When biographies are written, in that rocky ground between hero worship and dry scholarship, who is seen as notable - and who decides?
Wikipedia, with its crowd-sourced encyclopedic entries, makes arbiters of us all. Yet when a group of Australian editors tried to write an influential architect into history, anonymous doubters lurked.
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One architect decided to make his home inside a concrete factory.
In 2015, a Wikipedia entry for Jennifer Taylor, an architect, writer and academic,was written by Monash University architecture lecturer Charity Edwards. Taylor's legacy - from her strong interest in Japanese architecture to her global teaching - was hugely influential in NSWand Queensland in particular.
The entry was deleted straight away. "She wasn't deemed notable enough," says Justine Clark, founder of Parlour, a lively advocacy organisation for equity in architecture.
"At Parlour, we were all totally pissed off. It seemed inconceivable to us that she wouldn't be included, and that's when we started to work out what you have to do to prove notability."
In the past two years, Parlour's team has assiduously added, updated and checked the profiles of Australian women architects to increase their numbers on Wikipedia.
They might seem unlikely, inoffensive combatants - editors hauling style guides into the trenches - but their impact on younger women, and Australian history, is magnifying every year.
On Saturday the laptops will again be humming as Parlour hosts an edit-a-thon at the National Gallery of Victoria, as part of the Melbourne Art Book Fair. Participants will be taught guidelines to shore up their proposed Wikipedia articles.
They come with an idea - a woman overlooked through time - and the Parlour team run them through a comprehensive guide to Wikipedia editing. Scholarly papers and encyclopaedias are referencedto ensure each new listing meets the required three reliable citations.
In a kind of vertical integration benefit, a new entry also helps raise the profile of scholars and historians who first documented the figurewhen their work is cited on Wikipedia. Even though some women may seem lost tohistory, "material does exist but it may not be well known," says Clark. "Wikipedia does not accept new primary research or oral history as evidence, so any new work must first be published elsewhere."
While Parlour has spearheaded the Australianwomen architects project, other edit-a-thons around the world have sought to tackle a similar erasure of women's achievements. The BBC hosted a 12-hour entries marathonlast year. A University of Sydney event on March 28 aims to beef up the numbers of female writers and researchers listed in Wikipedia.
Clark says Wikipedia itself recognises the imbalance. With Parlour, like-minded colleagues in New York and Berlin applied for and received seed funding from the Wikimedia Foundation,the non-profit organisation that sits above Wikipedia. They dubbed their international project "WikiD", and it would go on to host workshops to educate others in boosting women architect'sentries.
"Jennifer Taylor was not the only one," Clark says."[T]hat's why we went for funding, to work out how to work within the system and to challenge it."
Are entries about women beingjunked out of spite or envy? Clark sees it more as "a cult mentality from Wikipedians who think 'we control the entries, you guys are interlopers, you're not doing it properly'.
"The challenging of entries comes from other voluntary Wikipedia"editors" not from the Wikimedia organisation," Clark says. "We got the international funding because Wikimedia realised there were gender equity problems."
Historians and feminists have for decades fought to restore notable women to the public record on many fronts - from war service recognition to nationalhonours awards. However women architects face a specific hurdle - the collaboration test. No one designs or constructs a building alone, and in many cases a female partner's role has been minimised.
When renowned American architect Robert Venturi won architecture's leading prize, the Pritzker, in 1991, Denise Scott Brown, his collaborator, was overlooked. A petition to include her in the prize received thousands of signatures, and she went on to receive many other awards including the 2017 Jane Drew prize; but the rebuff stung female architects worldwide. The fury simmers to this day.
In Australia, despite cases such as Jennifer Taylor versus the sceptics, many more women could potentially be household names on par with Sydney's GlennMurcuttand Melbourne's PeterCorrigan.
MaryTurner Shawis one who should be more well-known in modernist architecture, Clark says, for her influential flats - in terms of design and use of concrete - her workon munitions factories and kitchen designs as a government architect, and her prefabricated country hospitals while atBates Smart McCutcheon.
"So a long, complex and diverse career - not the focus on houses sometimes expected of women earlier this century," Clark says. "It is really important that new generations of architects know about predecessors like Turner Shaw."
Probably the most famous is Marion Mahony,who graduated in architecture in the United States in 1894 and was the practice partner as well as wife of Walter Burley Griffin. The duo designed Canberra as well as cinemas, incinerators and houses, but only he is a household name with her contribution rarely acknowledged until recently.
Parlour editorVirginia Manneringhas been going through all theentries on Burley Griffin as well as finding documented projects thatshe might have led, Clark says. "She is doing the fine delicate surgery to write Marion back into Wikipedia - so it's not just adding new people, it's editing what's there as well.
"Wikipedia is terribly patchy, it responds to people's enthusiasm," Clark says."Australian architecture on the whole hasn't had a great presence. When we started, there were 10 women listed as being Australian architects. By last year there were 60."
Parlour was behind the addition of Eileen Good, the University of Melbourne's first female graduate of architecture in 1920.
It also added Shelley Penn, who hassat on numerous design review panels, including Barangaroo. Kerstin Thompson now has an entry - hermany significant projectsinclude the Monash University Museum of Art, and the expansion of Arthur Boyd's Bundanon trust property in New South wales. Also recently arrived on Wikipedia was Maggie Edmond, part of the celebrated Edmond and Corrigan partnership that designed numerous Melbourne houses and the striking Building 8 at RMIT University.
Yet to be acknowledged is Debbie Ryan of McBride Charles Ryan, whose highly visible buildings include the elegant new Cancer Centre which sweeps around Melbourne's inner north with a flourish.
This weekend, the edit-a-thon will explore landscape architects for the first time. If female architects in general are often overlooked, landscape architects are even less visible - partly due to the misunderstanding of their profession.
"We're still perceived as just gardeners," sighs Lisa Howard, Melbourne Studio Principal at Taylor Cullity Lethlean. TCL is the urban design firm behind the Royal Botanic Gardensin Cranbournein Melbourne, the Manly Corso in Sydneyand the Canberra Arboretum. As well as horticulture, urban design work involves disciplines ranging from engineering and environmental sustainability to energy efficiency and urban renewal,all highly prized as demand for green infrastructure grows.
Proposals already pitched to be written into Wikipedia this weekend include pioneering mid-century landscape architects such as Beryl Mann and Grace Fraser. Mann was renowned for introducing gardens and courtyards in the design of schools in Canberra and Monash universities'grounds. Other illustrious names in landscape architecture will no doubt be thrown into the ring: Queensland-based academic Catherine Bull perhaps, and contemporary practitioners such as Aspect Studio's Kirsten Bauer, or Jane Irwin, an influential public domain planner whose projects, including Katoomba Civic Centre, are scattered across NSW.
One challenge for Parlour's Wikipedia project is that beyond the great forgetting of women's contribution, there are relatively few women at senior levels, even today.
Just over 20 per cent of registered architects in Australia are women - despite women graduating in equal numbers as men inthe past 30 years -according to research by Gill Matthewson, a Parlour co-founder. And the number of registered female architects falls steeply after the age of 30.
The picture is similar in landscape architecture, says Shahana McKenzie, chief executive of the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects. More women study the discipline at university, andthe peak body's membership is evenly split, she says.Yetthere appears to be a point whenwomen, approaching senior levels, leave to care for families and male directors become the norm.
"If you look at the hours some graduates are doing, that's the cultural expectation in architectural practices," McKenzie says. "It's remarkable. You just can't do that once you've had kids."
At 35, TCL's Lisa Howard has reached a senior level and herrole models include Kate Cullity, one ofthe firm'sthree directors. "Kate obviously should be on the Wikipedia register and much more of a household name."
But Howard acknowledges themale-dominated industry shows little sign of changing. "There's still a perception [women] can't do a full design service on a part-time basis."
Read the rest here:
Project to increase listing of women architects in Wikipedia - The Sydney Morning Herald