Women (and) Architecture
Scarce and Hampered: Discussion of Feminism in Korean Architecture
ith the ‘mirroring’ phenomenon of Megalia in 2015 and the femicides at Gangnam station in 2016 acting as the catalyst, discussion of feminism and gender issues that had been limited to those among professionals and certain organisations in Korea, and settled down quickly to become a popular theme of the lips of those in the Korean art world and more widely in movements such as ‘#MeToo’ and ‘sexual_violence_ within_sentences’. Words like ‘women’, ‘gender’, and ‘queer’ quickly became a part of daily conversation. Disclosure and confessions were disseminated through 140-word Twitter posts and the headlines of newspapers and magazines, and with a rapid increase of numbers in art works and forums that highlight such issues, one cannot but observe that a certain level of social empathy has been established. One can also see how recently released movies like ‘Kim Ji-Young: Born 1982’ and the ‘House of Hummingbird’ are receiving critical attention and are being consumed through perspectives and approaches that had not existed before. Against this robust feminist wave, however, there was a realm that stayed relatively in 1966. In the May issue of 1967, the German writer Ingeborg Drewitz wrote an article titled ‘Women Architect’s Struggle: 30 Years of Balance’, and in the June issue of 1976, Lee Sinok, Jang Yangja, Cho Gyesun, Chi Soon, Chun Byeongok, and Choi Euija featured in a panel discussion on the theme ‘Architectural Space of Everyday Life’. In the October issue of 1990, the architect Park Yeonsim wrote an article titled ‘And the Advent of Feminism?: Architecture for Women’, questioning why ‘feminist criticism is about making modern critical theory into something female while bearing its own political message. As a critic once said, having traversed across structuralism and deconstruction in western critical theory, have we now arrived at an era of feminism?’ In the October issue of 2002, a panel discussion on ‘Architectural Culture and Women in Korea:
