social implications that different people will experience.

Most of the queer scholarship in architecture has focused on gay men and, more marginally, lesbian women. Only recently have trans people become subjects of discussion, as in Joel Sanders and Susan Stryker’s “Stalled.” Issues surrounding trans people have been much more present in planning discussions, such as in the work of Petra Doan,¹⁰ but they seem to have triggered a renewed interest in architectural discussions after a period of limited visibility in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Sanders has discussed this shift in his own thinking in a recent article published in a special 2017 issue of Log, one of the few architecture journals to devote special issues to the relation of gender, sexuality, and the built environment.¹¹ This interest also aligns with a similar renewed interest in feminist issues. Like earlier scholarship, these new projects present a broad range of interpretations of what queer space can mean, highlighting its potential for rethinking both the practice and study of architecture. The projects return to a socially informed practice of architecture that had been erased in the early years of the twenty-first century by an overwhelming stream of digital experimentations and formal or projective approaches to design. Hopefully, this renewed interest will be sustained as the complex challenges posed by queer theory to architectural practice—particularly the translation of discursive practices into design and construction—call for a sophisticated understanding of the connection between gender, sexuality, and the built environment—something that can only appear with time and careful experimentation.

¹ Aaron Betsky, Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire (New York: William Morrow, 1997).

² Alice T. Friedman, "People Who Live in Glass Houses: Edith Farnsworth, Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe, and Philip Johnson," in Women and the Making of the Modern House : A Social and Architectural History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998); Katarina Bonnevier, "A Queer Analysis of Eileen Gray's E.1027," in Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture, ed. Hilde Heynen and Gulsum Baydar (London & New York: Routledge, 2005); Jasmine Rault, Eileen Gray and the Design of Sapphic Modernity: Staying In (Farnham, Surrey & Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011).

³ Henry Urbach, "Peeking at Gay Interiors," Design book review: DBR 25 (1992).

⁴ Jonathan Boorstein, "Queer Space," in Building Bridges: Diversity Connections: American Institute of Architects National Diversity Conference Proceedings (Washington, D.C.: American Institute of Architects, 1995).

⁵ John Paul Ricco, "Coming Together: Jack-Off Rooms as Minor Architecture," A/R/C, architecture, research, criticism 1, no. 5 (1994).

⁶ Henry Urbach, "Spatial Rubbing: The Zone," Sites, no. 25 (1993); Betsky; Ira Tattelman, "The Meaning at the Wall: Tracing the Gay Bathhouse," in Queers in Space: Communities | Public Places | Sites of Resistance, ed. Gordon Brent Ingram, Anne-Marie Bouthillette, and Yolanda Retter (Seattle: Bay Press, 1997); "Speaking to the Gay Bathhouse: Communicating in Sexually Charged Spaces," in Public Sex/Gay Space, ed. William Leap (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); "Presenting a Queer (Bath)House," in Queer Frontiers: Millennial Geographies, Genders, and Generations, ed. the Queer Frontiers Editorial Collective, et al. (Madison, WI: The University of Winsconsin Press, 2000); Henry Urbach, "Dark Lights, Contagious Space," in Intersections: Architectural Histories and Critical Theories, ed. Jane Rendell and Ian Borden (London and New York: Routledge, 2000).

⁷ Christopher Reed, "Imminent Domain: Queer Space in the Built Environment," Art Journal 55, no. 4 (1996): 64.

⁸ Henry Urbach, "Closets, Clothes, Disclosure," Assemblage, no. 30 (1996): 70.

⁹ Gordon Brent Ingram, Anne-Marie Bouthillette, and Yolanda Retter, eds. Queers in Space: Communities | Public Places | Sites of Resistance (Seattle: Bay Press, 1997).

¹⁰ Petra L. Doan, ed. Planning and Lgbtq Communities: The Need for Inclusive Queer Spaces (New York & London: Routledge, 2015); "Beyond Queer Space: Planning for Diverse and Dispersed Lgbtq Populations," in Planning and Lgbtq Communities: The Need for Inclusive Queer Spaces, ed. Petra L. Doan (New York & London: Routledge, 2015).

¹¹ See for example Log issue 41 (with a section titled “Working Queer”) or The Funambulist issue 13 (on “Queers, Feminists & Interiors”).