Currently, the number of women in Spain who decide to study architecture at university is greater than men. Several studies show that since 2007 more than 50% of students registering for architecture programmes are female.1 Coinciding with the political transition to democracy in Spain in the 1970s, the number of women studying architecture has been increasing. However, while the horizontal inclusion of women in the profession is a reality, a kind of vertical segregation still operates, with female architects left with the lowest paid jobs and fewer opportunities for professional advancement.2 Despite the increasing presence of women in the architectural profession, it is difficult to find female architects from previous generations whose leadership is documented. Not until the end of the 1980s do we start finding relevant articles and illustrated features on women in architecture in prestigious Spanish magazines such as El Croquis or Arquitectura Viva, publications normally associated with male colleagues.3 Theoretical studies on female Spanish architects that delineate their contribution to architecture culture are not prevalent enough. Fortunately, however, they are beginning to appear.4 Documenting these women is important in that they and their work can serve as a model for young female, and male, students in the 21st century.
Female Education and Work in the Franco Period
The first woman to qualify as an architect in Spain was Matilde Ucelay (1912–2008). She studied at the Madrid School of Architecture in 1936,5 during the crisis of the Second Spanish Republic (1931–1939) and the beginning of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939).6 A book and a dissertation on her were published in 2012, some four years after her death, as a consequence of growing interest in women in Spanish architecture.7 Her status as the first woman in the architecture profession has been the subject of recent academic studies that have rediscovered her life and work and contextualised it within the architectural currents of the era. As Inés Sánchez de Maradiaga’s research corroborates, just five other women qualified as architects in Madrid during the following two decades.8 In 1964, the Barcelona School of Architecture issued its first degree to a woman, Mercedes Serra Barenys.9 At the end of the 1960s, coinciding with Spain’s economic redevelopment, the number of female architects increased to around 40. Although the number of women studying architecture was growing by this point, they were still very few in comparison to men. In 1974, the magazine Triunfo published a study on ‘The work of women in Spain’,10 which showed that the percentage of women in technical colleges in the year 1970–71 was 1.2% compared with 43.3% for men; just 2.8% of the students of engineering and architecture were women. More concrete data on the Barcelona School of Architecture showed that between 1964 and 1975, only 73 women gained degrees compared with more than 1,800 men.11
M.E.D.E., ‘El trabajo de la mujer en España’, Triunfo, issue 609, 1 June 1974, 32–33
The data already available on the increasing incorporation of women in the architecture profession is not enough by itself to give a clear understanding of the situation in Spain. It is necessary to relate that significant information to a reflection on how women were educated in the last century in a country where people suffered more than three decades of a right wing regime that endorsed gender inequality and supported conservative ideas and rigid gender roles, affecting not only women but also men’s education and cultural values.12 Several social history studies on gender indicate that the ideology promoted by Francisco Franco’s regime (1939–1975), supported by the Catholic church and the Falange Women’s Organisation,13 promulgated sexist and discriminatory education for women, taught them that they should remain subordinated to men, and constrained them from entering university and finding jobs. The Spanish historian María Ángeles Larumbe points out that one of the first acts of Franco’s regime was to repeal those laws passed by the Second Republic designed to promote and advance equal rights and the legal status of women.14 In the 1940s, a married woman still needed the permission of her husband to undertake legal and contractual activities, like opening a bank account. Larumbe argues that society at that time discouraged women, even those with a degree qualification, from having any other expectation than that of getting married (to a man, naturally) and remaining at home to look after her children, elderly relations, and her husband. In general, it was considered proper that the wife and daughter should not work, as a demonstration of the male’s capacity to assume sole responsibility for the financial and material needs of his family.
This situation during Franco’s regime meant that equality at work between men and women was non-existent, despite the fact that outside of marriage men and women had had the same political and professional rights since 1961.15 Roles with greater responsibility remained barred to women, the most obvious being that of head of state. Women were also excluded from the defence forces or military careers. In addition, professions considered to be male domains, such as architecture, engineering and the legal professions, were dominated by men.16 This psychosocial idea remained fixed within a great number of families throughout the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, and even, in certain parts of the country, into the ’70s and ’80s.
Vindications of Women in the Late Franco Era and The ‘Transition’
With the 1975 United Nations declaration of the International Year of the Woman and the death of Franco came renewed hope that men and women could construct a new Spain, free, democratic and egalitarian. This led to a continuous struggle for women’s rights and their entry into the workplace. The period between 1975 and the election of the first democratic government in 1982 – the so-called ‘Spanish Transition’ – was politically intense particularly in terms of the vindication of social rights. There had already been critical voices against the oppression of women, essentially linked to resistance movements against the dictatorship and conscious of the work of American and European feminists. Larumbe pointed out two principal focal points for demands for women’s rights at this time: academic research and newspaper articles.17 One of the pioneers to analyse legal, social and anthropological aspects of the woman’s situation during Franco’s regime was the lawyer and journalist Lidia Falcón, leader of the PFE (Partido Feminista de España), founder of the feminist magazine Vindicación Feminista (1976–1979), and author of numerous studies on women and Spanish society.18 Vindicación dedicated its tenth issue to reviewing what had constituted women’s education in the preceding years. As historian Amparo Moreno stated in Women’s Education: The Great Swindle (1977), an unspoken reality during the regime was that, ‘to analyse the education of women was to consider the most important, relevant and damaging experience that women suffered. From birth, and throughout her life, the woman [was] subjected to an education process whose purpose [was] to make her accept, as something natural, the role that a capitalist and patriarchal society [gave] her: as housewife, that is, wife and mother at the service of the man’.19 Cultural magazines of the period were also committed to the cause: Cuadernos para el Diálogo and Triunfo published issues concerned with examining the life of women and the conditions they suffered.20 At the same time, Spanish translations of the canonical texts of feminist literature, such as The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan or The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir were published, in both cases in 1966.
In addition to these vindicatory texts, a growing number of women’s associations were created, some clandestine, that actively fought for the recognition of women’s rights. Among the most remarkable were MDM (Movimiento Democrático de Mujeres), founded in 1964, ANMSL (Asociación Nacional de Mujeres Separadas Legalmente) in 1973, and ACMS (Asociación Católica de Mujeres Separadas) in 1975, to name a few.21 Following Franco’s death in 1975, a great many meetings, conventions and events took place that strove both to recover the rights that had been lost during the regime and to gain further rights, such as the decriminalisation of abortion and adultery, and the legalisation of contraceptives. It became essential that women could make decisions about their own lives and develop their own independent and autonomous professional careers. However, although obtaining the right to autonomy in life and the work place is for women undoubtedly one of the great achievements of the Spanish Transition, to achieve equality of professional recognition remains, unfortunately, a project for the 21st century.
A First Generation of Spanish Female Architects under Democracy: Five Remarkable Examples
In parallel with this environment of social protest, which was especially active in Madrid and Barcelona, the number of women studying architecture continued to rise. Despite the male-centred nature of their education, the generation of female architects educated in the 1970s was the first to be able to practise their profession in a democracy.22 These women architects were the first who could make their career in a society whose values were evolving towards equality.
A remarkable female architect of this generation is Carme Pinós. She graduated in 1978 from the Barcelona School of Architecture. Her work, together with her partner Enric Miralles, bloomed at the end of the 1980s with the recognition of their design for the Igualada Cemetery. After some photographic features in a few magazines, the Spanish journal El Croquis published a monograph on their work in 1987. She became the first female architect with such a volume dedicated to her work. Four years later, she became the first female Spanish architect to be awarded the FAD prize (Fomento de las Artes y el Diseño) for Architecture Design, although the award was shared with Miralles. It is notable that a considerable amount of writing on the joint work of Miralles-Pinós tends still to leave her in the background. Despite her success, she failed to gain equal recognition with her partner until the beginning of the 1990s.23 This situation worsened when she began to run her own architecture office.24 It was the support of foreigners like Wolf Prix and Thom Mayne that helped her re-establish herself after her professional separation by offering her the chance to give classes in prestigious Austrian and American universities.25 Years later, her work and evident talent has been recognised with several awards and in dozens of publications, but there is still insufficient academic research on her contribution to the Spanish architectural culture.
Carme Pinós belonged to a generation where to be a woman and have a successful career in architecture was considered unusual. It is significant that other remarkable colleagues, who also started working during the Spanish Transition, decided to focus on other fields less explored and valued in the late 1970s and early ’80s, such as landscape architecture, urban planning, history and theory, criticism, and scientific research. Nowadays, some of the most outstanding Spanish names in these once secondary or unexplored fields are those of women.
One of the most important names from the Barcelona School of Architecture is Rosa Barba Casanovas. Having graduated in 1971, Barba is currently considered to be the ‘the driving force of landscape in Spain.’26 In recognition of her importance, in 2001, a year after her death, the College of Architects of Catalonia nominated her for the European Prize for Landscape Architecture. Barba was involved in university teaching from the mid-1970s, and was the ‘main driving-force for landscape studies in Barcelona and a keen defender of the existence of the discipline, with the capability of interpretation, design and planning.’27 In 1993, she founded the Centre for Research into Landscape Projects (Centre de Recerca de Projectes de Paisatge), and instigated the postgraduate study of landscape in the Barcelona School of Architecture.28 Another remarkable individual is Beatriz Colomina, who also graduated from Barcelona, although several years later. Perhaps the most important female architect educated during the Spanish Transition, she chose to move to North America in order to develop professionally. Colomina is undoubtedly the most internationally recognised female Spanish historian and theorist of architecture. She directs the doctorate programme Media and Modernity at the University of Princeton and is the author of numerous research articles and books, such as Architecture Production and Reproduction (1988), Sexuality and Space (1992), Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (1994), positioning her as an international reference figure within architectural academia.
As it was for Colomina, doctoral qualifications open new possibilities for teaching, research and writing. The academic arena seems to have been one of the most promising for outstanding women to forge new paths and to develop their insights. Nevertheless, Spanish academia is still male-centred and subject to vertical segregation. According to recent data, ‘the average distribution of women and men in Spanish public universities shows how, in spite of the fact that women enrolled make up more than half of the student body and attain better marks than male students, as women move forward in their academic career, they begin to disappear… In some academic fields – such as urban and town planning – [women] disappear completely’.29 In 2007, the number of men and women in doctoral programmes in architecture in Spanish public universities was almost equal. However, the percentages of women that hold a tenured position decrease dramatically: 20.5% are tenured professors, and 7.1% are full professors.30
Noteworthy names from the School of Madrid (ETSAM) that succeeded, in spite of the inequitable atmosphere, are Margarita de Luxán and María Teresa Muñoz. Both careers stand out, although both have yet to achieve much international recognition. De Luxán, who graduated in 1970, was involved in cultural movements that fought for equality for women during the political Transition. In 1975 she was involved with the APEC (Asociación para la Promoción y Evolución Cultural) in Madrid, a feminist group legalised in 1974 that focused on cultural aspects as the instrument with which to change society. Five years later, she founded SAIMA (Seminario de Arquitectura Integrada en su Medio Ambiente) with colleagues and students from the School of Madrid.
The seminary has become a national point of reference in the study of environmental adaptation and bio-climatic architecture thanks to its pioneering research work in the field. In 1999, she became the first female full professor of the Architectural Drawing and Representation Department at the school, the first time that particular ‘glass ceiling’ was broken.
As for Muñoz, she is today recognised as one of the most respected critics of architecture in Spanish academia. Her career has been based in teaching and researching at the School of Madrid. She graduated in 1972 and continued her education at the University of Toronto, Canada. On her return to Spain, she translated into Spanish George Baird and Charles Jencks’ book Meaning in Architecture,31 initiating a long career as one of the foremost architecture critics on cross-cultural relations between Spanish architecture and the British and American English speaking world, in contrast to the previous preference for Italian and French.32 Towards the end of the 1970s, with a group of architect colleagues, she edited the magazine Arquitectura for the Chamber of Architects in Madrid for a period of two years, becoming the first woman to participate actively in the management of such a prestigious magazine. Between 1987 and 1990, she was the first woman to direct the Department of Architecture Design at the School of Madrid. After a career that produced more than twenty books and scientific articles, in 2008 she was the first women to be awarded the FAD prize for Thought and Criticism33 and, in doing so, broke one more glass ceiling.
The female architects whose trajectories have been outlined in this chapter represent outstanding achievements on several levels. Not only did they offer genuine contributions to the development of both the profession and the discipline, exploring new directions in which to take architecture practice and thinking; they also managed to do so in spite of the male-centred atmosphere of the time, a structural problem stemming from the gender inequality promoted during Franco’s regime. However, we should add that the male dominance of the profession has not disappeared completely. Even at a time when the numbers of female students of architecture outweigh males, gender inequality still persists, with women’s presence diminishing (sometimes to the point of oblivion) as we climb to the higher ranks of academia and the profession. The effects of a 40-year-long androcentric educational system can still be felt in certain strata of society and it is in this context that a study of the presence of women in Spanish architecture is much needed. Not only would it help fill a persistent void in the academic study of contemporary Spanish architecture, it would also help point out the glass ceilings that still need to be broken, and the active role women have played – and continue to play – in Spanish architectural culture.