Women in Architecture Houston's 2019 Equity Series

Women in Architecture Houston's 2019 Equity Series Event:
Me to We | An Authentic Look at Collaborators in the Practice of Architecture - Panel Discussion

This year’s Equity Series panel, moderated by Dean of the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture & Design, Patricia Belton Oliver, FAIA, will offer a thoughtful discussion about Collaborators in Architecture, how working together is viewed and valued, and why our perceptions may hinder both workplace efficiency and architectural progress.

This year’s speakers include:
Alexandra Lange - Architecture Critic & Author
Gabrielle Bullock, FAIA, IIDA, NOMA, LEED AP - Director of Global Diversity & Principal at Perkins+Will
Marianela D’Aprile - Architectural Critic, Author, & Activist
Beth White - Houston Parks Board President & CEO, Urban Planner, and former Chicago regional director for The Trust For Public Land

1.5 AIA LU

**

"[Starchitects] portray an idea of success that is exclusionary, grinding out new versions of the same self-promotional model embodied by Frank Lloyd Wright. Whither the boring architect who just likes to work? What about a more soft-spoken collaborator? ... As we look beyond this moment, we must focus on the work and all the people who make it. The #MeToo stories illustrated with the outtakes from the architects’ profiles? I don’t want to see their faces right now. We need new faces, and nonfiction." - Alexandra Lange

"Women have long suffered from the myth of the lone creative genius... A number of studies have shown that women prefer, and excel in collaborative environments, even choosing team based compensation. Recognizing and rewarding collaborative creative process is therefore important in order to achieve greater gender Equity and new opportunities for women, and it acknowledges that architecture has always been a joint process." - Esther Sperber

"I was there to perpetrate what I can now more clearly see as a fiction: that one man (or Zaha) does it all. That fiction props up much coverage of architecture in the mainstream media—buildings aren’t stars, but their makers can be. It also reinforces the hierarchy that makes hundreds of people dependent on a single individual to speak for their work and sell it to the world. That individual—the star, the genius, the auteur—can operate with impunity because no one wants the enterprise to go bust, just as I brushed aside any slight because I wanted to write the story and get paid. #MeToo may take down individuals, like Meier, but the reckoning should go deeper than that. I reckon it is time to put an end to the architect profile as we now know it." - Alexandra Lange