Expanding Agency: Women, Race and the Global Dissemination of Modern Architecture

Project Information

Expanding Agency

Grant agreement ID: 101019419

DOI

10.3030/101019419

EC signature date 5 May 2021

Start date 1 January 2022

End date 31 December 2026

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 2 082 906,00

EU contribution

€ 2 082 906,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN, NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, DUBLIN
Ireland

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - Expanding Agency (Expanding Agency: Women, Race and the Global Dissemination of Modern Architecture)

Reporting period: 2023-07-01 to 2024-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Expanding Agency investigates the ways in which patronage, journalism, entrepreneurship, and institution building can be used as lenses to understand the contributions that ethnic minorities and women have made to the global dissemination of modern architecture and design between 1920 and 1970. This in turn, it is hoped, will serve as the basis for writing more inclusive histories of modern architecture that offer greater encouragement to diverse cohorts of architecture students and thus contribute to the development of a broader based architectural culture better able to meet the social challenges posed by issues such as migration and sustainability.

Although since the middle of the nineteenth century women have made considerable inroads into the professions of landscape architecture, as well as interior decoration and product design, the practice of architecture continues in most countries to be dominated by men and, at the international level, primarily by men of European and Japanese descent. Expanding Agency explores the role that women and members of ethnic minorities, primarily African Americans, played in transmitting modern architecture and design between 1920 and 1970. It pays particular attention to the way in which this was documented in and encouraged through popular publications targeted at women readers.

The project intends thus to expand our understanding of who had agency in a narrative that remains central to training of architects and more generally to our interpretations of who has had agency in the shaping of the built environment. Taking a global approach also helps build a more nuanced understanding of how architecture, landscape architecture, interior decoration, and the design of furnishing are transformed by new ideas that emanate from a multiplicity of sources. This in turn can help support a more diverse profession that, in the wake of #metoo and Black Lives Matter, is better prepared to engage with a broad public, including to address such social challenges as migration and sustainability.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Expanding Agency’s project team currently consists of two PhD students, both of whom advanced to candidacy in the spring of 2024; two post-doctoral fellows; a research assistant; and the PI as well as a project manager.

The team has conducted archival research and site visits in Belgium, Ireland, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. They have presented the preliminary results of their research in conferences, lectures, and workshops held in Canada, Ireland, Germany, Greece, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The project’s research been published in scholarly journals based in Brazil, China, Spain, and the United States, as well as in book chapters with two academic presses in the United Kingdom. A website and social media accounts on Instagram, X, and Facebook chronicle these activities. The website includes links to open access publications and, within one year, to the repositories in which the others have been placed. A book on the Belgian Friendship Building on the campus of Virginia Union University in Richmond, Virginia, co-authored by Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Katherine Kuenzli, and Bryan Clark Green is forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press; a number of other book chapters and journal articles are in press or currently undergoing peer review.

In June 2024 the project’s conference Minding Her Business took place across three days at the ESB Headquarters and the National Museum of Ireland Collins Barracks. Nina Stritzler-Levine gave the keynote address; fifteen scholars whose work addresses examples of female entrepreneurship related to architecture from across five continents also contributed.

For the first five months of the project, James-Chakraborty was an Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. In the autumn of 2022 she spent two weeks at the University of Toronto as a W. Bernard Herman Distinguished Visiting Scholar.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Expanding Agency has made substantial progress in advancing the understanding of the influence that African American patronage of architecture, journalism by and targeted at women about architecture, and entrepreneurial activities of women affecting architecture had on the shaping of the built environment, and on the expression of communal and individual identity, particularly but by no means exclusively in the domestic sphere.

Because the case studies addressed by the project’s team members and by participants in the conference it hosted are so geographically diverse, no single conclusion can encompass them all. Nonetheless, several findings can be highlighted. First, the architecture of the campuses of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the United States offers important evidence of the engagement of African Americans, including African American architects, with architectural modernism as part of their aspirations for educational, economic, and political advancement in the face of racist discrimination. Second, the study of shelter magazines and other mass market publications targeted at women, reveals the extent to which in their capacity as both journalists and consumers, women in many different parts of the world were exposed to new ideas about architecture and design, often before they appeared in local publications targeting architects. Third, the role of class, caste, and race contribute to enormous differences in the way in which domesticity was imagined and modernism was marketed around the world. Fourth and finally, the range of activities in which women engaged with architecture and design in order to make their own living and/or to engender social change is much more extensive than has been previously recognized.

These findings offer new templates for architectural and design historians working on other places and periods to write more inclusive histories. They should also provide materials to inform more inclusive pedagogies that in turn inspire diverse student cohorts to remain in the profession or to be aware of the compelling alternatives available to them. Finally, the hope is that Expanding Agency’s results will contribute to the formation of a broader based architectural culture in which the interests of a diverse public are given more weight.

Auditorium designed by Hilyard Robinson and Paul Revere Williams, Howard University