Publications → Beyond the Star System in Architecture: Gender and Minor Architecture

In standard practices of architectural history and criticism, essentialist approaches predominate; these tend to overemphasize certain singular careers while failing to give sufficient consideration to the value of professional practices or to the social and historical conditions under which architectural works are created. These practices, along with the mechanisms of exclusion and exclusion practiced by individuals and institutions in positions that the literature has termed “gatekeepers,” are the cornerstone of the so-called star system of architecture, which significantly disadvantages women architects, though not exclusively. They also undermine the appreciation—and thus the quality—of the city’s common, everyday spaces and the spaces of daily life, in favor of grand public works and singular buildings.
These are approaches to architectural criticism and historiography centered on the constructive and stylistic description of works, which describe the trajectories of their authors more as hagiographies than as biographies, and which, when accompanied by references to the social or historical contexts of their production, do so more through an accumulation of juxtaposed data than out of a desire to overcome the all-too-frequent opposition between essentialist and exogenous analyses of art. Although these approaches are beginning to be abandoned from certain contemporary perspectives linked to cultural studies, as well as in some critical and historiographical traditions, they largely maintain their hegemony in many areas of our discourse.
This article advocates for changes in these practices of architectural criticism and historiography, along with a revival of urban planning as public policy, as elements for improving the quality of architecture and the city as a whole. And also as elements for a fairer recognition of the merit and capabilities of all architects,