Friday, March 17, 2017

"The Invisible Women: How female architects were erased from history"

AR:
The erosion of authorship among starchitect-women has made headlines in recent times. Prominent awards have been presented to the male half of equal architectural partnerships, such as the controversial decision to award Robert Venturi the Pritzker Prize in 1991 but not practice co-founder Scott Brown, an injustice that sparked a major (failed) petition to have Scott Brown retrospectively given the Pritzker in 2013. Similarly, Wang Shu received the Pritzker Prize in 2012 without practice co-founder Lu Wenyu, and in 2013 the Gottfried Semper Architekturpreis was initially awarded to Matthias Sauerbruch of Sauerbruch Hutton alone, without acknowledging equal founding partner Louisa Hutton – a decision later reversed when Sauerbruch objected. In 2014, Patty Hopkins, co-founder of Hopkins Architects, was controversially photoshopped out of an image with her husband Michael Hopkins during the promotion of a BBC documentary, The Brits who Built the Modern World.