Just in time for the holiday gift-giving season, a new survey of the 100 most influential women architects working in our time is set to hit the shelves courtesy of the Royal Institute of British Architects.
The organisation’s new title, 100 Women: Architects in Practice, intends to champion the cause of gender equity in architecture while promoting the contributions of often overlooked or unheralded women architects in more than 70 different countries.
“We wrote this book as a form of peaceful protest not a bloody revolution,” authors Harriet Harriss, Naomi House, Monika Parrinder, and Tom Ravenscroft detailed in the RIBA Journal. “It is the inequitable product of an inequitable profession, and all four authors eagerly await the day when the need for publications like this are rendered obsolete. When that day comes, it will mean that the perennial problem of gender-prejudice in architecture is a thing of the past.”
Alison Brooks was responsible for writing the foreword, joined by fellow contributors Francine Houben, Yvonne Farrell, Elizabeth Diller, Yasmeen Lari, and several others whose careers have become emblematic of the progress that has been made in the field — despite the gnawing obstacles that remain in the form of pay equity, major awards and other types of visibility, and professional leadership roles.
“These profiles highlight the socially engaged, future-building agendas evident throughout the book — sustainable in the broadest sense. These agendas are not in themselves new but, when taken together, the architects included here offer ways forward that are contextually grounded, authentically democratic and, at their most radical, supportive of systemic change,” its authors say once more in summary.
The 320-page book can be ordered here via RIBA Books.