A plan is an abstract thing: a schematic representation of space in the most codified and flattened manner. Yet between those thin dark lines, so much information can be inscribed. “If anything is described by an architectural plan,” wrote historian Robin Evans in his influential 1978 essay “Figures, doors and passages”, “it is the nature of human relationships.”
Building on Evans’s ideas, architect Charles Holland and artist Di Mainstone have created an eccentric but terrific little exhibition at London’s Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba). Through an exploration of architectural drawings in the Riba’s superb collection, Holland guides an alternative route through a more marginalised architecture, pointing to the directions the industry might have taken if it had allowed, or at least appreciated, a more prominent role for women in design.
Up to the 20th century, the records of women’s role in architecture are sketchy at best, often misleading, always underplayed, occasionally bizarre. Take, for instance, the cousins Jane and Mary Parminter. Eschewing marriage, they embarked on a decade-long Grand Tour and, on their return in the 1790s, set about building themselves a curious house in Lympstone, near Exmouth in Devon.
If most middle-class houses of the era were defined by a classical portico, symmetry and Italian detail, this was not. A 16-sided plan with a conical thatched roof and lipstick-red-framed, diamond-shaped windows, A la Ronde, completed in 1811, was designed for a daily habitation of the rooms that followed the path of the sun.
The Parminters were not architects (the plan was probably drawn up by a teenage boy who later became an architect) but their references and expression were sophisticated. The house was influenced by the Byzantine Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna. The triple-height hall is a thing of hypnotic elegance and the spaces were decorated with anything from shells to feathers.
It sits somewhere between the follies of the era and Benthamite ideas about the panopticon, which became the model for the prison and which Michel Foucault, the French philosopher, would later use as a metaphor for the society of surveillance.
Or you might look at the amazing Hardwick Hall (1590-97), always attributed to Robert Smythson but hugely influenced by its patron Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury, or “Bess of Hardwick”. Bess had been deeply involved in the design of her earlier dwelling, a little house named Chatsworth. Hardwick is often seen as the first British house to show the influence of continental classicism but also, with its huge windows almost appearing as glass curtain walls, as a possible — and credible — precursor to Modernism.
Here the traditional hierarchies of entrance and elevation were abandoned. Instead of corridors and lobbies, the great hall is immediately apparent on entry and the elevated dais at one end, traditional position of Lord of the Manor, is no longer. Instead, the most imposing state rooms are upstairs, commanding views of the estate, their tapestries replete with imagery of Diana the hunter goddess. This, we might remember, was the era of Elizabeth I and any grand house had to be designed with the expectation that she might come to stay.
A more modern aristocratic woman, Eileen Gray, also appears in the show. Gray, a Scots-Irish designer of independent means, had no need to employ an architect. In fact this was an apartment she designed for a male architect, her friend and probable lover Jean Badovici.
Gray is best known for her house E-1027, on the French Riviera, but this less-known home for the same client, a studio apartment in Paris’s rue Châteaubriand (1930-31), is equally stunning in its own way. All the action happens, counter-intuitively, in the circulation, a small hall full of motion, texture, light and pattern.
Using a silvery curtain and folding, perforated aluminium screens, Gray created an effect more theatrical than any 3m x 4m space (that included a WC, cupboards and kitchen) deserved to be. Fluid and flexible, it could be transformed with a flick of the hand to change the position of the curtain or the screens which, when closed, created a delightful moiré pattern, prefiguring the Op Art canvases of Victor Vasarely.
There is more here: homes designed by women that were once credited to men and homes made for neglected female designers or women clients. There is for instance, the 1976 high-tech house Michael and Patty Hopkins designed for themselves in Hampstead, with Patty finally given her proper due as the main designer.
And there is the Crocknorth house by Georgie Wolton in 1969, as pure a piece of Modernism as there ever was in England. As an architect Wolton, who died last year, was slightly neglected by the histories. Her former Team 4 partners Richard Rogers and Norman Foster became better known but it was she who provided the initial professional qualification while the others were still studying — the senior partner.
All of this discovery and surprise plays out against an occasionally raucous, sometimes contemplative soundscape accompanying the extraordinary installation by Di Mainstone. With a large portion of Bauhaus-era Oskar Schlemmer, a dash of Poly Styrene-era punk, a little Priscilla Queen of the Desert and a dollop of London grime, Mainstone (who trained as a fashion designer) has animated some of these women as extremely vivid figures, with mad costumes, rich in pattern and movement, unwilling to not be heard. It is funny, visually stunning and occasionally a bit annoying.
Holland’s design of the exhibition itself is by far the best I have seen in this odd space in the Riba’s otherwise grand HQ. The carpet, walls and curtains feature patterns abstracted from architectural motifs of the buildings on display.
And the curtains, inspired, I think, by Eileen Gray’s foyer, can be drawn to reveal the “archive”, the drawings that evidence all this history. The action of drawing a curtain to peer at a drawing makes it theatrical, with hints of anything from Psycho to a puppet theatre and the slightly clunky metaphor of revealing a hidden history. But unlike many architectural exhibitions, it is fun and engaging in its blend of irreverence and incredible artefacts.
There is no overarching theory here, no radical revisionist view beyond the obvious, that women have been written out for centuries and that research into their entanglement in a history recorded mostly by men keeps revealing a far more complex, interesting and surprising architecture.
“Radical Rooms: Power of the Plan”, until July 30; architecture.com
Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture and design critic
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