1st Edition
Women and Architectural History The Monstrous Regiment Then and Now
In this book, prominent architectural historians, who happen to be women, reflect on their practice and the intervention this has made in the discipline. Of particular concern are the ways in which feminine subjectivities have been embodied in the discourses of architectural history. Each of the chapters examines the author’s own position and the disruptive presence of women as both subject and object in the historiography of a specific field of enquiry. The aim is not to replace male lives with female lives, or to write women into the masculinist narratives of architectural history. Instead, this book aims to broaden the discourses of architectural history to explore how the potentially ‘unnatural rule’ of women subverts canonical norms through the empowerment of otherness rather than a process of perceived emasculation.
The essays examine the historiographic and socio/cultural implications of the role of women in the narratives and writing of architectural history with particular reference to Western traditions of scholarship on the period 1600–1950. Rather than subscribing to a single position, individual voices critically engage with past and present canonical histories disclosing assumptions, biases, and absences in the architectural historiography of the West. This book is a crucial reflection upon historiographical practice, exploring potential openings that may contribute further transformation of the theory and methods of architectural history.
01. Introduction: Assembling the Monstrous Regiment
Dana Arnold
Part 1: (Auto)Biographies
02. Refracting feminine subjectivities through space, time, and architectural history
Dana Arnold
03. Maude and Me
Annmarie Adams
04. Looking Back: Small Spaces as Countermapping Architectural History
Swati Chattopadhyay
Part 2: Spatial Position and Temporality
05. Against the Grain: Women Architects Rereading and Reimagining the Archive and Monograph
Mary Norman Woods
06. In plain sight: women in and around the archive
Elizabeth Darling
07. Making the Zaha Hadid Foundation
Jane Pavitt
Part 3: Social and Cultural Flows
08. Feminist Architectural History 2.0
Alice T. Friedman and Nora Wendl
09. Expanding Agency: Ethel Power, House Beautiful, and the writing of the history of American architecture
Kathleen James-Chakraborty
Part 4: Spatial Experience
10. Beyond the Walls: Traversing the Boundaries of Architectural History
Elizabeth McKellar
11. Looking Softly at Architectural History: Eroding the Hegemony of Formalism
Joan Coutu
12. Afterward
Nancy Stieber
Biography
Dana Arnold is Professor of Architecture at the Manchester School of Architecture. Her work focuses on histories and historiographies of architecture and urbanism in relation to social and cultural theory. She is the author of The Georgian Country House: Architecture, Landscape and Society (1998); Re-presenting the Metropolis (2000); Reading Architectural History (2002); Rural Urbanism: London Landscapes in the Early Nineteenth Century (2006); The Spaces of the Hospital: Spatiality and Urban Change in London 1680–1820 (2013); and Architecture and Ekphrasis: Space, Time and the Embodied Description of the Past (2020). Her many edited and co-edited volumes include Architecture as Experience (2004); Rethinking Architectural Historiography (2006); Biographies and Space (2008); Interdisciplinary Encounters (2014); and Paris-Londres (2016).
Arnold has held research fellowships at the Getty Research Institute, Yale University, and the University of Cambridge. She was a Guest Professor at the International Research Centre for Chinese Cultural Heritage Conservation, Faculty of Architecture, Tianjin University (2009–2019) and Honorary Professor at the Architecture Faculty, Middle East Technical University, Ankara (2007–2015). Her latest book, British Architecture: A Very Short Introduction (2024) is a significant re-working of the subject offering new insights into the fluid relationship between architecture and culture.
