Ideological Equals: Women Architects in Socialist Europe 1945-1989

摘要

This book gazes over the variegated topography of the professional achievements of female architects working in Soviet-aligned Eastern Europe, which has been hidden from view for two reasons: because their work was situated behind the Iron Curtain and because women in general remain in the blind spot of architectural histories. The women architects discussed in this volume, edited by Mary Pepchinski and Mariann Simon who also authored two of its chapters, are fascinating both for the roles that women played in the socialist politics of equality and as engineers and architects of distinction. The book revolves around the question, wittily quoted in one of the chapters (p. 50), of how 'a creature like a woman' featured in the architectures of socialist Europe. The authors explore what the role of women was in the field of architecture in a political culture where they were cast equal but gendered weaker. In other words, they assess the effectiveness of the policy that proclaimed equality and maintained it from above in the education and practice of women architects in socialist societies in countries or national regions ranging from The German Democratic Republic, the Yugoslav Republics of Slovenia and Macedonia, Hungary, Slovakia within Czechoslovakia to Poland, Romania and Soviet Estonia. The resulting chapters give a balanced summary of the gendering of women architects in these countries, with relevant statistical evidence and commentaries on their position in education and practice, as well as individual case histories of leading architectural figures such as Harald Engler. Several authors, presumably prompted by the editors, challenge the notion of a feminine approach to socialist architecture, 'the drawing board au feminin', as one author (Ana Maria Zahariade) neatly puts it.