Field 7: Becoming a Feminist Architect

Title: Becoming a Feminist Architect

In: Becoming a Feminist Architect, Special Issue of Field:, 7.1

Editors: Karin Reisinger and Meike Schalk

Publisher: School of Architecture, The University of Sheffield

Year: 2017

Abstract: Field is an international peer-reviewed journal for the discussion of critical, theoretical, political and playful accounts of architecture, and an open electronic forum. It was established at Sheffield School of Architecture to make good architectural research available to the widest possible audience.

Becoming a Feminist Architect is one of three publications subsequent to the 13th International Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA) Conference “Architecture & Feminisms: Ecologies, Economies, Technologies,” which was held at KTH School of Architecture, Stockholm in 2016. The present publication assembles a series of vital discussions that emerged at the event, including accounts of careful and creative ways of becoming feminist architects by “knowing and doing otherwise,” ¹ “practising ‘otherwise’,”² or doing architecture in other ways, ³ the implication of which is a rethinking and expansion of the conventional scope of architectural practice. Becoming a Feminist Architect includes different nuances of becoming: from becoming visible, becoming momentous and becoming with, to the becoming of nomadic subjects, formations of knowledge and the development of an ethical practice. Concerned with the built and materialized environment, but well aware that building is not the only way to influence architecture, the authors of this issue reveal different processes of becoming attentive, strategic and collective, starting with the important practice of becoming visible

1- Elizabeth Grosz, ed., Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,1999), 77-157.

2- Doina Petrescu. “Foreword: From Alterities and Beyond,” in Altering Practices: Feminist Politics and Poetics of Space, ed. Doina Petrescu (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), xvii.

3- See for example Nishat Awan, Tatjana Schneider and Jeremy Till, Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture (London: Routledge, 2011).