Staged at the Mies van der Rohe and Lily Reich-designed German National Pavilion in Barcelona, the exhibition Una cambra pròpia (A Room of One's Own) was pegged as an 'artistic intervention [which paid] tribute to all the women who have made pioneering contributions to the field of furniture and object design’. The exhibition remained on view until earlier this month at the pavilion, which has now become a bonafide centre for cultural activities and soirées, especially in the fields of architecture and design. The Fundació Mies van der Rohe, in collaboration with collectible design gallery Galeria Il·lacions, invited 10 contemporary practitioners to add their voices to the legacies of pioneering female designers and architects from the 20th century. It is in this sense, too, that the title alludes to Virginia Woolf's foundational text, A Room of One's Own, in which Woolf argues for carving out space for women in the public sphere—a space not only created for and by them, but also one that implicitly transgresses into typically male/masculine spheres of influence.

Within this framework, the voices and stories of some of the ‘forgotten’ women of the 20th century infiltrate what is arguably the best-recognised symbol of the virulent, masculine and 'pure' doctrines of the International Style. Following its construction and eventual dismantling, the image of the Barcelona Pavilion (not the pavilion itself) symbolised the core philosophies of what was helmed as a ‘new form of architecture’. After the German pavilion was disassembled in 1930, Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock's eponymous 1932 exhibition at the MoMA sanctified it as the poster child for their new ideology, with van der Rohe as the sole author of the work. Characterised by its break with tradition and insistence on an almost sterile aesthetic, the style was advertised as proliferating from a discipline that was singularly male, or was unsuited to women, rendering any design that followed its tenets as inherently masculine.

Lilly Reich, interior designer and lover of the German-American architect who worked with him on the pavilion design, was conspicuously absent from the canon created by the MoMA exhibit. In the aura of such an architecture anchored as heroic to begin with, one that disavows the notion of collaboration and has been attributed to the idea of dominant masculinity through a spatial morphology that defers to, and, at the same time, challenges Greek ideals, how might women make a mark? What does it mean for a design exhibition that comments on the space of women within patriarchal systems when its context is the quintessential image, the poster child of 20th-century architecture (understood as predominantly male-driven)? One could then think of the interventions that respond to the pavilion as partaking in a form of situated curatorship, where the contextual conditions are refracted through the responses of the artefacts on display.

Of the incredible women who inspire the contemporary designs on display are several names that are only now beginning to gain prominence in design discourse. These include the likes of Charlotte Perriand, Eileen Gray, Lilly Reich, Aino Aalto or Franca Helg, whose virtuosity was overshadowed by the celebrity of Le Corbusier, van der Rohe, Alvar Aalto and Franco Albini; designers whose work was pioneering within their fields such as the German textile designer Anni Albers, who transformed the tapestry into her canvas and developed a particularly distinct visual vocabulary, or the Hungarian industrial designer Eva Zeisel, who was one of the first women to be commissioned by MoMA and to display her ceramics there in 1942; along with lesser recognised figures such as French interior designer Andrée Putman and French designer Maria Pergay. To that illustrious list, one might ask: why these women and not others? Does correcting the record simply mean the addition of a few or a few hundred names to the historiography of modern architecture? Fundamentally, is it a question of correction, or the creation of a new way of thinking and doing architecture, one that acknowledges its ‘productive complexity’ (as architectural historian Beatriz Colomina argues in an essay on the hauntings of modernist rhetoric)?

In the case of architectural duos such as Reich and Mies, Aino and Alvaar or even Perriand and Corbusier, we could also question what led to the omission of what was a collaborative practice between peers. One clue might be in the archives of these notable architectures and historical record keeping: what we choose to remember and who decides what that story is. As architectural historian Elizabeth Darling outlines, this decision is often skewed towards particular ideas about what and who matters in history (the individual rather than the collective, the privileged rather than the working classes). Doubling up on that conspicuous absence, Colomina writes, “Women are the ghosts of modern architecture, everywhere present, crucial, but strangely invisible. Unacknowledged, they are destined to haunt the field forever.” 

The 10 designers who displayed their work in the gallery space included Spanish visual artist Carla Cascales, Spain-based textile designer Ines Sistiaga, design researcher Jana Tothill, Barcelona-based furniture designer Sanna Völker, artist Marria Pratts, American artist Laura Molina, digital artist Magdalena Hart, Si.atelier, textile artist Mariadela Araujo and ceramic artist Rosa Cortiella. The designs by these women paying homage to their predecessors are a means to domesticate what is seemingly a hostile architecture. As the press release emphasises, the women clutter the spartan interiors of the pavilion. This juxtaposition of the minimal nature of the original interiors and the insertion of domestic artefacts, such as lamps and kitchenware, is especially worth noting. In conceiving a ‘new form of architecture’, the pavilion seemed to disavow the user completely. In Una cambra propia, this is upended, even if conceitedly, through the various chaise lounges, tables and kitchenware that are part of the show. In this case of the recently concluded exhibition, the notion of haunting could alternatively be read as inhabiting.

A multicoloured, translucent tapestry, inspired by the geometric precision of Alber's weaves, hangs off the pristine glass facade—definitive in many ways—of the pavilion. The textile artwork by Tothill, A View of Our Own, as detailed in the official release, is meant to function as a curtain paying tribute to Albers’ pictorial textile and was created by the artist alongside her mother and grandmother. In view of the provocations lent by textile to the relatively unyielding architecture of the Barcelona Pavilion, with glass panels offering endless reflections, the supposed ephemerality of the pavilion—not only through its production of a liminal atmosphere but also the absence of a specific programme—is brought into question. Is it the hosting pavilion or the textile architecture that is meant to be ephemeral? Further, why is it that textile and weaving have often been relegated to a more feminine subset within craft? The fluidity of the textile, in contrast to the stoic solitude of the architecture itself, contradicts the very dichotomies that segregate the feminine/fluid and the masculine/solid.

The emphasis on craftsmanship and crafted elements in the displayed works is of equal relevance in the context of the exhibition. If the technological advancements of the 20th century saw a decline in the handmade, with an insistence on precision and modularity, where does craft fit in the equation today? The reliance on modularity and modern production could also be read as an insistence on individuality over the collaborative nature of craft. Chair designs on display by Cascales and Sistiaga (inspired by Eileen Gray and Lily Reich, respectively), the Wicker Lamp by Si.atelier (inspired by Franca Helg’s legacy of craftsmanship) or even Araujo’s rug design (inspired by Putman’s work), use weaving as a leitmotif, bridging the modernist and the handmade. Sistiga’s chair, a version of Reich’s MR 10 Weissenhof Chair, goes so far as to weave Reich’s biography into the piece. The insistence on craft is not only present through weaving but is also expressed in the ceramic E-Z Vase, Laura Molina’s tribute to Zeisel, and Rosa Cortiella’s ceramic side table, which is a tribute to Pergay, which, interestingly, sees Cortiella transliterate Pergay’s use of stainless steel into ceramic.

The contention of craft and its implicitly feminine undertones is then, something that continues to outline the displays as well as this text. Is craft still only under the purview of female makers? On the other hand, using crafted elements within the otherwise austere interiors of the pavilion 'softens' the spaces and their near surgical precision of industrial elements. It is a well-intended decrying of the hard pressed-on sense of order and geometry associated with the male modernist architect through an organic order and geometry of its own. In playing on the paradoxical rhetoric of the Mies pavilion, the exhibition lays bare the inherently sexual nature of the politics of space; women are still seen as transgressing the male sphere when they make a mark. It seems to be of almost no consequence that these spheres are dictated by opinion and discourse. On this strand, the exhibition warrants further questioning. Does the transgression of the ‘feminine’ into the masculine sphere inspire new ways of seeing? Are there ways of moving beyond the binaries often attributed to males and females? Why, as women designers, do we still seek a proverbial ‘room’ of our own?

The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of STIR or its editors.