Annual Lecture: Conversazione — Lynne Walker with Elizabeth Darling
Three foundational exhibitions spread over three decades focusing on the history of British women in architecture and on related feminist projects are discussed by Lynne Walker – a central figure in the development of a feminist architectural history in the UK – with Elizabeth Darling at the SAHGB Annual Lecture: Conversazione
As readers will know, the pandemic has caused the Society’s events to move – very successfully – online. This included the annual lecture, which in 2020 was to be given by the distinguished historian Dr Lynne Walker. Aware that the lecture format was not ideally suited to the Zoom platform, it was decided that a more engaging and productive approach would be to hold a conversation with Lynne, during which she reflected on key moments in her career as a feminist architectural historian. The interlocuter was Dr Elizabeth Darling, with whom Lynne collaborated on the AA XX 100 project (2014–17). The Conversazione took place on 14 December and was complemented by a profile in the Architectural Historian, in which Dr Aymee Thorne Clark focused on Lynne’s doctoral thesis on the Arts and Crafts architect, E.S. Prior. Presented here is a transcript of what Lynne (LW) and Elizabeth (ED) discussed.
The conversation began with reference to that article. ED noted how Lynne and Aymee ended their discussion by talking a little about how the disconnect between the maleness of the world that Prior inhabited – such as the men-only Art Workers’ Guild – and the fact that his aunts and mother played significant roles in funding projects on which he worked, pointed Lynne towards the path that was the focus of the evening’s discussion: the path to become a foundational figure in the development of a feminist architectural history in the UK.
ED: You completed your thesis in 1978. Six years later you would curate the first historical exhibition on women and architecture in Britain: Women Architects: Their Work at the RIBA. Might we start our conversation by you reflecting on how you went from defending your thesis to curating that exhibition?
LW: Just to go back a step, although I was not a member of the organised Women’s Movement while writing my thesis in the 1970s, I had been avidly reading feminist critical writing and when going through the periodicals in the RIBA Library looking at the work of late 19th- and early 20th-century architects (Prior, Shaw, Lethaby, Newton, Macartney, etc.) I would note references to women in architecture.
Soon after I completed the thesis in 1978, I wrote a conference paper with Alan Crawford on the organisations of the Arts and Crafts Movement, which highlighted to me the nationwide participation of many women designers and makers in the decorative and applied arts (this was reinforced by Anthea Callen’s book, about women in the Arts and Crafts Movement, Angel in the Studio, published the following year), but no women architects in paper or book were to be seen. As I had been with the women clients and donors to Prior’s architecture, I was again intrigued.
A significant shift was my teaching in Newcastle, where with Cheryl Buckley I set up and ran a course on ‘Women & Design’ in 1982, and in 1983 organised ‘Women in Design’, a design history conference at the ICA – both firsts, we believe. In the midst of the course and conference, I curated ‘Between the Wars: Architecture and Design on Tyneside 1919–1939’, held at Newcastle Polytechnic Gallery, again with Cheryl. It was my initial experience of exhibition-making that strikingly did not include women architects and designers!
However, around this time, a group of women students at Bristol University invited me to give a paper on women in architecture – I was off.
Ethel Charles, the first woman member of the RIBA, RIBA Associates nomination papers, 1898, showing ‘his’ corrected to ‘her’ throughout, exhibited at Women Architects: Their Work, 1984.
A key moment was the approach of the 150th anniversary of the RIBA. An exhibition on women architects was proposed by an RIBA staffer (and the architect and feminist Kate Macintosh pressed from within and later contributed to the exhibition and chaired the Hanging Committee for contemporary work). I was alerted to the proposal by Ruth Kamen in the RIBA Library and then invited to curate. The exhibition, Women Architects: Their Work, was the result. It opened in July 1984.
ED: Who did you have in mind as your primary audience when you curated this exhibition? How did you go about the curation?
LW: As the emphasis was on the architect – the architect as designer – the audience was first and foremost: architects and architectural students as well as architectural historians and the general public.
I was very much feeling my way along, learning on the job. I had no curatorial training. But I was aware of the importance of strong, compelling images within architectural culture. The last thing I wanted would have been just a series of panels and photographs. So 3D objects added interest and represented the range of women’s practice. The architect, Sadie Speight (Lady Martin), for example, was shown to be a prolific designer for industry with a handful of her products from the 1940s, as well as The Flat Book (1939, with J.L. Martin).
In terms of exhibition structure, the history aspect of the display centred on work and key events, and Ethel Charles, the first woman member of the RIBA in 1898, became the starting point of the exhibition.
Lady Elizabeth Wilbraham, Weston Park, Shropshire, 1671 – the first woman architect? Copyright: Mike Hayward/Alamy.
Although I had set out to present a history of professional women architects, with more research I realised that it was important to represent the strand of amateur architects (i.e., before professional practice and the RIBA). Weston Park, 1671, was attributed to Lady Elizabeth Wilbraham and exhibited as the first building designed by a British woman.
A key event in professional practice was also central to the exhibition: Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1927–32, the first major public building in Britain designed by a woman, Elisabeth Whitworth Scott. This is a good example of the importance of drawing an audience in, and I was able to use a set of very good photographs in RIBA Photographs Collection.
Generally, the approach I took was to arrange the exhibition chronologically to move viewers from historical to contemporary architecture, thus establishing, through exhibition items and supporting material in captions and catalogue, a history of women and architecture in Britain from 1671 to 1984. The public sector was very much in evidence with a section carefully researched by Bebbe Klatt on the LCC/GLC, whereas Victorian philanthropists and reformers were linked by Gillian Darley to current architectural practice. A coda of student work ended the exhibition.
ED: That 1984 exhibition was followed in 1997 by the exhibition Drawing on Diversity: women, architecture and practice held at the RIBA Heinz Gallery. How did your approach to curation differ from that which you’d taken in 1984? Were there different emphases, different concerns, that had emerged by that date?
LW: An important aspect of the exhibition was to break up and challenge gendered assumptions about the notion of a monolithic ‘woman architect’, and to find new ways to represent women’s diversity, in terms of gender, race and class, ranging from aristocrats to indigent cottage builder, from middle-class Quakers to feminist architects. Another aim was to show their diverse practices at all levels of the profession from the recent graduate to the established professional. The scope was expanded significantly chronologically (covering the 16th century to the 20th century), which enabled me to define their roles as architects across time, and redefine what an architect was and might be.
Thus while as in the 1984 exhibition, architectural design was still central to the display, this time that idea of a broad range of practices including teaching, writing and research was investigated, prioritised and displayed/revealed through the use of original drawings, photographs, correspondence, artefacts and miscellanea and models, slide shows and a breathtakingly temperamental computer installation.
I decided to move outside strict chronological order and impose a thematic organisation. This included patron builders. My research had led to a rethinking of how women’s role in architectural production had changed over time in order to understand the impact on women of the social, political and economic conditions of how architecture was made before professionalisation. Women, such as Bess of Hardwick, Lady Anne Clifford and Lady Sarah Napier, were identified as patron builders and brought more centrally into the narratives of architectural history.
A key event in 1993 had been the SAHGB annual symposium, ‘The Education of the Architect’, with proceedings edited by Neil Bingham. My paper on women in architectural education focused mainly on the Bartlett, and provided the insight that systematic architectural education was the key to women’s access to architecture.
Lesley Lokko, ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’, Bartlett fifth year project (Distinction), 1995.
So in Drawing on Diversity, I explored how conditions of training and practice both inhibited and facilitated women’s practice within the profession. Of these the most important was systematic architectural education, which began from around the time of the First World War. In the early days of women’s presence in architectural schools, the high standard of architectural drawing by female students was strongly welcomed and heavily called on in Beaux-Arts training. The AA student Betty Scott’s drawing of the Corinthian order (c.1924) showed this typical but substantial skill. Extraordinary levels of conceptual ability, which augured well for future practices, were achieved by contemporary students and exemplified in the exhibition by Lesley Lokko’s fifth-year project (which was awarded a distinction) at the Bartlett, ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ (1995), a series of 12 drawings and a text that explored the relationship between race and architecture.
Competitions were another theme, but their problematic nature was recognised. So we included Zaha Hadid’s model for the Cardiff Bay Opera House competition (1994), which she won and then lost. In contrast Elisabeth Scott won the commission for the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford, based on a model; in a blind competition, she was the only woman out of 72 entries.
Collaboration was an important concept and saw me going beyond the intent of the 1984 exhibition to show an individual’s contribution – Sadie Speight, Jane Drew, Alison Smithson – to articulate different types of architectural collaboration within the essentially collaborative practice of architecture. So I included all-women firms, feminist collectives, the public sector, and most numerously husband-and-wife partnerships.
The exhibition’s most distinctive theme of process and use grew out of commitments by women who were feminists and architects to find common ground in co-operative working and a collaborative, non-hierarchical approach to architectural design. Matrix, the feminist architectural co-operative, emphasised the process of design over the product/building, involving the client or user-group in all aspects of the design. Placing Matrix and muf in an RIBA exhibition, in the heart of the profession’s establishment, allowed their collaborative, user-centred work to be seen. It also displayed their critique of star-struck architecture’s values and organisation, which offered representation and building types that meet the needs of women, often working class and BAME, who are not normally represented in the design process. Although the feminist architecture practice Mitra had been included in the 1984 exhibition, by 1997, women who were architects and feminists had some of the freshest and most powerful ideas and practices, a central theme of the exhibition.
ED: Looking back at these two exhibitions, what do you consider their impact was? Did they lead, for example, to shifts in collecting policy in architecture archives? Was there an influence – or interaction with – developments in scholarship on women and architecture.
Invitation to private view, Drawing on Diversity: women, architecture and practice, exhibition held at RIBA Heinz Gallery, 1997, showing Aiton & Scott Architects (Norah Aiton and Betty Scott), 1930, against a full-size detail of a stair tread, Eva Jiricna Architects, 1994.
LW: In between curating these two exhibitions I had moved from my post at Newcastle to work for RIBA in 1987 as director of development for the library and its collections. There I got to know as colleagues, and very important colleagues: Ruth Kamen, later director, Eleanor Gawne, Neil Bingham, Robert Elwall, Cathy Dembsky, Julian Osley, Nick Savage, Eileen Harris, Jill Lever, John Harris, James Bettley, Charles Hind, Tim Knox, and the archivist, Angela Mace. My research was frequently stimulated and enriched by their suggestions and comments. In turn, they became more alive to women in architecture and their histories. Women architects’ papers and drawings came into the collections, from Elisabeth Benjamin, Norah Aiton, Betty Scott, Jessica Albery and others, and more information populated the very useful biography files.
Also from this time, I must mention and praise the work and friendship of architectural historians, which cannot be underestimated. It’s a very partial list but in chronological order, Godfrey Rubens, Andrew Saint, Alan Powers, Alan Crawford, Gavin Stamp and Gillian Darley.
ED: Taking us much nearer the present, can we talk now about the AA XX 100 project, which ran from 2014 to 2017, on which we both worked. Perhaps you could start by talking through the genesis of the project and what you hoped it would achieve; then we might move on to what you think it represented in terms of a feminist historiography of architecture?
LW: The starting point was the centenary of the AA moving to premises at Bedford Square and discussions about how to mark the event. I was approached by Yasmin Shariff, a member of AA Council, for ideas about how to represent women at the school. My suggestion was an exhibition, book and conference modelled on the RIBA’s sesquicentennial celebrations in 1984, which featured my exhibition devoted to women architects, Women Architects: Their Work; the powers-that-be bought into the project, which became known as AA XX 100, and agreed to fund it. I roped in you, and over four years, we worked most closely with a team at the AA (Eleanor Gawne, Manijeh Verghese, Ed Bottoms, the archivist, and a group of young women architects, all recent AA graduates).
We were aware of the lack of feminist projects and values in architecture schools, and we wanted to stir things up! With the exhibition, we wanted to fill the building with representations of the diverse experience, values and designs of AA women in architecture past and present. Throughout the AA gallery and beyond on the well- trafficked stairway and halls, and also in the social centres of the AA bar and members’ rooms, we placed photographs, models, showed films, artefacts, portraits.
We wanted to include and redefine the AA’s well-known reputation for radical architecture, juxtaposing the innovative aesthetics of their most famous graduate, Zaha Hadid, with the radical initiatives of the first women students who braved not only male resistance within the institution and the profession but the conditions of Britain during World War I and the influenza pandemic of 1918–19. During the first wave of the pandemic, Winifred Ryle, one of the first women students, was measured but optimistic: ‘In the future the woman architect will not only be a vague possibility but an absolute necessity.’
AA Women in Architecture 1917–2017, exhibition installation, Architectural Association Gallery, 2017, showing Zaha Hadid’s concept model for the Hong Kong Peak competition, 1983, and her painting and drawings for the reinvention of Trafalgar Square juxtaposed to silhouettes of the first AA women students of 1917–18. Copyright: Architectural Association/Sue Barr photographer.
In terms of a feminist historiography, our own conclusions about the history of AA women in architecture found that the story of the Architectural Association is at once the history of women’s presence within an educational institution (and a very particular one at that), a history of women’s presence within a profession and a part of the history of 20th- and 21st-century architecture in Britain and the wider world.
More specifically, we revealed another tradition at the AA beyond the notion of it as the home of ‘starchitects’, like Zaha Hadid and Amanda Levete. We sought to portray it as equally the home of collaborative feminist architects, most notably Matrix and muf. This part of the AA’s radical social tradition was shown to be grounded in the strength and importance of inter-war AA women to the architecture of the welfare state and social architecture in both the public and private sectors.
A fond memory of related events during AA XX 100 was the conference panel chaired by Elsie Owusu, and the earlier evening talks called ‘The Lawrence Legacy: Challenging Racism and Celebrating Diversity in Architecture’, at which Stephen’s mother Baroness Doreen Lawrence spoke along with the young black architects Dana Walker and Stephanie Edwards (the latter a Stephen Lawrence scholarship winner and former AA student), who signalled positive energy in the contemporary profession.
ED: Before we draw to a close, I wanted to ask you about your work beyond, for want of a better phrase, ‘pure’ architectural history: an important part of your writing has been exploring different aspects of gender and urban space, while you’ve also done significant work alongside feminist practices such as Matrix, and feminist organisations like the Women’s Design Service (WDS).
LW: I enjoyed the collaborative experience at WDS (which occupied adjoining office space with Matrix). The WDS was an organisation that provided advice and information on women and the built environment through research, consultation and publications, promoting best practice for unfashionable subjects from a gendered perspective, such as public conveniences, disability and offices, and older women and housing.
Beyond women as architectural producers, as you mentioned, my work has often considered gender and urban space, which perhaps I can come back to more fully on another occasion. In addition to publications (such as ‘Home and Away: The Feminist Remapping of Public and Private Space in Victorian London’, in the 2001 book The Unknown City, Contesting Architecture and Social Space), a key outcome has been the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Gallery, which opened in the Euston Road in 2011. Conservation has been an important part of my practice as a historian [see interview with Aymee Thorne Clark]. With a group of women and the new client, the former EGA Hospital, which was run by women for women, was listed, restored, and a new use found for the building, and a permanent exhibition created about the entry of women into medicine and their achievements in the wider social and historical context.
ED: Finally, the thing I note about your career is the way you’ve rarely stayed still; you’ve always been alive to changes in the discipline and in practice as well – I wonder if you had a final comment to make on the differences that strike you about the profession of architectural history and women’s place in it between 1978 and now.
LW: This is not something that I have researched, but my impression was that around 1978–9 academic architectural history had few places for anyone. A few women, such as Hermione Hobhouse at the AA, taught architectural history (e.g., Victorian architecture and garden history). But in polytechnics where the majority of jobs were, design history held sway with its implicit rejection of architecture. And architectural historians who were there had to fight for space in the teaching programme for their subject. So women architectural historians at this time were a minority within a minority and certainly not working at the top of the profession.
If you flip forward to today – you are in a better place to assess women’s place in academe – but it seems to me that although there are more jobs, more research money, more opportunities for publication, and indeed stronger professional organisations, women academics still lack validation at the top of the profession. In my view, however, the biggest change between the late ’70s and today is seen outside the academy in the public sector, Historic England particularly, and in related amenity organisations and societies which focus on conservation. These areas of practice have grown increasingly over the period and offer a career structure and opportunities in architectural history to women at all stages of their careers and provide a platform for making substantial contributions to both history and architecture — with women architectural historians often leading from the front.
Here the conversation finished and we opened up the discussion to the audience. Lynne’s annual lecture will take place at some point during 2021.
Dr Lynne Walker, Senior Fellow, Institute of Historical Research, University of London.
Dr Elizabeth Darling, Reader in Architectural History, Oxford Brookes University, and Convener, Women Architectural Historians’ Network (contact diversity@sahgb.org.uk for further information).