Mary Pepchinski Bücher

It remains to be seen whether the future really is feminine. Indeed, although far more than half of all students in architecture faculties are now women, it is certainly not the case that they all really get a foothold in the profession and only very few manage to make the leap into the top ranks—there architecture is still a man’s world. FRAU ARCHITEKT elucidates the topic in 22 portraits, project examples and very personal stories of women in Germany who have significantly influenced architecture or are currently shaping it. The story begins with Emilie Winkelmann, who founded the first architecture studio in Germany in 1907, and ends with post-Reunification architecture in Berlin and the new Federal States. Some of the women architects are barely known or indeed entirely unknown even among professionals, let alone the wider public. With texts by Lori Brown, Christina Budde, Sigal Davidi, Christiane Droste, Magdalena Droste, Oliver Elser, Christina Gräwe, Heike Hambrock, Edeltraud Haselsteiner, Josenia Hérvas y Heras, Hilde Heynen, Sandra Huning, Karl Kiem, Claudia Lenz, Hans-Georg Lippert, Petra Lohmann, Ursula Müller, Hanneke Oosterhof, Mary Pepchinski, Kerstin Renz, Tanja Scheffler, Peter Cachola Schmal, Eva C. Schweitzer, Ines Sonder, Despina Stratigakos, Wolfgang Voigt, Sabine Weißler, Laura Weissmüller and Karin Wilhelm.

Feminist Space: Exhibitions and Discourses between Philadelphia and Berlin, 1865-1912 investigates the relationship between gender and the production of public space, namely the exhibitions of feminine bourgeois culture that were created in Berlin between 1865 and 1912. This book demonstrates that these exhibitions gave expression to evolving bourgeois feminist discourses that proposed an expanded public sphere, containing separate and equal, masculine and feminine qualities. In addition, these feminine exhibitions were enriched by contact with and participation in the Woman's Buildings constructed at the 1876 (Philadelphia) and 1893 (Chicago) American world exhibitions, as well as the ideals of the German applied arts movement. As the exhibitions of feminine bourgeois culture were hugely popular and financially successful events, they attracted attention and stimulated discourse and debate. This book proposes that German bourgeois feminists created unique public spaces, which can be seen as contributing to the seminal architectural culture, which emerged in Germany prior to 1914.