Symbolic violence, in the language of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, occurs when signs, symbols, language, and behaviour are used in a manner that is alien and indeed damaging to a particular category of people.1 In this chapter I am going to reflect back on the symbolic violence I experienced in my career and on the symbolic violence that I inflicted on others through use and custom, something of which I am not proud.
Fowler and Wilson, in their in-depth sociological study of the architectural profession, discovered ‘a whole repertoire of strategies for resigned endurance’ amongst the women they spoke to at every level’.2 This, I would say, was the central lesson of my education. I have now been qualified as an architect for 22 years, 19 of them spent teaching architecture. I went into teaching for four reasons: first, I was incensed by what I was put through at architectural school and I didn’t want others to have to go through the same thing; second, because it was the only way I could find to be an architect and a parent; third, because I didn’t enjoy practice at a time of recession – it was isolating, intellectually dull, confrontational, and financially very stressful; and lastly, because I know the difference good architecture can make to people’s lives. These experiences continue to underpin my work.
Feminists make a point of writing in the first person ‘I’ to make evident the subjectivity of their own viewpoint. This is done consciously to avoid the pitfalls of what Bourdieu calls ‘doxic knowledge’, essentially the unspoken things that you need to know about to get on in a particular culture or habitus. Doxa are toxic for those who are not in the know and who do not fit in. They work hand in hand with symbolic violence. Tacit values and unspoken assumptions nearly always work in favour of the most powerful, the hegemony. Hence ‘the personal is political’. This is why I am a methodology zealot. By trying to say with clarity where your ideas come from, what you are leaving in, and why you are leaving out, you are not assuming that others buy into your point of view; you allow them to make the choice. So, to be clear, this chapter is written by a London bred, white British, middle aged, middle class, state and Oxbridge educated woman married to a Peruvian non-architect with three daughters, now happily living in Wales. All opinions are my own.
The problem of history only hit me with full force when I began teaching history on the Women into Architecture and Construction programme at South Bank University in the early 1990s. Here I was faced with a group of brave women, all mature, many mothers, nearly all Afro-Caribbean. I cringe when I remember my attempts to trot out the chronologies I was taught at university. What was I doing by asking these students to read Adolf Loos’s 1908 ‘Ornament and Crime’, one of the most sexist and racist tracts ever written, without any discussion of its political dimension and context?
And what about F T Marinetti, who wrote in his 1909 Manifesto that the Futurists would fight ‘feminism’?4 The only thing that had been mentioned to me beforehand was their dynamic use of space. The only research that I could find of any use in those pre-Internet days was Lynne Walker’s account of the history of women in the profession, but where did that leave the teaching of the greats?5
Feminists often make a distinction between the female (our biological make-up) and the feminine (a social construct), but as a woman it is hard not to feel implicated in images of femininity. It is particularly important to be aware of these differences as you move through art history where the lives of real women are blurred with fetishised images of womanhood.6 As I embarked on my PhD studies I began to realise that it wasn’t generally the architects who were committing the symbolic violence of leaving women out of their worldview. It was in fact the historians who were the problem.7 ‘The collection and ordering of information presupposes a theoretical framework of reference’ but this was rarely, if ever, made explicit.8 Instead I sought inspiration from a quietly growing band of women writers such as Mary McCleod at Columbia, Griselda Pollock, Sarah Wigglesworth and Katerina Ruedi Ray.
Oddly enough on closer inspection, Mies van de Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier all had strong women in their lives as well as an emancipatory bent to their handling of space and ornament. My first book, written with Sarah Menin, focused on Aalto and Le Corbusier, who both had complex relationships with their mothers – its aim was really to make the point that architecture is a personal business and should be treated as such.9 My second book, Le Corbusier: Architect and Feminist, described by a colleague in an introduction to one of my lectures as ‘the book that nobody thought possible’, focused on the little known fact that Le Corbusier took a great interest in trying to improve women’s lives.10 I wrote that book to show, with meticulous archival excavation, that yes, perhaps the most influential architect of our time actually liked, valued and respected women while also enjoying having sex with them – respect and sex not always being mutually exclusive in my opinion.
Women are also notably absent in discussions of architectural detail on the shelves of the library, so I went on to write a book on Le Corbusier’s details, also inspired by a philosophy of egalitarianism.11 My final Le Corbusier book, written with Inge Linder Gaillard, made the point that his churches were designed around a feminised version of religion; here, more than in their technical details and form, lies their most significant innovation.12 It was ever my naïve hope that in writing five books about Le Corbusier, in revising history to include women, that I could make some impression on architectural culture.
When I first began work in a school of architecture my regular, self-imposed duty was to go through the studios taking down the Page 3 girls and naked centrefolds that adorned the student work stations, but which passed seemingly unnoticed by my male colleagues.
Symbolic violence to women, to minorities, and to the disabled is everywhere in architectural schools – even the most well meaning. Back in the 1980s, when I was in school, there were virtually no female teaching staff. Those that were there were evidently suffering, providing us with almost nothing in the way of role models. While you might think this a thing of the past, there are still to this day some schools with almost no female staff. A rough and ready guestimate would suggest that there must be around 200 professors (top ranked academics) in the 44 schools of architecture in the UK. Of these, some 16 are women. I know, from supervising a series of gender related student dissertations, just how important it is for students to see women at high levels within their institutions. A further aspect of symbolic violence is to have all the female teaching staff at the bottom of the school. We all know the importance of year one in setting the tone of education but, symbolically speaking, the MArch, the two final postgraduate years of professional education, is where the action is. When I began teaching I ran first and second year for nearly ten years as I was told that I didn’t have what it took to lead the design agenda in the degree. I then went on to be the first woman to lead the MArch at the University of Bath and the first woman to head the school at the University of Sheffield.
From time to time I am invited to talk on the issue of gender in schools of architecture across the UK. On such occasions conversation with students invariably drifts to the issue of crits. At their worst these take the form of a panel of male architects sitting in a row at the front of the room with a smattering of yawning students behind. It was here in the crit that, as a student, I experienced the most visceral, symbolic violence, both to my person and to my incipient architectural sensibilities, at Princeton when I was verbally ‘hosed’ (the terminology of the time) by a panel of seven men – including Peter Eisenmann and Michael Graves – who seemed to see my project as an opportunity to air their internecine squabbles. As a reviewer I have in the past been shocked by my colleagues’ comments on, for example, a woman student’s breasts, assumptions that the student dressed provocatively to cause distraction, and on the need to tone down critique in case a student might cry. While the gender make-up of review panels may be improving, the gender balance of external examiner panels remains heavily distorted towards men. From students I have heard complaints that male reviewers don’t tend to give such incisive advice to female students and that female reviewers can be overly harsh, perhaps to make a point (I think I have been guilty of this myself). The thing that makes crits particularly symbolically violent is the absence of a clear set of criteria. Students have to use their knowledge of the unwritten rules, the doxic structure of the school, to be a success. We need forms of assessment that reward collaboration and research rigour, not clubability. In my experience architects often object to having to articulate what they are trying to teach in a sequence of clear learning outcomes, a tendency that may have hazy roots in old arguments about ‘creativity’ and ‘art’.13 We owe it to students to be as clear as possible about what we expect from them.
While architecture schools may profess the opposite, certain kinds of work are generally more admired than other kinds, the differences often boiling down to doxic issues of taste or fashion. Repeatedly I have seen schemes drawn up in hesitant pencil and delicate watercolour with extreme concern for inhabitation downgraded for lack of ambition and originality. The same goes for projects with an overt concern for colour, decoration, and people. I well remember, during my MArch, one critic saying to me in a snide tone, ‘I can see you like children’, because I had drawn children at play in my proposal for a school. Another issue is those schemes that focus on designing a process to enable the engagement and choices of future users, as these rarely result in the epic drawings that we have come to associate with the RIBA President’s Medals for student work, instead achieving more quiet and collegial forms of innovation. An unspoken and violent tyranny of taste floats over the assessment of student work, one that is loaded with gender, class, and race baggage, once again illustrating the need for assessment criteria that clearly valorise research, process, and intellectual content as well as representation.14
The RIBA Student Destinations Survey has showed that women arriving in practice for their first year out are already less confident than their male counterparts.15 The RIBA Education Review regularly reports on the pay gap between male and female Part I students, which is already in the region of £1,000. The number of women dropping out of architecture at this point has always been a major problem for the profession in terms of its gender statistics; indeed it seems its overall diversity has actually decreased in recent years. When I was a student graduating from university we actually made a complaint against the department because the degree results were so skewed against the women, despite us all arriving with supposedly the same marks. I had another memorable experience when being examined for RIBA Part 3 for the first time. I was told that I had failed because I didn’t take the whole thing seriously enough, something that was established at oral examination. The only two failures out of a cohort of about 40 were women. Arbitrary happenings with seemingly no moral justification continue the cycle of symbolic violence in education.
When I arrived completely unprepared for practice in the middle of a terrible recession I was not expecting to be the only female in the office who was not a ‘secretary’. Seeing my male colleagues flooding out to lunch, or drinks after work, without asking me to join them has, until quite recently, been a repetitive riff in my career both in practice and in academia. While this could be ascribed to social awkwardness as much as anything else, it has sometimes seemed to me as though the formal meetings are just done for appearances and the true power is exercised in those pubs and cafés.
It was motherhood that hastened my return to academia. Working in practice part-time while looking after a baby was fairly unheard of, so I continued to work from home. The legal requirement to have PI insurance made it impossible for kitchen table practices such as mine to break even. In those days it was not even possible to get a payment holiday from the ARB for registration while living on state maternity allowance, let alone pay the punitive RIBA fees (which have since become more flexible due, presumably, to intense lobbying). It is great to hear about the creative ideas bubbling up for using digital technologies to help parents in such circumstances collaborate as if in a virtual practice. Maybe these will stop the constant drift of women away from architecture.
Female students have often asked me to come up with the names of successful women architects who have children. This is easy to do if the woman in question is in a relationship with another architect who holds the practice together during the child bearing years; it is less easy to cite the names of women who have continued their practices without the help of an architect partner. There is no denying that the precious period of time spent at home when children are small can, unless carefully managed, result in a loss of confidence, a loss of skills, and a loss of women to the profession. I was lucky with my second and third children because I was cushioned by the more humane policies of academia. But even so, my maternity leave – the first academic maternity leave in my department – was couched in the terms of a ‘sabbatical’ and I had to produce just as much high quality research as my male counterparts (the rules on this have since changed). I was also asked by my then boss whether anybody had ever told me about contraception.
I tried to put these experiences to good use when the tables were turned and I became a boss myself. I know from speaking to many women in many parts of the industry that assuming leadership can be difficult when staff are unused to being managed by a woman. In my experience, architects favour a charismatic leadership style – the all-powerful boss who leads firmly from the front – as this is the form of leadership promoted by our canon. Yet this approach is now eschewed by schools of management in favour of more effective collegiate empathic methods.
Not only are ‘charismatic leaders’ promoted by our teaching of history, they are promoted by our national obsession with individual ‘starchitects’ and by the media – and I haven’t even started on the symbolic violence inflicted by ‘iconic’ architecture.16 It is far more important to celebrate collaboration, hence my uneasy response to the Architects’ Journal Women in Architecture Awards, which once again focus unrealistically on the individual.17 As Camille Paglia famously wrote, ‘A contemporary woman clapping on a hard hat merely enters a conceptual system invented by men.’18
A 2004 sociological study of the profession concluded that there ‘are few grounds for belief that women are on the verge of “making it” in architecture’.19 Indeed, a 2014 Architects’ Council of Europe survey shows that women are paid on average 33% less than their male counterparts.20 Despite this, when I am asked to talk about gender I always try to finish with a happy ‘things are getting better’ message – and they are. The RIBA Role Models project is a case in point,21 and the UK profession now has its third remarkable woman president, but symbolic violence still permeates our culture. This will not change until there is a shift away from tacit values towards transparency, research, evidence, ethics, and accountability – in other words, a 21st century professionalism. These values bring with them the evils of audit culture but are necessary when organisations are internally divided and persist in paying lip service to the political imperative of being more inclusive.22