Resetting Medium: Proactive Practices of Women in Architecture in the 21st Century

2022-11-29
Bezazoğlu, Duygu
This thesis aims to reveal and explain contemporary parallelisms between feminist thought and architecture in the mediatized practices of women in architecture. The place of women in the discipline, intensely questioned in the 1990s but mostly replaced by visibility debates after the 2000s, have not yet been sufficiently addressed through the mobility created by online platforms and the plural positions in feminist theory. Pointing to this gap and assisted by an inquiry into medium, shared concerns between feminism(s) and alternative architectural modes of existence form the central question of the thesis. By incorporating two different prior senses, medium comes to mean an environment of communication and functions on three levels. As a conceptual tool it enables to explain architecture's new disciplinary condition, to characterize an ephemeral aspect of space, and to examine practices of women in architecture. In the study, women from non-Western geographies are scrutinized and their practices unpacked via medium demonstrate four categorical alignments with feminist praxis. These indicate that the future of architecture is being shaped by the intersecting agendas of ecology, immateriality, cultural reparation and collectivity. Based on this revelation, the study concludes that in negotiating and communicating with the milieu of their practice, women operationalize architecture as a response. Though intersecting under the highlighted categories, this response varies depending on what each woman refines from their interaction with disciplinary and contextual medium. Complementarily, the study maps the online presence of collectives and reveals their distinctive agendas as well as strategies.It is found that these collectives take different webbed formats including comprehensive projects, which enable accumulation and dissemination of data, extensions of offline support mechanisms and empowering activities of social networking.

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Citation Formats
D. Bezazoğlu, “Resetting Medium: Proactive Practices of Women in Architecture in the 21st Century,” Ph.D. - Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2022.