‘Other Feminist Stories’ of Architecture
Indujah Srikaran, Katherine Vyhmeister, Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi and Zhengfeng Wang. This is a collaborative piece. All the authors contributed to it equally and the names appear alphabetically.
If architectural history books play a significant role in convening the culture, norms, and values of the architectural discipline to newcomers, then how they teach where we find feminism; from whom we find feminism matters.
Figure 1. Lin on the beam of the Kaiyuan Temple in Hebei, 1933. We have taken all reasonable steps but are unable to determine the copyright owner.
In her book, Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed writes, ‘[i]t might be assumed that feminism is what the West gives to the East [or North gives to the South]. That assumption is a travelling assumption, one that tells a feminist story in a certain way, a story that is much repeated; a history of how feminism acquired utility as an imperial gift.’ Ahmed continues, ‘[t]his is not my story. We need to tell other feminist stories,’ referring to her auntie, Gulzar Bano, as one of her first ‘feminist teachers’ – ‘a Muslim woman, a Muslim feminist, a brown feminist’.
Drawing on Ahmed’s words, we hope to make a distinct case for a global history of women in architecture in this blog post with reference to the first women who became architects in China, Sri Lanka, Chile and Iran: Lin Huiyin (Phyllis Whei Yin Lin, 林徽因) (1904-1955), Minnette De Silva (1918-1998), Dora Riedel Seinecke (1906-1982) and Nectar Andreff- Papazian (1924-).
If ‘[a]rchitectural history books play a significant role in convening the culture, norms, and values of the architectural discipline to newcomers,’ then how they teach ‘where we find feminism; from whom we find feminism matters.’ In this respect, our aim should not merely be to highlight the career of ‘understudied’ or ‘forgotten’ women in histories of architecture in the twentieth century, to call for writing histories of how women architects made China, Sri Lanka, Chile and Iran ‘modern’ or to discuss how they challenged ‘categories of modernism’ – as important as these topics are. For example, as one of the earliest female architects and architectural historians in China, Lin has been studied for her role in the establishment of the Architectural Department of Northeastern University, her study of ancient Chinese building structures (Figure 1), and her participation in designing the National Emblem (1950) and the Monument to the People's Heroes at Tiananmen Square (1958). Similarly, as the first qualified female architect in Sri Lanka and the first Asian woman to become an associate member of the RIBA, De Silva has been studied for being the founder of ‘Modern Regionalism’ and the co-founder of the Modern Architectural Research Group (MARG).
Karen Burns and Lori Brown suggest ‘transnational histories’ and ‘biographical micro-histories’ as sites for ‘unsettling the terms, chronology, and geography of feminist histories of architecture.’ All these four women did have ‘transnational lives’. A female student, Lin was unable to enrol in the architecture programme and obtained instead a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1927. De Silva studied first in Bombay in 1938 and later at the Architectural Association (AA) in 1945, before moving back to Sri Lanka and opening her own practice in Kandy in 1948. She then travelled to Greece, Iran, Pakistan, India and Afghanistan in the 1960s, went to London in 1973, and taught in Hong Kong in 1975 and eventually reopened her studio in Kandy in 1979. Likewise, Riedel Seinecke, after graduating from the Universidad de Chile, continued her studies at the University of Stuttgart (Figure 2) and Andreff studied at École des Beaux-Arts and worked in France, and for some time in Algeria, in the 1950s before moving back to Iran in 1959.
Figure 2. Dora Riedel in 1935. @ #MujerArquitectA
However, these histories should not fail to consider that the transnational histories of these women do not merely relate to their transnational mobility. They have ‘transnational lives’ because they travel to ‘us’; they travel with ‘us’. It is important to write about them because, like Ahmed to whom feminism travelled ‘growing up in the West, from the East,’ feminism travels to and with students from the ‘East’ to the ‘West’ or from the ‘South’ to the ‘North’. De Silva’s mother was a suffragette activist who simultaneously fought for independence from colonialism, yet, like Ahmed’s auntie, none of these women necessarily needed to have used the explicit term ‘feminism’. As Lucy Delap emphasises in her most recent book, Feminisms: A Global History, ‘the story of feminism is not allowed to revert to type’. ‘Global “feminisms,”’ as Delap puts it, ‘cannot be easily amalgamated or grounded under any one definition.’
‘The well-known “headliner” figures of feminist history’ in the twentieth century were important and these women may have read their ideas, but not ‘in isolation from the local context’. Indeed, Lin was an important member of the Beijing School, a group of writers who, in the late 1920s and 1930s, defended Chinese traditional culture by problematising the legacy of the May Fourth Movement in favour of a Western type of modernity. Meanwhile, she provided a counter-argument against the spirit of Confucianism towards women that ‘it is the virtue of a woman to be without talent.’ Therefore, describing, for example, Lin and De Silva as a ‘renaissance woman’ and a ‘difficult woman’ respectively offers a Eurocentric vision of their place in the feminist histories of architecture. Additionally, these terms exclude Riedel Seinecke, whose only architectural work was the family house she designed and built together with her husband in Innsbruck in 1947 and in whose name the Colegio de Arquitectos de Chile offers an award since 2017.
Shifting our aim to from where and whom we find feminism demands paying attention to specific local contexts and searching for alternative terms of references. Mansourah Pirnia has offered an option as regards Andreff, that is, salar zan, which means neither ‘renaissance’ nor ‘difficult’. Importantly, it situates her alongside such Iranian mythological female figures as Rudaba. In other words, a shift in our aim helps not only to tell more diverse stories but also to provide more accessible resources for students.
Further reading
Burns, Karen, and Lori Brown. ‘Telling Transnational Histories of Women in Architecture, 1960-2015.’ Architectural Histories 8, no. 1 (2020): 1-11. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/ah.403
Delap, Lucy. Feminism: A Global History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020.
Desai, Madhavi, Women Architects and Modernism in India: Narratives and Contemporary Practices. London and New York: Routledge, 2016.
Gürel, Meltem Ö., and Kathryn H. Anthony, ‘The Canon and the Void: Gender, Race, and Architectural History Texts.’ Journal of Architectural Education 59, no. 3 (2006): 66-76.
Klimpel, F. La Mujer Chilena (el aporte femenino al progreso de Chile) 1910-1960. Santiago: Ediciones Andrés Bello, 1962.
Pirniya Mansurah. Salar zanan-e Iran. Washington, 1995.
Prado-fonts, Carles. ‘Fragmented Encounters, Social Slippages: “Lin Huiyin’s In Ninety-Nine Degree Heat”.’ Lectora: Revista de Dones i Textualitat 16 (2010): 125-41.
Song, Weijie. ‘The Aesthetic versus the Political: Lin Huiyin and Modern Beijing.’ Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 36 (2014): 61–94.
Wilma Fairbank. Liang and Lin: Partners in Exploring China's Architectural Past. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.
Indujah Srikaran is a Part II Architectural Assistant and writer working in Warwickshire, with a BA (hons) in Architecture and MArch degree from De Montfort University. Indujah is interested in social mobility, racial and gender inequalities, and pedagogical methods within the built environment and has part-time experience in teaching architecture and writing for the RIBAJ.
Katherine Vyhmeister is an architectural historian trained in Latin American and Chilean history. She is a PhD Candidate in Architectural History at the University of Edinburgh. Her research examines the role that the built environment played in the nation-building of Chile during the nineteenth century, focusing on the period immediately after independence from Spain.
Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi is a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy, University College Dublin, where they finished their PhD in 2018 as an IRC doctoral scholar. In 2019-2020, Sara was a visiting researcher at the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, University of Edinburgh, on a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
Zhengfeng Wang is a PhD candidate in Art History at University College Dublin. Based on archival work involving the architectural projects in interwar Shanghai, British colonial Hong Kong, and Beijing under the Communist regime, her research project explores how the commercial buildings modernized Chinese everyday life.