Filling the gap

Architectural Review, The, Sept, 2004 by Sutherland Lyall

Everyone says there aren't enough women in architecture but where are the celebrations for those women who do make it through the architectural longhouse? One answer is at the International Archive of Women in Architecture at http://spec.lib.vt.edu/IAWA.

Started up a decade ago at Virginia Poly and Virginia Tech, it documents the history of women in architecture--professional papers mostly from before 1950. 'Women in architecture' includes landscape architects, designers, historians and critics, and from all over the world. Gae Aulenti's papers are here, plus a lot of Europeans, and Sally Lynn Levine's cv and a 1995 exhibit called 'Alice Through the Glass Ceiling'. Levine was co-founder of Chicks in Architecture Refuse to Yield (CARY). Alice is an acronym for Architecture Lets in Chicks Except ... Monica Pidgeon's biographical database is there and three drawings by Alison Smithson. Happily, they don't seem to take the 1950 time limit altogether seriously.