Team:

Organizers: Maggie Tsang (MDes ULE 19), Adelle York (MDes ULE 19)

Womxn in Design’s second annual International Womxn’s Week convenes a weeklong series of events that gathers members of the Harvard GSD community and beyond to celebrate and cultivate new ways of thinking about gender and power. In March 2019, International Womxn’s Week was focused around FEMININE POWER. We sidestep normative assumptions about what success and agency look like within the design fields and instead search for alternative ways to understand power/ Throughout the week, events will circle around three themes: feminist epistemologies in design, foregrounding women’s work, and workshopping emergent practices. Through these events, we strive to gather members of the Harvard GSD community and beyond to celebrate and cultivate new ways of thinking about gender and power.

The Secret Life of Modern Architecture or We Don’t Need Another Hero

Keynote Lecture by Beatriz Colomina

Team: Julia Roberts (MArch 19), Marisa Villareal (MLA 18), Lindsey Krug (MArch 19)

The secrets of modern architecture are like those of a family and it is perhaps because of the current cultural fascination with exposing the intimate that they are now being unveiled, little by little. There is increasing interest in the ways in which architecture works. It is as if we have become just as concerned with the “how” as with “what.” And the “how” is less about structure or building techniques—the interest of earlier generations—and more about interpersonal relations. The previously marginal details of how things actually happen in architectural practice are now coming to light.

“With,” and not “and,” is the way in which women are usually credited alongside men in the official records, if they are credited at all. Women are the ghosts of modern architecture, everywhere present, crucial, but strangely invisible. Unacknowledged, they are destined to haunt the field forever. But correcting the record is not just a question of adding a few names or even hundreds to the history of architecture. It is not just a matter of human justice or historical accuracy, but of opening the field to its own productive complexity. Architecture is deeply collaborative, more like moviemaking than traditional visual art. But unlike movies, this is hardly ever acknowledged. Until recently, it has been a secret carefully guarded.

To watch the recording of this lecture, visit the GSD’s website.

International Women’s Day Library Reception

Hosted in and with the generous support of the Frances Loeb Library with catered lunch and guest faculty speakers Diane Davis and Sai Balakrishnan, Dept. of Urban Planning and Design; Jenny French, Dept. of Architecture; and Silvia Benedito, Dept. of Landscape Architecture.