Women and Industry: Contributions to Design, Architecture and Spatial Organisation

Studies into workers’ movements carried out by Lillian Moller and her husband Frank Gilbreth around 1915. Source: Kheel Center, Catherwood Library, Cornell University.

A couple of years ago I visited an exhibition at the ICO Museum called “Camera and Model. Photography of Architectural Models in Spain, 1925-1970”¹. I remember I found one of the images there particularly interesting. It showed Carmen Ayala, the first female modelmaker at the ENSIDESA iron and steel works in Avilés, posing with one of the models she made for the company². Of all the works featured in the exhibition, both by architects and by photographers, that picture of Carmen and her professional activity in the industrial sector planted the seed of a project in my mind: that of reviewing recent gender-orientated architectural and urban planning historiographies to learn more about the hitherto unacknowledged role played by those women architects, engineers and designers and the major contributions they made to industry and design in the early years of the 20th century.  Since women were partly responsible for the evolution of a recent culture that is now studied and explained as a historically proximate heritage, their distinguished involvement in industry is unquestionably of great interest as an object of research.

As in many other disciplines and fields of study, gender perspective allows us to reassess the role played by numerous women professionals and thinkers who up until now have never received the recognition they deserve³. This process of rediscovery is aided by an extensive bibliography. One recent publication, Zaida Muxí’s “Mujeres, Casas y Ciudades” (“Women, Houses and Cities”)⁴, covers the activities of some of those professionals, offering an insight into women who helped build up the industrial world of the 20th century from different disciplines and whose work is worthy of an in-depth analysis that has still only barely begun⁵.

Mention should be made, for example, of Louise Blanchard Bethune, the first woman architect recognised as such by the American Institute of Architects, in 1888. Bethune’s prolific output included major factory complexes like the Iroquois Door Company and the Lumber plant in Buffalo, and her architecture was comparable in quality to that of male colleagues like Albert Kahn. Design was another very important area of activity for women architects and engineers of that period, many of whom, like Aino Aalto and Lilly Reich, were often overshadowed by their partners and whose designs produced beautiful, creative – but at the same time cost-effective – objects. In another field, Lillian Moller worked with her husband Frank Gilbreth on pioneering studies into workers’ movements in workspaces. Their aim was to rationalise and optimise workplace organisation, a field that would be extensively researched during the course of the 20th century and would give rise to other design-related offshoots such as ergonomic furniture.

This undoubtedly broad field of research is now growing in interest, particularly in view of the widespread ignorance and oblivion that have shrouded women’s activities in different sectors of the industrial world. Today, those professionals are seen not only as occupying a place of honour in the history of architecture, engineering and design, but also as important contributors to 20th century culture and, by extension, actors in the transformation of both tangible and intangible industrial elements into heritage assets. The process is now mainly one of vindication, but the conviction exists that in a not-too-distant future the issue will eventually be addressed from an equality perspective.

Text translated by Andrew V. Taylor