On a contemporary design board online, where members discuss everything from interior and exterior concepts to architectural floor plans to architectural rendering techniques, one poster asks, “Where are the women?” [1] The responses and general consensus was that women in architecture are still sometimes hidden or overlooked. But the architectural floor plan of super structures around the world is indebted to a number of super women:
Gae Aulenti
Nee Gaetana Aulenti in Italy in 1927, Gae Aulenti has been a leading mistress of the architectural floor plan, as well as of whole building design, inside and out. Besides teaching and lecturing throughout all of Europe, Aulenti had a private architecture firm in Milan.
Treating architectural floor plan as part of an organic relationship to its urban environment [2], Aulenti’ s greatest achievement is seen in the in re-design and architecture she completed in 1987 on Mus ée d'Orsay, in Paris, France. Restructuring the architectural floor plan of France ’s old train station, the Gare d'Orsay, Aulenti re-defined spaces for 19th century art by incorporating vaulted central areas with barrel glass and iron, and making the adjunct galleries equally urbanized.
Retaining original public works such as the giant wall clock, and adding connecting ramps and catwalks, Gaetana Aulenti re-designed an architectural floor plan that is one the most frequently visited in the world.
Julia Barfield
Julia Barfield, MBE, AA, Dip, RIBA, and founding director of Marks Barfield Architects, was awarded Best Architectural Practice of the Year in 2001. One of the top specialists of the architectural floor plan, Barfield--who studied at the Architectural Association—has designed low cost and self-build community centres and houses for a large squatter settlement outside Lima; [3] has set up model making companies, such as Tetra, and has been the head project architect for works like the Royal Academy Sackler Galleries, the high-rise prototype project, Skyhouse, and several school and playground projects.
Rebecca Binder
A native of New Jersey who was born in 1951, Rebecca Binder not only designs and builds the architectural floor plan, but teaches it as well. Owner of R. L. Binder, FAIA Architecture & Planning established, in 1979, Binder has been instrumental in leading California design on a number of commercial, institutional, and university projects. These projects--such as work on laboratories, administration/office space, auditoriums and lecture halls, classrooms, conference centers, student family housing and dormitories, medical facilities, food service facilities, multi-media and exhibition space, student unions, art studios, athletic and recreational facilities and power cogeneration plants [4], have earned Rebecca Binder many creative design awards for her woman-owned firm, such as the 2001 AIACC Firm Award.
Lina Bo Bardi
Rome born Lina Bo Bardi knew the architectural floor plan as an implement of design freedom. With her architecture degree in 1939, Bo Bardi was the leading architect of homes, cultural centers, museums, and set designs influenced by her living in Brazil. Popular culture is inherent in her work as a combination of indigence and authenticity she found prevalent in the San Paolo and surrounding areas. Besides incorporating Brazilian influences, Bo Bardi included in her work the themes and visions familiar to Africa and Europe, creating architectural floor plans that blended expressionism with surrealism, primitive with metaphysical.
Denise Scott Brown
Like Gae Autlin, Denise Scott Brown leads the architectural floor plan art and industry communities. An architect and urban designer and planner, her influence of both men and women has directed and created such distinguished projects as the Perelman Quadrangle at the University of Pennsylvania, the French Département de la Haute-Garonne provincial capitol building in Toulouse, France, and Nikko, Japan’s Mielparque Kirifuri resort in Kirifuri National Park.
Headmistress of the architectural floor plan of universities, urban centers, and public sites, Scott Brown— also a theorist, writer and instructor— is reputedly a respected post-modernist who combines the aesthetics of the past with the functionality of the future.
Merrill Elam
Merrill Elam is a season queen of the architectural floor plan, of design, of teaching and lecture, and of creative criticism. An architecture principal in the firm of Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects, Inc. in Atlanta, Ga., Elam has been a respected visiting critic at Harvard, co-founded the Architecture Society of Atlanta, and has earned a distinguished place with such awards for architectural excellence as her 1995 Academy Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and her 1996 Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design.
Creating centers and schools for children, development centers, and libraries, Elam steps up the criteria for excellence with such modern works as the Buckhead Library in Atlanta, Georgia, a project which reveals her visionary use of light and modernity. It is no wonder Merrill Elam has also been awarded awards for AIA excellence—five times.
Eileen Gray
At the center of the modern architectural floor plan movement is Eileen Gray, who, because of her gender and the times she lived in, was largely neglected—unnoticed was she despite her innovated architectural and design works that saw her transforming Victorian period space into stark, solid modern grays and shades of black and white.
For example, aside from Gray ’ s skill with lacquer work, she created architectural floor plans for verandas, bedrooms, and other rooms--like those she worked on with Bodivici in Roquebrune, near Monaco: combining glass and steel, which she used as a take-off from her impressions of Breuer and others, Gray contributed a modern aesthetic to a time that left her unnoticed as one of the most innovative and intellectually expansive creative minds of the 1900s.
Zaha Hadid
The 21st century has changed the acceptance and awareness of women who work the architectural floor plan with a vision and mastery that pushes beyond the walls of the architectural world. And the 21st century awards such mistresses. Zaha Hadid, urban designer and architect extraordinaire, will attest to this.
Zaha Hadid is 2004’ s laureate of the esteemed Pritzker Prize in Architecture. Her work, which “ experiments with spatial quality, extending and intensifying existing landscapes in the pursuit of a visionary aesthetic that encompasses all fields of design, ranging from urban scale through to products, interiors and furniture,” [5] is acknowledged as superior. Her work is architectural floor plan design that incorporates contemporary with what is known as Deconstructionist. Her work is worldwide—found in the heart of Strasbourg, in the Strasbourg Tram Station; in the Vitra Fire Station; in the Ohio Contemporary Arts Center . Stacking layers, incorporating black aluminum panels, contrasting color with structure and unpretentious urbanity with modern sublimity, Iraqui-born Hadid earns the awards and accolades that no woman has ever been privileged to win.
Maya Lin
Maya Lin, Asian, female, and young— has surpassed the architectural floor plan with unparalleled ardor for sculpture, design, crafts, and architecture combined …exponentially. Lin has brought eastern minimalist philosophy together with western modernity and memoir by creating world-renowned monuments like the Vietnam Memorial wall and Montgomery, Alabama’s Civil Rights Memorial (funded by Southern Poverty Law Center)—two structures that speak to the human experience of loss in ways that move even the peron as stoney as the stone with which she works. Pieces that are more present than pain, more powerful than politics, more accessible than architecture itself. Her magnanimous work is a soothing and cathartic testimony to memories, to veterans, to minorities, to those who stood up and faced risking death by bigoted hands. And Maya Lin’s work, like the work of all women artists and architects, is a testimony to women in the art and archicture worlds.
Works Cited
[1]Tatiana. “ Where are the Women?” Artifice Great Buildings Discussion. 8 Apr. 2000 . http://www.designcommunity.com/discussion/1607.html . 18 Jan 2005.
[2] Matthews, Kevin. 1994-2005. Great Buildings Online. http://www.greatbuildings.com/architects/Gae_Aulenti.html. 18 Feb 2005.
[3] Judge Bio for Julia Barfield. http://www.designsondemocracy.org.uk/ competition/ judges_barfield.html. 18 Jan 2005.
[4] Binder, Rebecca L. The International Archive of Women in Architecture.
http://lumiere.lib.vt.edu/ iawadb/browse_by_last_name.php3?last_name=b .
18 Jan 2005.
[5] Zaha Hadid. Profile. http://www.zaha-hadid.com/profile.html. 18 Jan 2005 .
Works Consulted
Eileen Gray, Design Museum Collection. n.d. http://www.designmuseum.org/designerex/eileen-gray.htm. 18 Jan 2005.
Eileen Grey Homepage. n.d. http://www.tangle.com/Eileen/Welcome.html. 18 Jan 2005.
“ Lina Bo Bardi—The Freedom of Architecture.” Sept. 2004. http://www.floornature.com/worldaround/articolo.php/art150/2/en. 18 Jan 2005
Miss Archy— the Place for Young Women in Architecture. 2004. http://www.missarchy.com 18 Jan. 2005.
Organization of Women Architects and Design Professionals. 1973-2004. http://owa-usa.org/about.htm . 18 Jan 2005.
“ Women’ s National History Month Honoree, Maya Lyn.” National Women’s History Project. http://www.nwhp.org/tlp/biographies/lin/lin_bio.html
