In 1963, Ada Louise Huxtable was one of the first full-time architecture critics at The New York Times, a job title she created at the newspaper. Despite being in a typically male-dominated field, Gae Aulenti built a career as an architect and interior designer independent of male partners (while it was far more common for women to establish studios with their partners, with the husband invariably getting most or all of the credit). A pioneering figure in advocating for urban renewal and conservation, Canadian architect and philanthropist Phyllis Lambert has often been called the "Joan of Architecture". She was an influential patron for the discipline, who founded Heritage Montreal, the Société d’amélioration Milton-Parc (SAMP) and the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA).

The three women, trailblazing figures in their own right, are the subject of an ongoing exhibition at the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris. Crossed Histories: Gae Aulenti, Ada Louise Huxtable, Phyllis Lambert, On Architecture and the City, curated by architectural historian Léa-Catherine Szacka along with Catherine Bédard, traces the lives of these women with a focus on their influence in shaping discourse on public architecture and preservation (a seemingly fortuitous but vital thread for the show). In foregrounding the histories of these women, Szacka also manages to bring out the ambivalent relationships each had to the modernist project and how each in turn affected the evolution from modernism to post-modernism in discreet ways.

The project brings together archival images, drawings and photographs to shed light on each woman’s life and her work. Vitally, the exhibition interweaves the women’s biographies with narratives of five buildings that they were associated with, whether as an architect, commissioner or critic. The emphasis on material history further allows the exhibition to draw together thematic red threads that reveal unforeseen relationships in a collective narrative. Apart from the buildings these women worked on in one way or another, the showcase also brings together interviews conducted by the curators with scholars, critics and directors of major architectural organisations who have studied their lives.

These dialogues include Phyllis Lambert (architect and founder of CCA, Montreal), Alexandra Lange (architecture and design critic, New York), Mary McLeod (professor of architecture, Columbia University, New York), Mirko Zardini (curator and architecture critic, Milan, former director of CCA, Montreal), Giovanna Borasi (director of CCA, Montreal), Maristella Casciato (curator of architecture, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles) and Barry Bergdoll (professor of art history and archaeology, Columbia University, New York).

A lot of exhibitions in the recent past have depicted women and their stories as vanguards to give them a space within a contentious ‘canon’. However, by focusing on Huxtable, Aulenti and Lambert’s work of building, Scazka underscores the crucial role women played in the histories of 20th-century architecture and its move away from modernism.

The interweaving of the lives of these three women, the ambiguous spaces that designers who are women occupy in what continues to be a male dominated field and the mirrored ambiguity of the period in which these women most actively practiced (and how that transformed architecture today) formed the background for STIR’s conversation with Scazka. Edited excerpts from an insightful discussion on a nuanced exhibition and subject follow.

Mrinmayee Bhoot: The most fascinating aspect of the exhibition, in my opinion, is the focus on the three women since you would not group them together instinctually. Could you begin by elaborating on how you conceptualised the project?

Léa-Catherine Szacka: I was working extensively on research about the second half of the 20th century, but somehow this was always focused on white male figures. The last significant project I completed was a book on the Italian architect Paolo Portoghesi. But I always wanted to study the work of women architects and turn that into a research project. In 2021-22, I was on sabbatical in Zurich, in a chair at ETH focused on urban history. This is where I started to think about the project (around women designers) again, wanting to incorporate an urban component to the research.

To make it a little more fun, I restricted myself to selecting women who were all born in the same decade. I chose the ‘20s because it was exactly 100 years ago. Plus, I feel like that was an interesting generation of women because they came of age just after the Second World War. They were also a generation a little in-between the first and the second wave of feminism. It was a bit of an arbitrary rule, but it led me to select the three women in the showcase.

Huxtable was someone I was already fascinated by because of my vested interest in media, critical writing and journalism. More importantly, I knew that her archive was available. The fact that each of the women in the show had sizeable archives that were open or had recently been opened did influence my curatorial choice. Ada Louise’s archive was located at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, and as it turned out, Aulenti’s family had recently opened a foundation in her home where they were holding her archives. Lambert also had archives at the CCA. This becomes crucial to consider because when you start researching women and their contributions to the field, it’s nearly, usually impossible—their disappearance from history is very much linked to the fact that their archives are not preserved.

Mrinmayee: What’s also notable is the focus on the shift from modernism to post-modernism in this period, as you mention in the official release. What I was wondering, especially with these women, was whether the critique of modernist architecture, in any way, feminist? How did the fact that these were women practitioners play an important role in their re-evaluation of modernism and the rise of the post-modern aesthetic?

Léa-Catherine: That's a good point, because I would say that’s not the case. It's quite the contrary. It was a surprise for me while I was working on the project. One component of the exhibition is a series of interviews I conducted with experts—six people [who] I thought could talk about at least two of these three women. One of the interviews I conducted was with Lambert, the only one of the three still alive. And the discovery that emerged from these conversations was that none of these women were feminists. It’s interesting to me because when we talk about women today, we always link their work to the feminist movement and that notion is refuted here.

I would say they were simply women trying to operate in a male-dominated world. And there are instances where we see that they were actively not willing to help other women. For example, Ada Louise refused to sign a recourse by some women at the Journal to raise their salaries. She specifically said, I don't want to be part of that. They were fighting for themselves in a way. But I think they do advance the condition of women. And one of the underlying themes of the exhibition, in this sense, is the idea of power, the kind of power these women wielded.

Mrinmayee: Speaking about working in a male-dominated field, I was also interested in understanding how you think these women, particularly Aulanti and Lambert, who were both mentored by men, break away from the domineering image of the male architect?

Léa-Catherine: In the exhibition, we have an expansive timeline that not only details the lives of the three women but includes other important historical (or architecturally relevant) events. You’ll notice that from around 1965 to 1969, a lot of important figures of the modernist era—Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Ernest Donat and Richard Rogers—died. This is where we also see a major shift towards postmodernism.

One of the binding themes of the exhibition is exactly this—what I call an ambivalent relationship to modernism and those figures—and how we move away from that. With Phyllis, we see it very clearly in the shift from working on the Seagram with Mies to then conceptualising CCA in the late 1980s.

In the case of Aulenti, the last project that is presented in the exhibition is the Piazzale Cadorna, which is done in a very postmodern, colourful language. So you see a symbolic emancipation from those figures in these works. There is also the ambivalence where they don’t necessarily define themselves as postmodern, but they are marked by a moment of transition, they are always in these both/and situations where you can define it as both this or not this.

Mrinmayee: The idea of an ambivalent relationship is quite interesting, especially given the period that we are looking at. On that note, from what I understand, the exhibition itself is structured not solely on individual histories but on their projects and this blurring of how history can be told.

Could you elaborate on how this exercise of tracing the history of a building—from conception to completion—can become a way to tell interconnected stories?

Léa-Catherine: I think more than five buildings, it's these five stories that are mostly related to a building or a public space. In the gallery, each of these is presented chronologically. The first project is the Seagram building in New York, which has a very hardcore modernist design language. Here, Phyllis Lambert was the commissioner for the headquarters of her father’s company. The first story also touches on the tools of the architect. So all the other tools or means by which one can have an agency on architecture in the city. As I said, here Phyllis is not the architect of the building.

Of course, it's a man, it's Mies, but she is the woman behind the scenes. The relationship between the two also explores the relationship to modernist architecture. You even have a little crossover here because Ada Louise, being an important journalist in New York in those years, wrote an article on the building.

The second project we focus on is the demolition or the campaign to prevent the demolition of Penn Station around 1963. Ada Louise, along with other women such as Jane Jacobs and Aline Saarinen, was trying to defend the station from being destroyed. This moment is often seen as the beginning of preservation laws in America. The aim here was to highlight preservation movements and how women were influential in shaping cities through such activism.

Then we turn to Phyllis Lambert in the early ‘70s to late ‘80s, and her project of photographing greystone buildings, which are typical of Montreal's old neighbourhood, with Richard Pare. Through her documentation, she is trying to prevent the destruction of her city. This is also the era where urban renewal is gaining prominence and she would spearhead the creation of the largest non-profit cooperative housing renovation project in Canada as a way to champion the cause.

Eventually, the Canadian architect also bought a Victorian house that was supposed to be demolished. Here, she decides to build the Canadian Centre for Architecture around the house. It’s a postmodern project in how the material and language of the house are reinterpreted by Peter Rose, the architect on the project. Again, the aim was to highlight preservation and the idea of publicness in architecture. I wanted to look at how architecture can become a public concern in the city.

The renovation of the Gare d'Orsay (now the Musée d’Orsay) in the mid-80s, for which Aulenti worked on the interior design, is our fourth story. What’s fascinating is that the station was also slated for demolition to make space for a hotel. It’s shocking when you see these images, to imagine that you would have such a thing along the Seine in that area. Piazzale Cadorna in Milan is the last project for the exhibition, also designed by Aulenti. For me, it represents the major themes of the showcase—dwelling on the idea of art and architecture in the public domain and this evolving understanding of the modernist project.

Mrinmayee: If I understand correctly, the exhibition starts from a very modernist project to something that, at least aesthetically, is much more postmodern, while there are red threads—the notion of publicness and preservation—that run through the projects that you're talking about.

Léa-Catherine: It's a bit of a complicated structure because you have three women, five stories and three red threads. The three red threads, as you point out, are the relationship to modernism, preservation in architecture and its publicness. What I thought was interesting is that, with a lot of exhibitions about women architects being held at the moment, there’s a tendency to lean towards spotlighting their biographies.

Their lives take precedence—where they came from, whether they had families or not—all these things are important. In this case, I tried to mix biographical aspects with the larger histories of the period. This allowed me to bring the women into some form of dialogue with each other. I was trying to be both very zoomed in, in terms of biography, but at the same time, zooming out and trying to extract these three red threads.

Mrinmayee: In that sense, it is quite a layered exhibition with unforeseen connections, which is quite commendable. By way of conclusion, I’d like to dwell on the fact that you focus on two architects and one critic.

What particularly drew me to the project was the inclusion of Huxtable. And I’m wondering, how does the exhibition rethink the idea of architectural production, as more than simply ‘building’?

Léa-Catherine: It's funny because we come back to the first question in a sense, but as I said, to be very honest, these three women were chosen, not completely arbitrarily, but because I find them interesting. But then I discovered that they were a good sample because you have here three distinct examples and methods of ‘practice’. Aulenti was someone who designed at all scales from products to urban design, although she did a lot of interiors. Then there is Phyllis, who is an architect, but later in life—after already having worked as a project manager and commissioner—she takes on the role of institution director. She's also a patron, you know, she's a lot of other things. Lastly, you have someone who is not an architect at all.

Ada Louise’s inclusion was also a way to emphasise, as I said before, if you widen your understanding of who is an agent in terms of architecture and the city, then you will probably find a lot of influential women. These are women who have been placed in positions where perhaps they're not given the label of an architect or a builder, but they have advocated for the built environment in equally important ways.

'Crossed Histories: Gae Aulenti, Ada Louise Huxtable, Phyllis Lambert, On Architecture and the City' is on view at The Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris, from February 13 - May 17, 2025.