This seminar will consider feminist frameworks, aesthetics, and politics in relation to architecture and the built environment. How might theories on the feminine, and gender more broadly, transform architectural thought and design? What are the implications for materiality, space, and construction? Is there potential in a “minor architecture,” as described by theorist Jennifer Bloomer, to challenge dominant architectural narratives and ways of building? The seminar will address these inquiries by focusing on a select number of key practices from the 1970s to the present, and will emphasize deep engagement with historical and theoretical texts, archival objects, and material practices. Among other topics we will discuss the relationships between the personal and the political, feminist approaches to history, questions of labor, aesthetics, and craft, alternative models of pedagogy and practice, sexuality and the body, and the social constellations of family, friendship, collaboration, activism, and community.
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