Women's Places Architecture and Design 1860-1960

"Women's Places: Architecture and Design 1860-1960" presents a series of case-study essays, all of them based on research which has been unpublished up until now, dealing with the relationship between particular women, buildings and design in the time period.

This collection shows a range of actual relationships between women and material culture in a given historical period, from those who engaged with the avant-garde of their day, to others who were more conservative and worked within prevailing traditions and conventions; their differing strategies and the ways in which the picture changed over a period of time in response to shifts in the contemporary aesthetic, economic, social and cultural climate of gender, architecture and design. The team of authors are noted within the discipline for their original and pioneering research in the field of gender, architecture, material culture and the built environment.

What was different about the environments that women created as architects, designers and clients at a time when they were gaining increasing political and social status in a male world? Through a series of case studies, Women's Places: Architecture and Design 1860-1960, examines in detail the professional and domestic spaces created by women who had money and the opportunity to achieve their ideal. Set against a background of accepted notions of modernity relating to design and architecture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this book provides a fascinating insight into women's social aspirations and identities. It offers new information and new interpretations in the study of gender, material culture and the built environment in the period 1860-1960.

Introduction 1. Questions of Identity: Women, Architecture and the Aesthetic Movement 2. Creating 'The New Room'. The Hall sisters of West Wickham and Richard Norman Shaw 3. Elsie de Wolfe and her Female Clients, 1905-1915: Gender, Class and the Professional Interior Decorator 4. Your Place or Mine? The Client's Contribution to Domestic Architecture 5. Architecture and Reputation: Eileen Grey, Gender, And Modernism 6. Marie Dormoy and the Architectural Conversation 7. A House of her Own. Dora Gordine and Dorich House (1936) 8. Elizabeth Denby or Maxwell Fry? A Matter of Attribution?

Brenda Martin, Penny Sparke