Introduction

My peers and I witnessed a great social revolution as children but entered a professional world of conservative retrenchment. Christian Caryl’s recent book Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century² defines a forgotten generation’s historical identity obscured under the shadow of the ’68 generation.³ In 1979, the year I received my undergraduate degree in architecture, Margaret Thatcher, John Paul II, Ayatollah Khomeini and Deng Xiaoping marked a counter-revolution away from the secular socialism of the 20th century towards the resurgences of religion and capitalism in the 21st. By the time I left graduate school and moved to New York in 1981, Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as president of the US, the New York Stock Exchange converted from paper to electronic trading, and the first clusters of deaths from what came to be known as AIDS were reported by the New York Times. Discrimination during America’s cold war relegated women to the home and gays to the closet. New York City in the 1980s became a place where feminist theory and practice met with AIDS activism to create radically new affiliations and alliances that resonate today.

Removed by a century from the first women’s movements that arose from industrialisation and modernity, the last three waves of feminism are intimately intertwined with this global digital restructuring of capitalism. This chapter traces my own personal and professional encounters with these three waves, which form not only an historical timeline but also offer a layered inheritance of teachers, colleagues, knowledge and experiences that constitute social scenes in which emancipatory alliances become possible. The first section of this chapter outlines my own intellectual debt to the second wave feminists who provided alternative theories and practices to the gentrification/redevelopment narratives in New York at the time. The second section overlaps with the ‘culture wars’ that resulted from the reactions to identity politics, revisions of collective memory, and especially the broader application of digital technologies and social media beginning in the mid-1990s. Finally, the last section looks at the fourth wave of a new generation of allied causes spanning globalisation, the right to city, and climate change.

Inheritance: Feminism, AIDS and the Non-Sexist City

As an undergraduate student in both architecture and liberal arts at an American university in the mid-1970s, I was witness to both the impact of the 1960s social revolutions on higher education and the strong reaction to that upheaval in schools of architecture in the 1970s. As a dual-degree student, moving from class to class would literally mean going from radical revisionist lessons in sociology, anthropology, politics, geography and cultural theory, to a revanchist pedagogy focused on the autonomous formalist art of modern architecture. This tension reached an apogee at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York, where I spent my fourth-year spring term in 1978. As a think tank dedicated to bringing critical theory to a moribund architectural profession, the Institute managed to be both avant-garde in its intellectual ambitions and decidedly rear-guard in its lack of engagement with the burgeoning feminist movement outside its doors, such as the Women and American Architecture exhibition curated by architect Susana Torre the previous year.

Returning to upstate New York for my last year of undergraduate studies, I had the opportunity to take Torre’s design studio at Syracuse, which is when I first encountered her skilful engagement with both critical theory in architecture and political feminist activism. The studio brief was based on a Ms. Magazine 1978 cover story titled ‘Who is the real American family?’ The cover depicted the myth of the traditional two-parent, stay-at-home mom model that, in reality, represented fewer than 16% of American households. The studio project was for a housing complex comprising a cooperative neighbourhood on the fringe of downtown Syracuse, New York. While the design programme was formulated around a new social reality, it was also focused on new architectural, landscape, and urban forms. Among the seminar presentations Torre made was one on ‘Space as Matrix’ and would later appear in the feminist collaborative journal Heresies with the title ‘Making Room: Women and Architecture’.⁴ Diversity, multiplicity, and flexibility were themes that excited both my formal/spatial and social/political imagination.

Many of the themes in the studio were later articulated in Dolores Hayden’s seminal essay ‘What Would a Non-Sexist City Be Like? Speculations on Housing, Urban Design, and Human Work’, published in 1980.⁵ The essay clearly articulates the intended integration of architectural space and urban form with the vision of an equitable and fair design for housing and cities. Hayden positions her work within the extensive Marxist literature on the importance of spatial design to the economic development of the capitalist city.⁶ According to Hayden, ‘None of this work deals adequately with the situation of women as workers and homemakers, nor with the unique spatial inequalities they experience. Nevertheless, it is important to combine the economic and historical analysis of these scholars with the empirical research of non-Marxist feminist urban critics and sociologists who have examined women’s experience of conventional housing.’

At graduate school there was gender balance among students but not faculty, as no women taught design studio. I had just spent six months interning with the last of the ‘madmen’⁷ at SOM on Park Avenue in midtown Manhattan, and graduated with the cynical warning that ‘architecture was a gentleman’s profession’. As mentioned, I left graduate school in 1981 to begin my professional career living and working in Lower Manhattan, where I became determined to practise architecture in a most ungentlemanly way. Fortunately, Lower Manhattan, specifically the East Village on New York’s Lower East Side, provided a living laboratory of the non-sexist city – even if it was only for a short period of time.

The non-sexist city was being created through the founding of the Cooper Square Committee by Frances Goldin, Thelma Burdik and planner Thabit in 1959. The Committee organised the first community-based plan that was able to block a massive urban renewal project in the Lower East Side of New York. Within the same area, Ellen Steward founded La Mama performing arts centre in 1961 and garden activist Liz Christy later established Green Guerillas by seed bombing and community gardening on vacant lots. New School sociologist Janet Abu-Lughod provided the theoretical basis for extending these overlapping feminist practices as a critique of the sexist city. Her on-the-ground collaborative reporting contrasts deeply with Neil Smith’s totalising gentrification story. Smith’s blind spot repeated the same lacuna as the Marxist geographers that Hayden countered.

It was in this context that I began a deeply collaborative practice and teaching career both supported by the foundational inheritance of second wave feminism and invigorated by the savvy social activism of ACT-UP, the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power, which met weekly in the Great Hall of Cooper Union.⁸ Practising as an architect at that time, many projects involved using the analogue tools of the architect, developed in the 19th century, for the renovation and rehabilitation of century-old row houses, tenements, lofts, and pre-war towers for the workers of the new, digitally enhanced service economy. I also began teaching at New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark under the tutelage of another important second wave feminist, Leslie Kaynes Weisman, author of Discrimination by Design: A Feminist Critique of the Man-made Environment.⁹

At New Jersey Institute of Technology School of Architecture, the ruined city of Newark became the site of urban-inflected projects inspired by the women activists of New York’s Lower East Side, and Rome became the locus of a new summer programme I created, to offer the ‘Eternal City’ as a model for inhabiting the shrinking American city. My first book, Transparent Cities, was published by SITES Books in 1994.¹⁰ A boxed set of 24 acetate maps, each showing an elemental layer of Rome or New York from a particular period of time, was the result of diving into the map archives at the New York Public Library and at the Biblioteca Nazionale in Rome, but was also a response to the experience of living in these two cities in the 1980s. The idea was to represent the city not as a fixed plan but as a landscape in flux, changing slowly or abruptly according to technological invention, political change, or social desire. The plates can be juxtaposed and superimposed in any order, producing new discoveries with each overlay. This overlay method was a way to understand the architecture of the city as the result of adaptive processes, and to invite ways for designers and communities to enter urban design as actors and agents of change.

Safe Sex Pier, Brian McGrath, 1989

Responding to Flexible Sexism

A decade after the New York Stock Exchange went from paper to electronic trading, architects began to seize the power of digital tools. In August 1991, Susana Torre asked me to teach in a new graduate programme in architecture she was developing at Parsons, and she presented me with the school’s first Mac computers along with the beta version of 3D modelling software. New hardware and software packages became tools to facilitate collaborative and networked architectural activism, employing embodied cinematic measurement and representation. If my first decade of practice was informed by the inheritance of second wave feminism and AIDS activism, the second was informed by questions of gender identity and technology in a new globalising world, brought into focus by third wave feminist cultural and social critics. To the layered methodology of Transparent Cities, I developed digital tools allowing for an embodied transdisciplinary meta-design practice that incorporated the widening participation and multiplying points of view in the construction of new forms of transnational urban life.

From 1987 to 1995, ACT-UP held their weekly meeting in the Great Hall of Cooper Union, a few blocks north of the Cooper Square Committee. The gay men like myself, who were most affected by the disease, received substantial support from feminist and lesbian activists as well as newly radicalised corporate and media professionals. This unholy alliance gained expertise at making mediated ‘scenes’ in public spaces to bring the health crisis to government and media attention. In a neighbourhood where Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holtzer, David Wojnarowicz, Keith Harring and the Wigstock festival emerged and building opportunities were scarce, art-infused architecture and design practices thrived. I became deeply engaged in digital tools to explore more complex readings and representations of architectural and urban space as well as the ability to use motion and animation, to represent time, interactivity, the body in space, dynamic scaling, and multiple points of view offering new arenas for a post-gendered profession.

In 1994, at the Queer Space exhibition at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in Lower Manhattan, I displayed a giant transparent screen where the voyeurism and cruising in urban space could be experienced in the gallery through a 3D digital model. In 1996, Urban Diaries was exhibited as a three-monitor digital animation installation at Parsons School of Design and an interactive web-based online text and photo essay that followed the daily lives of three individuals in Bangkok, Taipei, and Bucharest. For the exhibition City Speculations at Queens Museum in 1996, I created two video animations of arriving in Rome at Termini Train Station and in New York through the Port Authority Bus Terminal. The detritus of history, from aqueducts and viaducts to baths and piers, was superimposed and looped with supertitles from the historical layers relating to the actors and statements that symbolised the times.

The work during the 1990s can be seen in the context of third wave feminists’ critiques of the interpretation of postmodernism by Marxist geographers Edward Soja and David Harvey. Both art historian and critic Rosalyn Deutche and feminist geographer Doreen Massey questioned the absence of feminist readings in Soja and Harvey’s universalist description of the cultural effects of neoliberal globalisation.¹¹ Art, architecture and urban space is thoroughly gendered, and the professed objective gaze of Soja and Harvey masked the contingency and complexity of space as inhabited, rather than visually observed from above.

According to Massey’s essay and book chapter on flexible sexism, Soja and Harvey both privilege vision over the other senses in their criticism of postmodern culture and present a gendered city. Massey helps us see ways in which gender in the city is spatially organised.¹² My projects, such as Safe Sex Pier and There is no Queer Space, incorporated layering, multiple points of view and the scaling of information from the body to the city in interactive settings. Influenced by cultural postmodernism, these projects on queer and sexualised space offer a counter narrative to the flexible sexism of Marxist geographers. If second wave feminism addressed the absence of women, families and children in the critical evaluation of architecture and urbanism, the third wave faced the new form of patriarchy through the marginalisation of postmodern culture as part of the Marxists’ battle against neoliberalism.

There is no Queer Space, Brian McGrath, 1994

The Right to the Feminist City

Third wave feminists Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto and Saskia Sassen’s Toward a Feminist Analytics of the Global Economy situate both the body and the city in relation to the new realities of digitally enhanced science and global finance, and set the stage for the fourth wave: the millennial generation who grew up with the internet and social media.¹³ These writers seem to predict the online movement occupywallst.org, which, in September 2011, was able to exploit a loophole in the policing of privately owned ‘public’ spaces in New York City by physically occupying Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park. For two months, before police cleared the plaza at 1am on 15 November, the space was occupied by an alternative vision of a community-based global city. From New York’s Wall Street, Cairo’s Tahir Square, Istanbul’s Taksim Square, to Central Hong Kong, ‘occupy’ movements, organised and mediated by mobile smart mobs, transfixed the world.

This fourth wave of feminism has emerged at the same moment as a resurgence of Henri Lefebvre’s 1967 concept of the ‘right to the city’ in relation to the global Occupy movement.¹⁴ In spite of previous feminist critiques of postmodern Marxist geographers in the 1990s, gender, sexuality and non-western perspectives continue to be absent from much of this discourse (Deutche and Massey). With David Harvey as a prominent spokesperson for the revival of the right to the city, class struggles remain as universalist claims when in fact they speak only from a white, western, heterosexual male perspective. Despite four waves of feminism, the proposition of a gendered profession has not been transformative.

It was of great interest and concern when I heard from a graduating student in 2012 about a new group of women in architecture who were meeting in New York as part of what became ArchiteXX.¹⁵ I was intrigued that a new generation was able to bring fourth wave feminism to architecture, but concerned that some recent graduates did not know the history of women and architecture in New York. As Susana Torre asked in an email exchange at the time, ‘Why are we having the same discussion every ten years?’ After contacting Torre, and Rosalie Genevro, the executive director of The Architectural League of New York (the organisation that originally sponsored Women in American Architecture), we agreed that it was important that there was an intergenerational dialogue. Subsequently Parsons has hosted two conferences, the first around Torre’s keynote address, and the second coordinated with Peggy Deamer on ‘Women, Architecture, and Academia’.

In Torre’s talk at the first event she outlined six thematic ways in which feminist ideas have contributed to changing architecture and urbanism, and ‘how these contributions have gone either unacknowledged or misinterpreted’. These themes include: the design of domestic spaces; the changed structure of the suburb; the development of new building types; the engraving of collective memory; our changed attitudes towards nature; and finally, women’s culture and identity as a legitimate design paradigm. These general themes, like the personal outline below, continually appear in various academic and professional contexts, and, alongside other important topics, remain agendas to set the stage for propositional, actionable, and transformative emancipatory social alliances.

The second conference, which solicited PechaKucha-style presentations, revealed a wide range of groups and individuals taking action across disciplines and generations internationally. As Torre concluded the first conference, ‘The discourse on Feminism and Architecture will continue to evolve, even as the number of women increases. We now need to formulate the questions for the next stage of its evolution.’¹⁶ That evolution may turn towards the first wave of feminism, when early 20th century social movements split into Marxist and anarchist groups. Anarchist geographer Simon Springer, in his critique of Harvey, evokes Emma Goldman’s call of 1917 for an anarchist project ‘that aligns with feminism in so far as it is an attempt to promote the feminisation of society through the extension of cooperation, equality, compassion, and sharing, which constitute mutual aid relations and contrast with the aggression, racism, exploitation, misogyny, homophobia, classism, and rivalry of our male-dominated modern society’.¹⁷

The two feminism and architecture conferences at Parsons brought to full circle numerous personal and institutional alliances began almost four decades ago. We were able to not only welcome Susana Torre back to Parsons, but to expand upon the emancipated vision of architecture and urbanism inherited from her generation’s second wave feminism. The post-gendered profession of architecture will be liberated from sexism, racism, and economic injustice only through a continued dialogue across generations and between marginalized and majority groups. Students, faculty and alumni from Parsons became aware of a legacy they are part of but not fully aware of, and international and intergenerational commitments were generated which will continue.