Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky's Frankfurt Kitchen

"They thought that I would starve to death. Nobody could imagine hiring a woman to build a house in 1916 — not even myself."

Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky

Schütte-Lihotzky (1897-2000) was born in Vienna and became the first female student of the so-called Kunstgewerbeschule, now known as the University of Applied Arts Vienna. As a student she worked on projects on affordable housing for the working class and decided to dedicate her career to reducing some burdens through efficient residential design. In an early project of hers, she designed flats for single, working women. 

When the social housing development programme "New Frankfurt" was launched in the German city of Frankfurt, Schütte-Lihotzky was invited to join - which she did creating her magnum opus, the first fitted kitchen, the "Frankfurt Kitchen" (aged 101, she said: "If I had known that everyone would keep talking about nothing else, I would never have built that damn kitchen!"). With this kitchen she aimed to make life easier for those (mainly women) using it. At the time, kitchens in working-class housing were part of the living room which often also served as a bedroom. The separated kitchen was small but efficient, the efficiency was drawn from kitchens in scientific laboratories and railway cars. The design was also based on interviews with housewives and time-motion studies of their work to reduce the number of steps needed to be taken between different tasks. About 10.000 of these kitchens were built in Frankfurt alone. Later, feminists linked Schütte-Lihotzky with the subjugation of women by the kitchen. Schütte-Lihotzky, however, wanted to reduce the hours and burden of women's unpaid labour at home: 

"I was convinced that the economic independence and self-realization of women would be a common good, and that therefore the further rationalization of household labor was imperative."

Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky

Schütte-Lihotzky was an ardent antifascist who joined the resistance against the Nazis. She was imprisoned in 1941 and sentenced to death but was lucky and returned to Vienna after the liberation in 1945 (via).

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photographs of Schütte-Lihotzky in her home via and via and via

Quoting Oscar Niemeyer

"I think of myself as no more than 60.
What I could do at 60, I can still do now."
Oscar Niemeyer in 2007,
four months before turning 100



photograph of Oscar Ribeiro de Almeida Niemeyer Soares Filho (1907-2012) via

"We don't embroider cushions here."

Charlotte Perriand (1903-1999) was a French Modernist architect and furniture designer and member of Le Corbusier's studio.



When Perriand applied to work at Le Corbusier's studio in 1927, she was rejected with the following reply: "We don't embroider cushions here." One month later, Le Corbusier visited a show of hers and changed his mind; Perriand became a member of his studio (via).



photographs via and via

"Would they call me a diva if I were a guy?" Zaha Hadid, Architect and Woman

Do you resent being called “architecture’s diva,” or do you find it empowering?

"I do find it incredibly frustrating, but I don’t mind. Everything that I am called which was negative, I try to think of it as positive — so it’s fine. It is so tough for women in the professional world. If a man has an opinion, people describe him as opinionated or powerful. However, if a woman in business voices her opinion, she is considered to be difficult or a diva!" 
Zaha Hadid



"Would they call me a diva if I were a guy?" 
Zaha Hadid

When Zaha Hadid's retrospective opened in Vienna in 2003, more than 2.000 people showed up. At the door, T-shirts emblazoned with her quote "Would they call me a diva if I were a guy?" were given out by attendants (via).

"For mixed in with the grief at Hadid’s loss is also anger among women architects who, no matter how they felt about her work, could empathize with the hostile reactions that, too often, seemed to come her way.
After Hadid won the Pritzker Architecture Prize, architectural journalists who might have been expected to laud her achievement instead commented negatively on her looks, clothes, ability to speak English and her talent and worthiness as a laureate. No other Pritzker Prize winner had been subjected to such a belligerent press response.
The New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp referred to her as “a big, raucous peasant woman” whose “earthier appetites” leaned toward eating lamb testicles over reading books. Guardian reporter Stuart Jeffries suggested that the price of her global travels and successes was to be single and miserable. Edwin Heathcote of the Financial Times rudely asked her if she deserved the prize.
That Hadid rose above it, fought back, and even walked out of interviews may have been perceived by some as diva-like. But to many women in architecture, her toughness was about a refusal to be dismissed. And that meant a lot." Despina Stratigakos, Associate Professor and Interim Chair of Architecture, University of Buffalo

"As a woman, you're not accessible to every world."
Zaha Hadid

"Architecture is particularly difficult for women; there's no reason for it to be. I don't want to blame men or society, but I think it was for a long time, the clients were men, the building industry is all male." 
Zaha Hadid

"I used to not like being called a 'woman architect': I'm an architect, not just a woman architect. Guys used to tap me on the head and say, 'You are okay for a girl.' But I see the incredible amount of need from other women for reassurance that it could be done, so I don't mind that at all." 
Zaha Hadid

"I don't generally think of myself always as a woman architect, as I've said many times. People ask 'what is it like to be a woman architect?' and I say 'I don't know, I've not been a man'. I feel that I should be recognised as an architect first. But now I think that if it serves as an inspiration or it helps women architects to push on then that's fine. Whenever I give lectures, I get lots of women come up to me wanting reassurance that it's a trip worth taking."
Zaha Hadid

"I don’t think any man could actually compete with her. If we can eliminate the practice of talking about female architects, it would be the greatest tribute we could give her."
Eva Jiřičná



Dame Zaha Mohammad Hadid (1950-2016) was a Baghdad-born British architect and the first woman and first Muslim to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2004 (via) - the prize was first awarded in 1979 - and the first woman to be named recipient of the Royal Gold Medal (given annually since 1848) in her own right (via). In a speech, Jane Duncan made the following remarks:

"Speaking as only the third woman president of the RIBA I find it amazing that it has taken until 2016 to elect the first female Royal Gold Medallist.""To right a 180-year wrong we elected a woman whom I have admired since my student days, visiting the AA [the architecture school where Hadid studied and taught] from the Bartlett up the road.""I come not to bury sexism but to praise Zaha. I am not here to castigate my predecessors and their committees for their masculine choices – what else could they do given how hard we make it for women to rise to the top of our profession?"  (via)

When Hadid studied at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London where she met Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis and Bernard Tschumi (via), only about 6% of the profession were women (via). She often spoke about the unfair treatment she experienced as both a woman and a foreigner. After her sudden death last March, more female architects started speaking out about suffering sexism at work. According to a survey carried out by the Architectural Review magazine, 61% of women architects have been victim of gender discrimination; four out of ten say that their bosses are responsible (via)

"She did not fit the stereotypical white male profession of registered architects. Jealousy and prejudice failed to bar her way, but it took its toll. Very few people realise the misogynistic, racist and anti-architect environment she had to navigate in Britain. For Muslims, minorities and women, Zaha is a shining torch beaming into the dark minds for whom a few tiles falling off a building seemed a justification to dismiss her work."  Yasmin Shariff, director of Dennis Sharp Architects

“I think Zaha was right that women have to work harder than men to prove themselves. There is a shortage of women architects at the top of the profession and running their own practices in the UK.”  Alison Brooks, winner of Stirling prize in 2008

More statements:

"I am sure that as a woman I can do a very good skyscraper."
Zaha Hadid

"People don't talk to you properly. It's the way they talk to you; they dismiss you. I think it's a combination of me being a woman and a foreigner."
Zaha Hadid

"As a woman, I'm expected to want everything to be nice and to be nice myself. A very English thing. I don't design nice buildings - I don't like them. I like architecture to have some raw, vital, earthy quality."
Zaha Hadid

"I'm judged more harshly because I am a woman."
Zaha Hadid

"In London it was very timid, people behave well, they're polite -- especially if you're a woman. A woman should behave properly. It means that you don't challenge the situation."
Zaha Hadid

"If you're a man you're seen as someone who's tough and ambitious," she says. "But when a woman is ambitious it's seen as bad. I think things have changed in the last 20 years. They're better. But there's still prejudice."
Zaha Hadid

"I think it's a boys' club everywhere. And I'm not privy to that world so much -- they go fishing, they go golfing, they go out and have a drink. And as a woman you're excluded from that bonding. It's a big difference."
Zaha Hadid

"Men think a woman should not have an opinion."
Zaha Hadid

"Society has not been set up in a way that allows women to go back to work after taking time off. Many women now have to work as well as do everything at home and no one can do everything. Society needs to find a way of relieving women."
Zaha Hadid

"I don't think people should do things because you know, 'I am turning this age, I must go have a husband.' If you find somebody and it works out then have kids, it's very nice. But if you don't, you don't."
Zaha Hadid

"In Iraq, many of my female friends were architects and professionals with a lot of power during the 1980s while all the men were at war in Iran."
Zaha Hadid

"When I taught, all my best students were women."
Zaha Hadid

"There are lots of women in school and whenever I teach I have a lot of women students, all from the beginning. When I started teaching there were mostly boys, and now there are lots of women who are actually sometimes the best students in the studio. It's a mystery to me what happens to them afterwards. I don't know what happens, whether it's a lack of confidence or difficult circumstances in offices or vanity or they're not accepted. I don't know.
Zaha Hadid

"It’s still very difficult for women to operate as professionals because there are still some worlds women have no access to. But I don’t believe that much remains of the stereotype that architecture should be a male rather than a female career. 50% of first year architectural students are women, so women certainly don’t perceive this career as alien to their gender. In our office we have no stereotypical categories that relate to gender at all."
Zaha Hadid

"You now see more established, respected female architects all the time. That doesn’t mean it’s easy. Sometimes the difficulties are incomprehensible. But in the last fifteen years there’s been tremendous change, and now it’s seen as normal to have women in this profession."
Zaha Hadid

"If you think about making a city that is much more porous, many accessible spaces, that is a political position, because you don't fortify, you open it up so that many people can use it."
Zaha Hadid

"Women are always told, 'You're not going to make it, its too difficult, you can't do that, don't enter this competition, you'll never win it,' - they need confidence in themselves and people around them to help them to get on." 
Zaha Hadid

"Like men, women have to be diligent and work hard." 
Zaha Hadid

"Half of architecture students are women, and you see respected, established female architects all the time."
Zaha Hadid

"Being an Arab woman and a modern architect certainly don’t exclude each other! When I was growing up in Iraq, there were many woman architects. My earliest memory of architecture, I was perhaps 6 years old, was of my aunt building a house in Mosul in the north of Iraq."
Zaha Hadid

"It’s still very difficult for women to operate as professionals because there are still some worlds women have no access to. But I don’t believe that much remains of the stereotype that architecture should be a male rather than a female career. Fifty percent of first year architectural students are women, so women certainly don’t perceive this career as alien to their gender. In our office we have no stereotypical categories that relate to gender at all.
You now see more established, respected female architects all the time. That doesn’t mean it’s easy. Sometimes the difficulties are incomprehensible. But in the last fifteen years there’s been tremendous change, and now it’s seen as normal to have women in this profession.
I still experience resistance, but I think this keeps me focused. It’s not as if I just appear somewhere and everybody says yes to me — it’s still a struggle, despite having gone through it a hundred times. It’s not necessarily always great, but it makes you think about and do things in a different way."
Zaha Hadid

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photographs via and (by Bryan Adam) via and via and via 

Jane Drew, Architect

Dame Jane Drew (1911-1996) was one of Britain's most distinguished architects and urban planners. Brought up by a humanist father who "despised the profit motive and abhorred cruelty", she had a compassion for both architecture and humanitarian concerns and worked on the principle that architecture had to provide a space in which human being could flourish (via).

"The first thing I learned from Jane was that the Office did not employ men and women, but architects and each was rewarded on merit unrelated to sex." Frank Knight, employee at the practice from 1947

Jane Drew, born Iris Estelle Radcliffe Drew and registered as Joyce Beverly Drew (via), had made a secret pact with her classmate Peggy Ashcroft that they would pursue a career and keep using their own names (via). Nevertheless, she was often introduced as "Mrs Maxwell Fry", the wife of the well-known architect - an architect's wife rather than an architect in her own right (Jackson & Holland, 2014). Once, when she was introduced by her married name as "Mrs Fry", she pulled the speaker's sleeve and corrected him quietly: "I'm sorry Mrs Fry can't be with us tonight, instead Miss Jane Drew has kindly accepted to replace her." (via).
In the 1930s, it was not easy for a female architect to find work and in order to succeed, "women were forced by social and cultural expectations to tread a very fine line with regard to gender identity". Women were expected to be gentle and modest and Drew did not adhere to these rules. For her, gender was a non-issue. As a reaction to the discrimination she had experienced as a graduate, she decided to employ only women staff when she set up her own office (Jackson & Holland, 2014), which she initially did (via).



The "Jane Drew Prize" is an award given by the Architect's Journal to persons who show "innovation, diversity and inclusiveness in architecture" recognising a "contribution to the status of women in architecture" (via).



- Jackson, I. & Holland, J. (2014). The Architecture of Edwin Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew: Twentieth Century Architecture, Pioneer Modernism and the Tropics. Farnham & Burlington: Ashgate
- photographs of Jane Drew (with Le Corbusier and husband Maxwell Fry in Chandigarh, (c) FLC/ADAGP) via and via and via

Urban Planning and Active Ageing

Statistics showing the two trends that in general a) society is getting older and b) the number of older people is increasing are not new and more or less well known. The need to adapt is a notion that seems to be comparatively less widely spread. In the field of urban planning that means that older people need to be involved as they often feel a stronger sense of isolation in cities than other age groups. One possible explanation is that older people are among the last to be included when it comes to decisions concerning urban development (via).

Philip Johnson wearing a model of his 1984 Pittsburgh landmark via



In 2011, the Dublin Declaration on Age-Friendly Cities and Communities was signed by more than forty cities, inspired by the World Health Organization's definition of active ageing as "the process of optimising opportunities for health, participation and security in order to enhance quality of life as people age, allowing people to realise their potential for physical, social and mental well-being throughout their lives and to participate in society according to their needs, desires and capabilities, while providing them with adequate protection, security and care when they require assistance" (via).



In the UK, Manchester is the first Age Friendly City. The projects comprise e.g. housing support, neighbourhood regeneration, cultural programmes, road safety, public health (e.g. free swimming and physical activity), local work, age-friendly design, and civic representation (via).



Beth Johnson Foundation & Manchester City Council Creating (2011) Age-friendly Places. A guide for cities, boroughs, towns or counties, councils, partners and communities (via)
Photos of Philip Johnson (1906-2005) via and via