L A   M U J E R    C O N S T R U Y E

W o m e n   w h o   b u i l d

First of all I want to thank the Public Institutions that have made possible the Seminar we begin today and the Exhibition “Building from the Inside” we opened yesterday. Our most sincere gratitude to the Order of Engineers and Architects of Lebanon, to its President Sobby Bissat and  to the President of the Architects Section Mr. Andre Berhazi, the latter, colleague and friend as well as his family. Thank you both so much for your hospitality, enthusiasm, work and implication in our, now, common idea. We want to thank Cervantes Institute, (represented by Mr. Andrés Perez Sánchez-Morate, Cervantes Institute Director in Beirut, and by Mr. Elias El Khik, Cultural Activities Coordinator) and of course, the Ministry of Public Works of Spain. Unfortunately they have not been able to come this time, but I know their heart is here with all of us. A very special mention to all our female colleges in Lebanon (Dolly Debs, Divina Abou, Randa Gegrayel, Roula Jamal and Roula Mouharram, Simone Kosremelli and Vera Bougy) because of their quick answer to our call, their collaboration in sending us their real good work, and sharing today with us this cultural feast, this ARCHITECTURAL FIESTA, if you allow me to express it in Spanish language. Thank you all and thanks to our Spanish colleagues too. A special mention to Marta Dalmau who had an accident, making photographs in Bilbao for her speech and has now five stitches in her knee; and thanks to everybody for coming, for being here.

We are very happy to be again in Lebanon. A country with such an enormous amount of energy, interesting architecture and historical background… (similar in so many ways to Spain).

We seem to share so many things: our blood mixture, a cultural heritage; our history of conquers and also of pacts and agreements; a privileged geographical situation in the cross-roads of different worlds; the climate and vegetation; feasts and celebrations; our food we now call “Mediterranean diet”, and above all: people and their particular life style: contemplative and creative women and men, dialectical and wide opened to dialogue, essentially, friendly and welcoming people. Resemblances that all together make us feel so comfortable visiting this land bathed by our common, peaceful and blue Mediterranean sea.

Spain is a country with a great tradition of art and culture. A country that has found its own way of changing to modernity, during the last 20 years without loosing its traditions and its plurality. These years of changes and openings to new tendencies, and not only regarding architecture, are the ones that I have been working as an architect in my own studio, in Madrid, the capital of Spain. These are some old streets and buildings of Madrid. These are some new buildings in the outskirts.. This is the street where I live and work. Where my office is. My work as an architect is the usual work architects have at home: Restoration of old buildings and monuments, housing, industrial buildings, offices, etc.. Small works some of them, always considered in our office as big ones, specially in our hearts and in our dedication to them. One of our best well known work was the Indian pavilion in  EXPO92 of Seville, a small temporary trade fair pavilion made to represent an important nation, India; through one of their traditional symbols: the Peacock. I will show it to you very quickly.

The pavilion was designed as a group of three different formal elements: The head was the tower, the male element, sun divinity of creation in Indian tradition (Shiva, Rhama, Krishna...) Located at the main corner of the plot, became the reception area. It was composed of a lower body with a single octagonal space resurfaced with blue little stones. The upper body was covered with painted perforated steel plate and the top was made in polished copper plate, perforated by a neon light, as a formal abstraction of the peacock’s head.

The central building, the body, was a semi-spherical dome, a female element, Mother India, Kali or Parvati goddess. Made with a laminated wooden structure, it contained the exhibition space, being a whole unitary space, but laid out like a maze, (to reach the centre – you have to go through several different levels of perception and purification), through low wooden panels that allowed the sequenced order of the objects on display. In the centre, the light: the vaulted space in its entirety. And on the ground, the fountain: the water rising vertically from a lotus flower drawn in coloured small mosaic tiles. The rear of the pavilion was shaped using a sloped plane which, through a system of coloured plastic capsules drew the peacock’s tail, adding the necessary ligthing to lit up  at nigth like a large advertising board. Underneath the offices, the assembly hall, other facilities, etc. We enjoyed it…

But I am here not to speak only about my work but to speak about “Women Who Build Association”, which I represent today.

Women Who Build- La Mujer Construye is a cultural project opened to all women architects worldwide as well to all women related to the construction of inhabited spaces. Its main aim is to support, disseminate and promote architecture within society, as well as to meditate on the professional role of women in architectural design. Traditionally, architecture was a purely masculine profession. Women were banished into craftwork, domesticity, into privacy; that is to say, to home life. There were no University vocations because University was forbidden to women. At the turn of the 20th century, a new model for women was born in western society, defined by their incorporation to cultural sectors and professional work, previously restricted to the masculine world. Travelling companions in the vanguard, both generous and enthusiastic, the pioneer women architects appeared, coinciding with their access to further education, or what we could call to “the places of learning”.

In this way,  we can name the Irish architect Eileen Grey, Aino Marsio Aalto (Finnish), Margaret McDonald Mackintosh (Scottish), Allison Smithson (English), Charlotte Perriand (French) or Ray Eames (North American). Women who worked and established their reputation thanks their association with their companions: Jean Badovicci, Alvar Aalto, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Peter Smithson, Le Corbusier or Charles Eames. Others such as Maïja Isol, and Lily Reich belonging to the Bauhaus, as well as Margaret Kropoholler Staal, Grethe Meyer, Nana Ditzel,Grete Schutte-Lihotzy, or Matilde Ucelay, our first Spanish woman architect, worked on their own and never reached the same recognition.

Remember what Le Corbusier answered Charlotte Perriand when she entered his office looking for work “Unfortunately, young lady, we don´ t embroider cushions in this office”. After a time, he changed off his mind, and together they designed buildings and furniture, like the famous “chaise-longue”, known as “the LC4”; very few people know it was designed by Charlotte Perriand.

Today things are a-changing (as the song says), but not so much, in a certain sense. The Higher Technical School of Architecture in Madrid has as many women students enrolled as men in their first years of studying and there are more and more women taking part in the wonderful task of building. We make up 17% within the general group of architects in our country. (Although this is still a small percentage, it is a significant one).

With this basis and with our need of expression and communication our group begins in 1995 .Through the name of our group we wish to join together all what is positive in human activity. “To Build” in opposition of “to destroy”. We placed “women” next to “build” and we established a symbolic parallelism between our activity and what we would like to have as an attitude in life, through “this other look” that comes from inside and looks at the world through the eyes of a woman and the eyes of an architect. Our name became a complete declaration of intentions.

The image we chose as an initial reference of our group was this miniature named “Women building a city wall”, which belongs to the book “The City of the Ladies” of Christine de Pizanne, French artist of 14^th century. In it we can see two women building a wall with their own hands: one of them is a queen, the other is a nun. The queen symbolizes the reason, the physical material, its form. The noun symbolizes emotion, spirit and poetry. Both of them build and both incorporate through their intimate essence, a daily and nearby image of architecture.

Architecture designed by women. This is our project. Project that began by a spontaneous and intuitive way. Some colleagues working in Madrid detected the small social repercussion of our work, in spite of our massive incorporation to our profession. “LA MUJER CONSTRUYE” has directed its efforts towards maintaining itself continuously active for over seven years, in such a way that the project has grown acquiring more importance and credibility.The line of work has  been concentrated on the following activities:

1.-National creation, currently becoming international, of a network of women architects interested in the development of a collective project. Our web site, now translated into English is www.lamujerconstruye.org and I invite you to visit it, learn about our philosophy, read our papers,  and  enroll yourself in our Association if you wish to.

2.-The compilation of 200 works of architecture carried out in Spain by women architects or teams where their participation has played significant role collected together in five volumes with plans, photographs, descriptive reports and reflections by the authors on the professional practice.

3- The organization & coordination, over the past five years of V Meetings in Architecture at Alcalá University (near Madrid), as spring or summer events, in which over one hundred conference-goers from different geographical, ideological and cultural areas from several countries within the Mediterranean (Spain, Italy, France, Tunisia, Greece, Algeria and Egypt) have taken part, as well as several hundred students.

4- The publication of three books containing the speeches from these Meetings. The key importance of these books is to be the first time, at least in Spain, that women architects express their interests, building their ideals in a collective way, through their own architecture.

5- The design and custodianship of the itinerant/travelling exhibition, which under the title "Building from the inside. An imaginary journey through the poetry of built spaces", is here today in Lebanon, showing the work of 46 women architects in Lebanon and Spain, under a common thought: The human being who lives, exists. The conductor thread of this imaginary journey has been the search of beauty as women ´s architects contribution to society.

6-“LA MUJER CONSTRUYE” has taken part in different congresses, meetings, courses and conferences organised by different Universities, Town Councils and national and international Institutions, as Carrara Marble Fair in Italy or Dubvronick Congress in Croatia.

Over the past years of work we have seen (specially among other colleges architects) a certain surprise at the group we represent and, Why not say it clearly? A suspicious attitude. However we have verified step by step, that our way to approach architecture to society, through this “other look” previously mentioned, is starting to be understood. Architecture needs new groups and so it is necessary for women to be there.

The interest of “LA MUJER CONSTRUYE” project lies in the fact that among its objectives there is no comparative analysis of architecture carried out by men and by women. We want to build a thought based on contribution and not on comparison. Over the last years we have found common attitudes AMONG WOMEN, and we want to vindicate them. Values, not at all exclusive, as the praise for what is small, the empathy or the solidarity. We believe in a balanced architecture. We like working from serenity, from the origin, also from criticism. We seek beauty, proportion, harmony, the essence of things. The poetry of daily life, because as Felix de Azua, a Spanish writer says: “It is impossible to live daily life without poetry.”

We are interested in the journey, not only in the arrival. To listen a to learn, to dialogue. We wish to build an architecture for all, we don´ t want to keep inventing all the time. We want to build a “normal city”, not a “trap”. A city understood as a life scenery. Because we understand architecture as life prolongation.

We are looking for simple and daily life solutions, where everybody fits, a design that combines reason with emotion, knowledge with intuition. We understand architecture specially as an ethic compromise with people. We are against the pessimism prestige. We need to bring back to architecture the notion of utopia, the need of happiness, justice and recognition of human dignity, a new model towards affectivity.

So, above all, we bring Lebanon an attitude, which is a consequence of the work done to date. A respectful, positive and open minded attitude, by an architecture that listens, an architecture that wants to know people´s opinion, those people to whom belong the places we build. A Spanish women  ´s architectural attitude which understands that cities and spaces have to be designed for all of us as well as with the cooperation of all: men and women, children an teenagers, elderly people, emigrants, disabled people…

Places and cities designed in a responsible way and with solidarity, for body and spirit benefit. Through the dialogue with nature, with the environment sustainability and memory respect. Necessary places to live and to love in which the human being is the main figure.

To conclude I would like to paraphrase Heideger´s words: “Places where poetry builds the nature of living”

Cristina García-Rosales
Architect.

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