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  • March 03, 2021

Women’s History Month Reading List Foregrounds Figures Shifting Practice and Culture

This installment of the Kappe Library reading list was curated in honor of March being Women’s History Month, highlighting a broad selection of titles, encompassing topics from the resilient and revolutionary work of some of the profession’s most influential practitioners to the political and social implications of women entering the architecture discipline thereby enduringly innovating the built environment. The list also includes a documentary film making visible the work and words of six women employed by Frank Lloyd Wright’s studio at a time in which very few women were represented in the field.

In addition to the selections below, Kappe Librarian Stefanie Crump has compiled texts and videos published on or by SCI-Arc faculty, staff, and alumni who happen to be women.

Suffragette city book cover
Suffragette City: Women, Politics and the Built Environment

SCI-Arc regularly releases a reading list curated by the Kappe Library's Manager Kevin McMahon and Librarian Stefanie Crump representing a cohesive, interdisciplinary collection of books featuring pertinent themes and authors. The reading lists reflect the overall mission of the Kappe Library to build its collection with representation and inclusivity in mind, but also incongruity, specificity, and relevance to the discourses taking place at SCI-Arc.

breaking ground book cover

Breaking ground: architecture by women / Jane Hall, Phaidon, 2019.

"Would you still call me a diva if I were a man?" asked Zaha Hadid, challenging as she did so more than 100 years of stereotypes about female architects. A century in which women were refused entry to architecture schools, were denied degrees when they had completed courses, a century in which even now, women occupy just ten per cent of the highest-ranking jobs in architecture firms. In contrast, Breaking Ground is a pioneering, even essential, celebration of incredible architecture designed by women. Featuring more than 150 architects and buildings, and spanning the last 100 years, Breaking Ground is both a glorious visual manifesto and a timely record of the extraordinary contribution female architects have made to the profession.

AA women in architecture book cover

AA women in architecture, 1917-2017 / edited by Elizabeth Darling & Lynne Walker, AA Publications, 2017

October 2017 marks the centenary of the admission of the first female students to the Architectural Association. Published to coincide with a symposium, exhibition, and series of talks all celebrating this event, AA Women in Architecture puts forward the stories of women who have entered the architectural profession and their contributions to architectural practice and education.

Where are the women architects? book cover

Where are the women architects? / Despina Stratigakos, Princeton University Press, 2016

For a century and a half, women have been proving their passion and talent for building and, in recent decades, their enrollment in architecture schools has soared. Yet the number of women working as architects remains stubbornly low, and the higher one looks in the profession, the scarcer women become. Law and medicine, two equally demanding and traditionally male professions, have been much more successful in retaining and integrating women. So why do women still struggle to keep a toehold in architecture? Where Are the Women Architects? tells the story of women’s stagnating numbers in a profession that remains a male citadel, and explores how a new generation of activists is fighting back, grabbing headlines, and building coalitions that promise to bring about change.

100 women architects book cover

100 women architects in the studio of Frank Lloyd Wright, Volume 1 [videorecording] / written and directed by Beverly Willis

At a time when few architectural firms would hire women, Frank Lloyd Wright—the visionary behind the Guggenheim Museum’s design—unhesitatingly employed more than one hundred, giving them both training and the opportunity to practice. This short documentary film presents the work and words of six of these women—Marion Mahony, Isabel Roberts, Lois Davidson Gottlieb, Jane Duncombe, Eleanore Petersen, and Read Weber—what they gleaned from their time in Wright’s studio, and stories from their own remarkable careers.

Women's places book cover

Women’s places: architecture and design 1860-1960 / edited by Brenda Martin & Penny Sparke, Routledge, 2003

What was different about the environments that women created as architects, designers, and clients at a time when they were gaining increasing political and social status in a male world? Through a series of case studies, Women's Places: Architecture and Design 1860-1960, examines in detail the professional and domestic spaces created by women who had money and the opportunity to achieve their ideal. Set against a background of accepted notions of modernity relating to design and architecture of the late 19th and early twentieth centuries, this book provides a fascinating insight into women's social aspirations and identities.

Suffragette city book cover

Suffragette city: women, politics and the built environment / edited by Elizabeth Darling & Nathaniel Walker, Routledge, 2020

Suffragette City brings together a collection of illustrated essays dedicated to exploring and analyzing cases in which women have resourcefully leveraged or defied the politics of gender to form and reform architecture and urbanism. Throughout much of modern history, women have been assigned to the margins and expected to play passive social roles. Suffragette City draws on nineteenth- and twentieth-century architectural case studies from the English-​speaking world, including the USA, South Africa, Scotland, India, and England, to examine places and moments when women stepped into the center of public life and claimed opportunities to shape the fabrics of their communities. Their engagements with the built environment consistently transcended architecture to achieve the level of urbanism, as whole networks of relationships came into their purview, transforming the architecture of socio-political connection as well as the confronting the physical divisions that have historically lay along racial, economic, and gendered lines.

—

Current faculty:

Kristy Balliet

  • Bair, Kelly, Kristy Balliet, et al, Possible mediums, Actar Publishers, 2018
  • Diaz, Granados, Ramiro, Sessions: M. Casey Rehm, Kristy Balliet, Maxi Spina, Mira Henry, SCI-Arc Press, 2019

Jackilin Hah Bloom

Natou Fall

Hsinming Fung (Hodgetts + Fung)

  • Bratton, Denise, “Hodgetts + Fung: the art of the remix,” Architectural Design, September/October 2005, Vol.75, #5, p.107-114
  • Forster, Kurt Walter, “Special feature: Hodgetts and Fung,” A + U: Architecture and Urbanism, March 1991, #3 (246), p.68-128
  • Fung, Hsinming, “Hodgetts + Fung: Robert Frost Auditorium renovation,” June 18, 2019, via SCI-Arc Channel
  • Lan, Bruce Q. (editor), Hodgetts + Fung: series of contemporary architects studio report in the United States, China Architecture & Building Press, 2005
  • Philips, Steven, L.A. [Ten]: interviews on Los Angeles architecture, 1970s-1990s, Lars Müller Publishers, 2014

Marcelyn Gow (SERVO)

Margaret Griffin (Griffin Enright Architects)

Soomeen Hahm

Kerenza Harris

Mira Henry

Betty Kassis

Karel Klein (Ruy Klein)

Zeina Koreitem (MILLIØNS)

Karen Lohrmann

  • Lohrmann, Karen (editor), The Culture NOW project: UCLA Suprastudio 2010-11, UCLA, Architecture and Urban Design, 2011

Angelica Lorenzi

  • "Kepos_cpdg," World Architecture, February 26, 2018 (with Dennis Schiaroli)

Elena Manferdini

  • Edwards, Meghan, “Lace’s cutting edge,” Interior Design, June 2008, Vol.79, #8, p.158-187 (SCI-Arc exhibition)
  • “Elena Manferdini & Florencia Pita: Form@ Color,” June 2, 2017, via SCI-Arc Channel
  • Griggs, Christina & Elena Manferdini, “Color corrections,” Log, Summer 2020, #49, p.105-109
  • Manferdini, Elena, “Building portraits,” PLAN Journal, Spring 2016, #1, p.7-16
  • Manferdini, Elena, Elena Manferdini, Equal Books, 2011

Rachael McCall

  • McCall, Rachael, Frayed, September 8-November 25, 2018, A+D, Architecture and Design Museum, Los Angeles, California

Lucy McRae

Kavior Moon

Anna Neimark (First Office)

  • Atwood, Andrew & Anna Neimark, Nine essays, Graham Foundation, 2015
  • Keane, Katharine, “Next Progressives: First Office,” Architect, December 2017, Vol.106, #12, p.36-38- 39
  • Neimark, Anna & Andrew Atwood, “How to domesticate a mountain,” Perspecta, 2013, Vol.46, p.46- 61

Claire Phillips

Florencia Pita

Mary-Ann Ray (Studio Works)

Marrikka Trotter

  • Choi, Esther & Marrikka Trotter (editors), Architecture at the edge of everything else, MIT Press, 2010
  • Choi, Esther & Marrikka Trotter (editors), Architecture is all over, Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2010
  • Trotter, Marrikka, “The discrete charm of the glitch,” Architectural Design, March/April 2019, Vol.89, #2, p.124-129
  • Marrikka Trotter: 13 ways of thinking about heteronomy, part 7 (March 25, 2019)

Devyn Weiser (Testa & Weiser)

  • “Extreme networks: Peter Testa and Devyn Weiser,” Architectural Design, November/December 2006, Vol.76, #6, p.42-43
  • Fortmeyer, Russell, “A fetish for fabrication,” Architectural Record, October 2011, Vol.199, #10, p.97-100 (SCI-Arc's Robot House)
  • Peter Testa, Devyn Weiser, Greg Lynn & Jeffrey Kipnis (April 1, 2015)
  • Testa, Peter & Devyn Weiser, “Emergent structural morphology,” Architectural Design, January 2002, Vol.72, #1, p.13-16

Jenny Wu (Oyler Wu Collaborative)

Mimi Zeiger

  • Durfee, Tim & Mimi Zeiger, Made up, Actar Publishers, 2017
  • Sitz, Miriam, “U.S. Pavilion’s seven scales of citizenship at Venice Biennale,” Architectural Record, April 2018, Vol.206, #4, p.28-29 (Exhibition co-curator)
  • Zeiger, Mimi, “Building sisterhood: feminists past and present have always sought to reposition architecture as a collective and interdisciplinary endeavor,” Metropolis, July/August 2019, Vol.39, #1, p.96-103
  • Zeiger, Mimi, “Feedback loops: or, past futures haunt architecture’s present,” Architectural Design, July/August 2019, Vol.89, #4, p.46-53
  • Zeiger, Mimi, Tiny Houses in cities, Rizzoli, 2016 (See also: Tiny Houses (2009), and Micro Green: tiny houses in nature (2011))

Former instructors and staff:

Ann Bergren (Historian, theorist, classicist)

  • Bergren, Ann, “Dear Jennifer,” Any, 1994, Vol.1, #4, p.12-15
  • Bergren, Ann, “The (re)marriage of Penelope and Odysseus: architecture, gender, philosophy,” Assemblage, August 1993, #21, p.6-23
  • Hankwitz, Holly, “The right to rewrite: feminism and architectural theory,” Inland Architect, January/February 1991, Vol.35, #1, p.52-55
  • Text & textures of urban memory (March 18, 1988)

Rebecca L. Binder

  • "Pacific Condominiums, Santa Monica, California, 1980-82," GA Houses, March 1983, #13, p.168-173
  • Whiteson, Leon, "Campus moxie: Visual Arts Facility, University of California at San Diego," Architecture, July 1993, Vol.82, #7, p.88-93

Phyllis Birkby

Marianne Burkhalter (Burkhalter Sumi)

Pamela Burton

Eugenia Butler (Artist)

  • Eugenia Butler moderated “Fire in the Library,” a series of discussions with people from wide ranging fields (artists, poets, theorists, scientists, etc.). View the collection via SCI-Arc Media Archive
  • Shurkus, Marie B. “Witnessing Eugenia Butler’s Kitchen Table,” X-Tra Contemporary Art Quarterly, Winter 2011, Vol.14, #2

Victoria Casasco

Diane Caughey

  • Sato, Toshiro, "Conversations with women in architecture," Space Design, 1990, #309, p.6-22

Annie Chu (Chu + Gooding Architects)

Joan Copjec (Philosopher)

  • Copjec, Joan (editor), Shades of noir: a reader, Verso, 1993

Margaret Crawford (Architecture historian)

  • Chase, John, et al (editors), Everyday Urbanism: featuring John Chase, Margaret Crawford, and John Kaliski, Monacelli Press, 1999
  • Crawford, Margaret, Building the workingman’s paradise, Verso, 1995
  • Margaret Crawford: the Situationist in relation to consumer society (February 16, 1994)
  • Mehrotra, Rahul (editor), Everyday urbanism: Margaret Crawford vs. Michael Speaks, University of Michigan, and A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture, 2005

Milica Dedijer-Mihich

  • McCoy, Esther, "The Green house", Arts + Architecture, 1982, Vol.1, #3, p.45-49 (via US Modernist)

Ena Dubnoff

Heather Flood

Diane Ghirardo (Architecture historian)

  • Diane Ghirardo: architecture and identity in apartheid Cape Town (January 15, 2003)
  • Ghirardo, Diane, Aldo Rossi and the spirit of architecture, Yale University Press, 2019
  • Ghirardo, Diane, Architecture after modernism, Thames and Hudson, 1996
  • Ghirardo, Diane, Building new communities: New Deal America and Fascist Italy, Princeton University Press, 1989
  • Ghirardo, Diane (editor), Out of site: a social criticism of architecture, Bay Press, 1991

April Greiman (Graphic designer)

Elyse Grinstein

Jia Yi Gu (Spinagu)

  • “Next progressive: Spinagu,” Architect, February 2020, Vol.109, #2, p.24, 26-27
  • “Emerging architects in USA,” A + U: architecture and urbanism, May 2017, #5(560) (special issue)

Hatty Hatch

  • "[Four California houses]," Architecture d'aujourd'hui, December 1981, #218, p.XV-XXII

Brooke Hodge (Curator, writer, critic)

Dora Epstein Jones (Architecture historian)

  • Dora Epstein Jones: Stacked (March 23, 2012)
  • Jones, Dora Epstein, “Little people everywhere: the populated plan,” Log, Winter/Spring 2019, #45, p.59-71
  • Jones, Dora Epstein, “The nonsignificance of columns,” Log, Fall 2012, #26, p.119-130
  • Jones, Dora Epstein, “The pas de chat: a modern tale of discipline and reward,” Log, Spring/Summer 2014, #31, p.18-22

Shelly Kappe (SCI-Arc co-founder)

Elsa Leviseur

Melissa Lo (Feminist historian)

Ilaria Mazzoleni

Bruna Mori (Writer & educator)

Merry Norris (Board of Directors, Honorary Trustee)

Aino Paasonen (Literature & humanities)

  • "Fire in the Library: Alan Dressler, Aino Paasonen & Margaret Wertheim," October 26, 1995, Part 1 and Part 2, via SCI-Arc Channel
  • Paasonen, Aino Anna-Maria, The architect, poetry + the city: SCI Arc faculty interviews, Southern California Institute of Architecture, 2001

Rose Marie Rabin (Librarian)

Margi Reeve (Communications Director)

Natasha Sandmeier

  • Alexandra Leykauf interview (April 15, 2019) (visual artist interviewed by Natasha Sandmeier)
  • Guimapang, Katherine & Antonio Pacheco, "Exploring the future of narrative in architecture with Natasha Sandmeier and Nathan Su of UCLA's IDEAS Entertainment Studio," Archinect, November 14, 2019

Kathryn Smith (Architecture historian)

  • "Schindler House Restoration," 1986, via SCI-Arc Media Archive (Tour and interview with Clyde Chace & Ann Harriet)
  • Smith, Kathryn, Frank Lloyd Wright: America's master architect, Abbeville Press Publishers, 1998
  • Smith, Kathryn, Frank Lloyd Wright, Hollyhock House and Olive Hill, Rizzoli, 1992
  • Smith, Kathryn, Schindler House, Hennessey + Ingalls, 2010
  • Smith, Kathryn, Wright on exhibit: Frank Lloyd Wright's architectural exhibitions, Princeton University Press, 2017

Katherine Spitz (Katherine Spitz and Associates Landscape Architects)

Linda Taalman (Taalman Koch Architecture)

  • Anderton, Frances, “iT House, Joshua Tree,” Dwell, November 2008, Vol.9, #1, p.130-137
  • Tylevich, Katya, “Turn off, tune in,” Mark: another architecture, October/November 2013, #46, p.70.-73
  • Zeiger, Mimi, “ITHOUSE.BLOGSPOT.COM,” Architecture, April 2006, Vol.95, #4, p.62-63

Lorraine Wild (Graphic designer)

  • Sandhouse, Louise, Earthquakes, mudslides, fires & riots: California & graphic design, 1936-1986, Metropolis Books, 2014
  • Sandhouse, Louise, “Reputations: Lorraine Wild,” Eye Magazine, Summer 2000

Notable alumni:

Barbara Bestor (Bestor Architecture)

Kim Colin (Industrial Facility)

  • Colin, Kim & Sam Hecht, Usefulness in small things: items from the Under a fiver collection, Rizzoli International, 2010
  • Hecht, Sam & Kim Colin, Industrial Facility, Phaidon, 2018
  • "Kim Colin of Industrial Facility," July 31, 2018, via SCI-Arc Media Archive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uEc3mpjxRA
  • Walker, Brian, et al, Locale: Sam Hecht & Kim Colin, Herman Miller, 2014

Wanda Dalla Costa

  • Dalla Costa, Wanda, “Indigenous futurity and architecture: rewriting the urban narrative,” Architecture Australia, March/April, 2020, Vol.109, #2, p.56-58
  • Dalla Costa, Wanda, et al, “Learning from indigenous consultants: how can indigenous design thinking inform architecture?” Canadian Architect, September 2020, Vol.65, #6, p.36-38

Rocio Romero

  • Arieff, Allison, “The Dwell home,” Dwell, July/August 2003, Vol.3, #7, 73-92 (Prefabricated home competition)
  • Finn, Donovan, “All you need is LV,” Dwell, November 2006, Vol.7, #1, p.164-171

Angela Brooks-Scarpa (Brooks + Scarpa)

Jennifer Siegal (Office of Mobile Design)