Making Space: Women and the Man Made Environment

By Matrix

Making Space is a pioneering work first published in 1984 which challenges us to look at how the built environment impacts on women's lives. It exposes the sexist assumptions on gender and sexuality that have a fundamental impact on the way buildings are designed and our cities are planned.
Written collaboratively by the feminist collective Matrix, tthe book provide a full blown critique of the patriarchal built environment both in the home and in public space, and outline alternative forms of practice that are still relevant today. Making Space remains a path breaking book pointing to possibilities of a feminist future.
Some authors worked for the London-based Matrix Feminist Architect's collective, an architectural practice set up in 1980 seeking to establish a feminist approach to design. They worked on design projects - such as community, children and women's centres. Others were engaged in building work, teaching and research.
The new edition comes with a new introduction examining the context, process and legacy of Making Space written by leading feminists in architecture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verso UK
• Release date: Mar 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781839765728

Matrix

Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative was set up in 1980 as an architectural practice and a book group that grew out of the Feminist Design Collective. hey were one of the first architectural groups in Britain to take an overtly feminist stance in their way of working and designing, and in the projects they took on. The practice was run as a workers' co-operative with a non-hierarchical management structure and collaborative working. Matrix worked in two main areas, design projects that were all publicly funded social projects and technical advice. Secondly, developing participatory design methods, acknowledging that architects' ways of working needed to be adapted in order to make the design process more understandable and engaging for clients and users. Although there were as many as twenty members of the collective, initial members include Frances Bradshaw, Susan Francis, Barbara McFarlane, Anne Thorne, Julia Dwyer, Jos Boys and Benedicte Foo.

Book preview

The contributors

Jos Boys continues to be active in, and write about, feminist and related practice, research and education as well as being distracted by many other things. Has taught widely, and is currently Director, Learning Environments Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Centre (LEEDIC) at The Bartlett UCL. In 2008 was co-founder of The DisOrdinary Architecture Project, a platform led by disabled artists that collaborates with built environment students, educators and professionals to creatively and critically reimagine approaches to access and inclusion.

Fran Bradshaw joined Collective Building & Design as bricklayer and designer after working with Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative and Hackney Direct Labour Organisation. In 1995 she returned to architecture with Anne Thorne at Anne Thorne Architects, where, from an ecological and low energy design approach and working with residents and community groups, they have continued to develop and evolve the feminist design practice ideas first described in Making Space.

Karen Burns is an architectural historian and theorist based at the University of Melbourne in Australia. She was co-founder of the feminist collective Parlour and is co-editor of the forthcoming two-volume book, The Bloomsbury Global Encyclopedia of Women in Architecture, 1960–2015 (2023). Her research on women, design and material culture focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries and is particularly concerned with issues of Empire and global culture.

Jane Darke was completing her PhD and teaching students of architecture and planning part-time while working on Making Space. She subsequently worked as a housing manager and then taught housing until retirement in 2004, devising new courses and writing about women in cities and the significance of home. She recently learned that her 1979 paper in Design Studies has been cited almost a thousand times and has sparked a subfield, ‘constraint research’, in interdisciplinary studies of the design process.

Benedicte Foo left London and Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative for rural North Wales, worked in small architectural practices, got interested in sustainability and self-building, set up her own practise doing extensions,projects for community groups, and campaigning to save a historic market hall. She worked with school kids on the built environment, and continued validating UK architecture courses. She moved to Cambridge, continuing in practice and teaching (at the University and on the qualification for those who could not afford to stop working), and became Chair of Governors at Parkside Community College.

Susan Francis, who died in 2017, was a founder member of Matrix and worked with Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative until 1986. She had three children, then ran the pioneering Women’s access course at North London University. In 1991 she joined the Medical Architectural Research Unit (MARU) providing a generation of NHS and international students with a unique education. She co-wrote the Nuffield Trust’s Building a 2020 Vision: Future Health Care Environments. Setting out a twenty-year development strategy for the NHS, it addressed virtually every element that forms the current debate about healthcare provision and reform. At the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment — (2006–11) she was Special Advisor for Health at a time when billions were being spent in capital investment, helping to improve the quality of a host of projects. Architects for Health, and The European Healthcare Design Congress are both fitting memorials to her vision, but she would have been especially pleased that Making Space is being republished.

Katie Lloyd Thomas is Professor of Theory and History of Architecture at Newcastle University, and author of Building Materials: Material Theory and the Architectural Specification (Bloomsbury, 2021). A founder member of the feminist collective taking place [takingplace.org.uk], Katie’s research often examines intersections between gender, architecture and technology. Current projects include The Architect as Shopper and the Anglo Brazil project Translating Ferro / Transforming Knowledges, which uses Sérgio Ferro’s work to catalyse a new field of Production Studies [tf-tk.com].

Barbara McFarlane is a practising architect. While working on Making Space she worked for Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative. Subsequently she worked on numerous housing projects, both refurbishment and new build, and a range of community projects before forming The McFarlane Partnership. She is a member of various amenity organisations working to improve the local environment and is currently involved with networks within architecture and construction which are taking action to address the challenge of climate and ecological breakdown.

Marion Roberts is Emerita Professor of Urban Design at the University of Westminster. Her PhD research was inspired by her involvement in Making Space and was published as a monograph in 1991. She carried the collective flame through a number of feminist scholarly projects in the UK and Europe in the course of her academic career. She has a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship project on urban design and the urban night, due to finish in 2023.

Anne Thorne was a founder member working for seven years at Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative. Following work on Jagonari, Anne joined the committee of Labo Housing Association for Asian women and became chair. Anne Thorne Architects was founded in 1991, working with local artists and community groups at Aldgate subways, on social housing and co-housing to Passivhaus/Lifetime Homes standards, and pioneering natural and recycled materials in homes, schools, community centres and nursery schools. Anne is a Past Master at the Art Workers Guild. FRSA.

MAKING

SPACE

WOMEN AND THE  

 MAN-MADE ENVIRONMENT

MATRIX

This edition published by Verso 2022

First published by Pluto Press Limited 1984

© Matrix Book Group, 1984, 2022

Foreword © Katie Lloyd Thomas and Karen Burns 2022

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Verso

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US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-571-1

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-573-5 (US EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-572-8 (UK EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

Contents

The contributors

Foreword to the 2022 edition / Katie Lloyd Thomas, Karen Burns

Illustrations

Preface

1.

Introduction / Jos Boys, Frances Bradshaw, Jane Darke, Benedicte Foo, Sue Francis, Barbara McFarlane, Marion Roberts, Anne Thorne, and Susan Wilkes

2.

Women, architects and feminism / Jane Darke

3.

Homes fit for heroines: housing in the twenties / Barbara McFarlane

4.

Women and public space / Jos Boys

5.

House design and women’s roles / Jos Boys, Frances Bradshaw, Jane Darke, Benedicte Foo, Sue Francis, Barbara McFarlane, Marion Roberts, and Susan Wilkes

6.

Housing the family / Sue Francis

7.

Working with women / Frances Bradshaw

8.

Private kitchens, public cooking / Marion Roberts

9.

House and home / Benedicte Foo

Notes and references

Foreword to the 2022 edition

Making Space is a book of its moment, but its arguments speak to today’s urgent questions about the relationship between space, gender, and oppression. It analyses the gendered violence of public space, the female burden of unpaid care work, and the gender segregation of cities. It is still women who disproportionately labour inside private dwellings and provide the childcare and housework to support daily life, health, and well-being. The thoughts of the Matrix book group on topics that once seemed consigned to the past, such as gendered food poverty, insecurity of tenure, fire safety issues and disrepair in social housing and their impacts on women’s lives are newly relevant. Other issues that we would have expected to make headway on — the penalties levied against gender and racial minorities in the architectural profession, for example — remain.

This book was addressed to a broad audience. When asked recently to recall for whom they were writing, book group members remarked that it was aimed at a new audience of women readers eager to hear women’s perspectives, to tenant associations, and, well, everybody. It was also directed at the architecture profession, who by and large ignored it, although one review helpfully declared that the book would be more politically effective if it had been written for men. Making Space however, refused the demand to ‘provide architects with a do-it-yourself feminist architecture kit. We are not prescribing the solution: we are describing a problem, so as to help women understand their own relationship to the built environment and to help architects understand how the environment is a problem for women.’

Making Space was published in 1984 and reprinted the following year. It entered libraries across the UK, USA, Australia, and Scandinavia. Although the still predominantly male architecture profession preferred to shun the book, Making Space was quickly reviewed and quoted by fellow feminists in feminist art, urban policy, social policy, urban planning, industrial design, and gender studies. It would go on to have a long underground life in architecture and beyond.

Making Space emerged during a period of flux and possibility, when a different present and future were being imagined through experiments in work, politics and living. The late 1970s and early 1980s London from which it emerged is almost unrecognisable, but the community-based infrastructure and local organising it sprang from has acquired new relevance. Local political agency continues to be a potential engine of change.

A late 1975 survey estimated that London had 20,000 squatters living in council housing. Squats in private properties were not counted. A later historian estimated that the numbers might be upwards of 50,000 units.¹ Squatting and protecting houses from forced demolition or inhabiting them before upgrading and sale (‘short life housing’), provided a base for experiments in collective living and do-it-yourself housing repair. It was also a local response to a city-wide housing crisis. The demand for housing went unmet as old dwellings decayed and redevelopment schemes displaced communities. Single women and single mothers, particularly lesbians, faced gender and sexuality barriers. Black British and South Asian British citizens struggled against race-based housing discrimination.

For some feminists, collective living experiments promised to liberate women from the isolation of child-rearing and housework. For others it offered a means to put left wing politics into action. Matrix book group member Jos Boys recalls that squatting enabled women to ‘negotiate our relationship with the built environment in a much more immediate way’ and claim ‘spaces that had been taken from us’ (by capitalism).² Accounts of collective life seep into the chapter on women’s everyday lives in Making Space.

The run-down Victorian and Edwardian spaces of the city also offered cheap office space in the former warehouses, factories and business spaces that had once oiled an expansive British economy and empire. These places provided the material infrastructure for the flowering of a thousand co-ops. The co-operative was an established British left tradition that could be found in food, credit, and workplace associations stretching back to the mid-nineteenth century. They were usually organised as not-for-profit syndicates and were democratically owned and controlled by members.

Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative was one of these. Both the book group and the design collective, which had members in common, had evolved from a feminist group founded in late 1977 within a larger organisation called the New Architecture Movement (NAM). NAM was a socialist architecture coalition dedicated to unionising architectural workers and restructuring the profession so that participatory design and user needs were placed at the centre of architectural work. Around half of the Making Space book group members had also worked as architects with the Feminist Design Collective, which changed its name to Matrix in 1980. As the book project took shape, it became publicly identified as the output of the Matrix collective, taking the name Matrix to identify the book’s authorship.

Both NAM and the NAM feminist group reflected the impact of the Left in British architecture. Both NAM and the ‘sexism in architecture group’ were able to meet at one of London’s first co-operative workspaces at 5 Dryden Street, some of whose occupants had been involved in the struggle to save nearby Covent Garden from wholesale redevelopment. A cadre of Covent Garden activists and housing reformers were also in posts at the AA: the Architecture Association, a private architecture school in Bedford Square, Bloomsbury.

NAM’s newly renamed Feminism and Architecture group was able to meet here through 1978 and to organize a public lecture on feminism and architecture at the AA, but they remained at a considerable distance from architecture’s professional institutions, and between NAM and the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), relations were fractious. In late 1979 The NAM feminist group criticized the RIBA survey of women members that the Equalities Opportunities Commission had requested. The NAM Feminist Group observed in NAM’s journal, Slate 12, that ‘The survey asked highly relevant and unbiased questions as What does your father do? and Is your husband an architect? ’

Material experiments in making new spaces for work and living were entangled with new ways of organising politics and generating knowledge. Book group members were deeply involved in political organisations. Marion Roberts and Jane Darke were active members of the Labour Party, which at the time had a strong left-wing promoting ‘municipal socialism’. Benedicte Foo was active in her trade union and left organisations. Fran Bradshaw was a minor member of Big Flame, a leftist political and cultural organisation, and she attended its Summer School.

Networks of alternative media were essential places for the production and communication of news and ideas. The community newsletter, local paper and political broadsheet were key information hubs. Fran Bradshaw, Barbara McFarlane and Sue Francis had worked on the production of NAM’s newsletter, Slate, and many of the book group had early pieces published there. These pieces were based in research work on housing, gender, and domesticity, communal living, public housing, and a growing feminist critique of the gendered behaviours and built practices of architecture. As well as deriving insights from their own practice in local authority architecture units and housing co-ops, writers borrowed from new feminist scholarship on housework, from gender studies in social geography, and from American research on feminist utopian traditions and ethnographic understandings of the home.

Anthropology was a key area of interest, as signalled by the title of what proved to be a foundational workshop for Making Space convened by members of the NAM feminist group: Women in Space: Feminist-Anthropology-Architecture-Community held in March 1979 at Caxton House, the North Islington Community Centre. Anthropology reconstructed a women’s history of the built environment through its recovery of matriarchal societies. Anthropology’s cross-cultural exploration of symbol and social relations provided tools for studying the built environment that were especially fitting in multicultural London.

The Women in Space workshop asked, ‘How can collective action change the way buildings oppress and isolate women?’ and ‘What could neighbourhoods, houses, and street patterns be like?’ Inner North London proved particularly fertile terrain for these questions. Caxton House in Archway provided a space for the public workshop, the Islington community press printed Slate and the Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative would be established first at Anne Thorne’s house on Montague Road, and then in Bradbury St and later Ashwin Street, both Co-ops in Dalston, Hackney.

Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative is discussed in Making Space under the title ‘Working with Women’. The chapter describes the Design Collective’s desire to break down power hierarchies by finding accessible ways to explain architectural design ideas and was integral to a politics of knowledge sharing. The women’s movement had developed new ways of generating and organising ideas. Experiences were shared in small group conversations and in the open meeting. As Julia Dwyer, an architect with the Design Collective, later remarked of her squatting experience when households living in the same street held group meetings, ‘organising in a self-generating way was absolutely core to the whole thing.’³ Making Space noted that the design collective was a group rather than ‘an individual’ who understood ‘the process of working in groups’, with other community groups.

As a process of collective authorship, Making Space joined a history of older collectivist models — the British Restaurants run by local councils between 1940 and 1950 described in