The “Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration” project labours in concert with a growing body of initiatives to write feminist histories of modern architecture through collaborative and intersectional historiographic practices. These redistribute power, co-produce solidarity, and reassess objects and methods that have been turned to with regularity in architectural history. We credit and attempt to extend that platform.1

The broader project follows two premises, as does this themed section and related contributions within this issue of Architecture Beyond Europe. The first is that the dynamic of a situated and re-situated perspective is foundational to feminist histories of architecture. The second is that feminist historiographical approaches destabilize presumptions of fixity that have driven the writing of architectural histories. With the goal of opening architectural historiography to narratives, perspectives, and practices based on these arguments, in this issue, we present histories that together employ feminist methods and gather empirical studies of women’s work, which emerged from acts and experiences of migration performed individually or collectively. We see these as narratives of migration into and out of geographies of control and subjugation, beyond gender or gender framings, across lifeworlds.

In narratives of migrants who were identified with architectural modernism in the most conventional sense, who crossed borders in the colonial and postcolonial worlds, we have found repeated instances in which they focus on the vernacular, the folkloric, the everyday, the “anonymous.” A transnational, cosmopolitan mobility oriented several such figures toward proving grounds outside established sociocultural, geographical, and professional territory, in which they generated debates on heritage, regionalism, and the everyday.2 In short, their migrations turned a lens on culture as architecture. Their practices posited architecture not as exceptional, but as entangled with many other forms of cultural production. We argue that the view of a stranger conditioned Sybil Moholy-Nagy’s fascination with the grain silo and other utilitarian American architectures, or spurred Lina Bo Bardi to curate and narrate the material culture of Bahia, as examples.

In narratives of migrants whose designs, built forms, and constructed environments have not been understood as authored, or of anonymous objects illegible within historical frameworks, we have found instances of empowering links between mobility and architectural forms and practices. The authority embodied by certain migratory works—camps built by refugees, exhibitions curated by exiled artists, urban spaces seized by protestors, radical journals circulated ephemerally—poses a meaningful challenge to the legitimacies and stabilities architecture purportedly offers. Writing feminist architectural histories of migration demands seeing the bodies of labourers within the grid of authorship, acknowledging the spatial practices of occupation by activists or prisoners, engaging the obscured work of teachers, researchers, and writers, studying material environments built by migrants, and naming homemakers and others whose designated use of architecture endowed it with value. Such iterations, which may have lacked signature but not significance, created or unsettled architectural discursivity and enacted forms of power predicated upon migration and mobility, or their mirrors, restriction and confinement.

  • 1. While there is a broad literature to cite, the following interventions represent collaborative historiographic practices whose articulated aims in the relationship between theory, historiography, and practice have informed the “Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration” project. Jane Rendell, Barbara Penner and Iain Borden (eds.), Gender Space Architecture: an interdisciplinary introduction, London: Routledge, 2000 (The Architext series); Hilde Heynen and Gülsüm Baydar (eds.), Negotiating Domesticity: spatial productions of gender in modern architecture, London: Routledge, 2005; Hélène Frichot, Catharina Gabrielsson and Helen Runting(eds.), Architecture and Feminisms: Ecologies, Economies, Technologies, London; New York, NY: Routledge, 2017 (AHRA critiques. Critical studies in architectural humanities, 13); Jane Rendell, “Chapter 4: Tendencies andTrajectories: Feminist Approaches in Architecture,” in C. Greig Crysler, Stephen Cairns and Hilde Heynen, The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory, London; Los Angeles; New Delhi: SAGE, 2012; Claire Jamieson, Torsten Lange and Lucía C. Pérez-Moreno, “Architectural Historiography and Fourth Wave Feminism, special issue of Architectural Histories (forthcoming); Karin Reisinger and Meike Schalk (eds.), Becoming a Feminist Architect, special issue of Field, vol. 7, no. 1, 2017. URL: http://field-journal.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/FIELD-2017-latest.pdf. Accessed 02 March 2020; Idem, “Styles of Queer Feminist Practices and Objects,” Architecture and Culture, vol. 5, no. 3, 2017; Justine Clark, Naomi Stead, Karen Burns, Sandra Kaji-O'Grady, Julie Willis, Amanda Roan and Gill Matthewson, Parlour: women, equity, architecture, n.p.: Parlour,2012), Christina Budde, Mary Pepchinski, Peter Cachola Schmal and Wolfgang Voigt (eds.), Frau Architekt: Seit Mehr Als 100 Jahren: Frauen Im Architektenberuf/Over 100 Years of Women in Architecture, Exhibition Catalogue (Frankfurt am Main, Deutsches Architekturmuseum, 30 September 2017-8 March 2018), Tübingen; Berlin: Wasmuth; Frankfurt am Main: Deutsches Architekturmuseum, 2017; Lilian Chee, Barbara Penner, Sophie Hocchaeusl, Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi and Naomi Stead (eds.), Situating Domesticities, edited volume in preparation; Isabelle Doucet and Hélène Frichot, “Editorial: Resist, Reclaim, Speculate: Situated perspectives on architecture and the city,” Architectural Theory Review, vol. 22, no. 1, 2018; Ana María León, Tessa Paneth-Pollak, Olga Touloumi and Martina Tanga, “Contested Spaces: Colony, Plantation, School, Prison, Kitchen, Closet,” Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative lecture module. URL: https://gahtc.org/browse/#heading_28. Accessed 2 March 2020; Rosalyn Deutsche, Aruna D’Souza, Miwon Kwon, Ulrike Müller, Mignon Nixon and Senam Okudzeto, “Feminist Time: A Conversation,” Grey Room, vol. 31, no. 1, Spring 2008, p. 32-67; The Funambulist, no. 13, special issue Queers, Feminists & Interiors. URL: https://thefunambulist.net/magazine/queers-feminists-interiors. Accessed 2 March 2020. “Women in Architecture” series, Places. URL: https://placesjournal.org/series/women-in-architecture/. Accessed 2 March 2020; “Gender and Academic Leadership in Architecture in India,” symposium convened by Madhavi Desai, Anuradha Chatterjee and Kush Patel (Thamarassery, Avani Institute of Design, 21-27 March 2020) (online version forthcoming); Architectural Historiography and Fourth Wave Feminism, Architectural Histories special collection (forthcoming); Now What?! Advocacy, Activism, and Alliances in American Architecture since 1968, exhibition curated by ArchiteXX (Lori Brown, Andrea Merrett, Sarah Rafson and Roberta Washington), New York, Pratt Institute, 24 May-6 July 2018; African Mobilities: This Is Not a Refugee Camp Exhibition, exhibition curated by Mpho Matsipa, Munich, Architekturmuseum der TU München, 26 April-19 August 2018; Workaround—Women, Design, Action, exhibition curated by Kate Rhodes, Fleur Watson and Naomi Stead, Melbourne, RMIT University, 25 July-11 August 2018; see also curation projects by Jackfruit Research & Design, for example: Mutable: Ceramic and Clay Art in India since 1947, exhibition curated by Sindhura D. M. and Annapurna Garimellawith Jackfruit Research & Design, Mumbai, Piramal Museum of Art, 13 October 2017-15 January 2018; Preview of Works by Ramesh Pithiya, exhibition curated by Jackfruit Research & Design, Bangalore, Milind Nayak’s studio, 26-30 May 26 2006, with Art of the Matter: A Series on Art and Literature, “1: Queerness,” by Ruchika Chanana(Kimaaya theater company).
  • 2. For example, such figures might include (and are not limited to): Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, Elsa Gidoni Mandelstamm, Sybil (Sybille) Moholy-Nagy (Pietzch), Charlotte Perriand, Martta Martikainen-Ypyä, Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, Dorothy Hughes, Jane Drew, Georgia Louise Harris Brown, Perin Mistri, Lina Bo Bardi, Erica (Erika) Mann (Schoenbaum), Minnette De Silva, Gillian Hopwood, Denise Scott Brown, Hannah Schreckenbach, Flora Ruchat-Roncati, and Diana Lee-Smith.
“A Future Architect?” pencil on paper drawing by S.M. Pithawalla, and “Women Should Not Become Architects!” remarks by G.B. Kahirasagar to the Sir J.J. College of Art School of Architecture Literary and Debating Society.
“A Future Architect?” pencil on paper drawing by S.M. Pithawalla, and “Women Should Not Become Architects!” remarks by G.B. Kahirasagar to the Sir J.J. College of Art School of Architecture Literary and Debating Society. These remarks opened a discussion with Perin Mistri, “our only lady student of Architecture.” Mistri became licensed by the Royal Institute of British Architects (riba) and practiced in Bombay for several years, as a principal in an architectural firm and the Secretary of the Indian Institute of Architects. Mistri’s firm apprenticed Minnette de Silva, who moved to Bombay from Ceylon, studied in the College, and later became an Associate of the riba. The migrations of these two architects (to London and back, elsewhere in Asia) shaped their architectural and intellectual careers. From Shilpa Sagar, Sir J.J. College of Architecture Literary & Debating Society journal, 1932.