Parlour LAB 01: Women in Architecture: Archives, Data, Visibility

Hi everyone, and welcome to our first Parlour LAB on Women in Architecture: Archives, Data, Visibility. We’re so excited to have Gill Matthewson and Julie Collins with us today. I’d like to begin today’s Parlour LAB by acknowledging that we’re gathered all across the country on the unceded lands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. I’m speaking to you today from Mianjin, or Brisbane, from the University of Queensland campus and we’d like to pay my respects to the Elder’s past, present and emerging. Is that better. So, to start today I’d like to throw over to Justine to welcome everyone before we get started.

00:50 - Hi, everybody, as Kali said, welcome to the first Parlour LAB session. We’re really very excited to have this new series up and running. This is the first one, as you can tell, we’ve got a new host we’re working with the University of Queensland on this event, we’re delighted to be working with them, but we are still just working out the technical stuff. So, excuse us, some of you saw us juggling that but you know what Zoom’s like. So, we’re really excited to have this new series.

Parlour has always operated in the space between 01:26 - research and practice and we’re very firmly committed to putting knowledge to work. This gap between practice and research is also one that I’m personally very interested in and I like to kind of play between those two worlds and so this series really is about trying to bring those two worlds closer together by sharing discussions about the great research that’s happening in the built environment, starting off in Australia, but also with ambitions to spread more widely. So, the series is convened by Macarena de la Vega de León and Kali Marnane. The idea of it actually came out of conversations that happened during our Parlour salon where Kali was a speaker. I just like to now hand over to Macarena and Kali and say thank you very much for doing this great new series and welcome everybody. Go Kali and Maca. Thanks, Justine and welcome everybody.

I’m Macarena de la Vega de León, and I’m a 02:34 - postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Melbourne. I also serve as communications manager of the Society of Architectural Historians of Australia and New Zealand SAHANZ, which is one of the collaborators in this series. Now, for today, we would just like to go very briefly through, some protocols. As always, please make sure your microphone is on mute – unless you’re actually speaking. Please leave your camera on, if you can. It’s very nice to be able to see your faces and feel a sense of being here together.

There will be an opportunity to ask questions of our 03:16 - speakers. So, if you have a question, please put it into the chat section. We will then choose questions and invite you to ask them live to our speakers. If you’re not able to do that, just let us know in the chat and we can ask it on your behalf. We may not be able to get to all the questions, but they do help inform future events and plans. Awesome. Thanks, Maca. I’m Kali.

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m a practicing architect, 03:46 - but I’m also finishing my PhD here at the University of Queensland and studying architecture, the architecture of informal settlements in India. I’m so excited to introduce Gill today as our first speaker. Gill is an architect, a founding director of Parlour and a lecturer at Monash University in Melbourne. Gill’s PhD thesis was titled Dimensions of Gender: Women’s Careers in the Australian Architecture Profession, which was published in 2015 at the University of Queensland. This work led to the compilation and analysis of the comprehensive statistical map that is at the heart of much of Parlour’s advocacy work.

04:24 - She’s now working at the XYX Lab: Gender + Place at Monash and she’s been researching how sex, gender and sexuality affects the spatial culture of cities, including who participates in and contributes to the production of city spaces. Thanks, so much for being here today, Gill. Thanks, Kali. Right. So, I think I might be known mostly as the kind of numbers nerd of Parlour or, as my friend, Charity once called me, the data diva. And it all came out of my PhD, which was part of a much larger project on equity and diversity, that produced Parlour itself. When I first started that PhD, there was a definite vibe from friends and colleagues of “isn’t that gender architecture stuff all a bit last century?. So, this is a diagram that changed that. It’s a summary of all the steps that Kirsty Volz and I dug up.

05:28 - Right, are you seeing my right screen? No, no? Sorry. All right. It’s saying it’s right behind me. That’s the one. Cool. All right, you got it now. Thank you. So, it’s all these stats that Kirsty and I dug up. But we didn’t know at the beginning, that this is what we were going to produce. You kind of knew that listing lots of numbers, just wasn’t going to cut it. Architects are visually literate, but tend to glaze over the very second you say percentage.

06:12 - So, one day, during my PhD, I was chatting about alternative medicine witj one of my colleagues and friend Amy Clark. She showed me this great way to diagram it, should you ever want to have a look at supplements, and I thought, oh, maybe I can do something similar with all our numbers. So, these are my first attempts. I wanted something with bubbles, kind of rising. But I was working in Word, which of course was never going to work. But the project fortunately had Georgina Russell as a summer intern, and she shaped it into the infamous circle diagram, I did get to do my bubbles rising with the growth over time, when I added to the PhD research in the 2018 Parlour Census Report. Most of the areas show that given that really kind of slow growth over time, except for this one here, oops, on this one here, which is for people who are new admissions to the register.

07:20 - I also looked at the gender pay gap and this was the initial diagram for it – very boring, again not going to cut it. And this is what graphic designer Jess Riley did with that bar diagram. And the pay gap, particularly here, just smacks you right in the face. This is the kind of research that I like to do, because it changes everything – changes things, so the circle diagram made the profession wake ups to it’s inequity. And I reckon there are people out there who are working very hard at the moment to make sure that when we dig into the data for the 2021 census, that we don’t get this result.

What these visualizations do is activate data, which leads to change. It builds bridges from research into making a real difference in the lives and careers of women. For the last, more than four years, I’ve been working with the XYX Lab at Monash University, where we also want to make a real difference using our research into gender and placed to impact in the daily lives of women using public space. One of our biggest projects is looking at safety for women on public transport at the moment. We found this table from a survey for London Transport looking at transportation settings – where people felt safe and unsafe after dark. It’s not very clear.

So, we turned that into 08:49 - we turned it into something, which I somehow got rid of! Sorry about that, but I can assure you it makes it very effective. All right, but our research is not just about numerical data, it’s also trying to distill it into very clear diagrams, hang on, I’ve really got myself all mixed up. Sorry, people, and we also, which, so this is the diagram that I want to show. So, this one’s about the impact of gender bias, there are many consequences of this, but the ones that impact access and inclusion of women in public space and gender-based violence, and the gender-biased built environment. It’s worth noting that there’s a kind of feedback mechanism going on here – and the violence and the environment also produce and reinforce gender inequality.

Violence perpetrated by men affects how women 09:50 - and girls understand the place in the world and gender bias in the built environment leads to places not designed for women needs. Both lead to subtle and not so subtle messages that women do not belong in public space. This in turn leads to women’s caution in public spaces and it’s not that women don’t tend to these, but it’s too often they’re on guard or simply feel uncomfortable. With both Parlour and XYX, I’ve also analysed very large data sets, from surveys looking at patterns and the free text answers, which is what none of those earlier diagrams was about. Okay. So, there is actually more to my work than kind of wrangling large Excel sheets, although sometimes I feel a bit buried by them.

It matters how as well as how many women are participating, 10:48 - both in public spaces and in the profession. So that leads to an interest in the culture of architecture, with a sideline in how architects dress. I’ve explored this mainly through SAHANZ conference papers. In 2018, I looked at the shift of architecture students from wearing a smock to wearing black. So, and they wore smocks up until the 1960s, this protects their everyday clothes, and it makes the crafting involved in the production of drawings and models explicit.

But it was also symbolic, a claim to a certain kind of artistic identity, 11:29 - but also in slightly different ways, is wearing black. In 2012, I looked at Architect Barbie, who was challenging some of the stereotypes of what an architect might look like, like wearing pink, and she does so in such a way that was easily dismissed by the profession. So, the Architects Journal did their own costume design for her, presenting an image much more acceptable to the profession. But it’s also the image of a woman’s body disciplined by the peculiar operation of both architecture and how women work with allowable presentations of the feminine. Both those papers are available on the SAHANZ website, I believe.

Anyway, gender 12:15 - is a social and cultural process of beliefs, expectations and restrictions about women and men are and should be and architecture there are also shared beliefs, expectations, restrictions, in better than the ideologies of what architects are and should be. So my research investigates what happens when these two cultural systems collide, be that how it manifests on the bodies, women architects are on their career, but overall, how gender impacts on the lives of all women as they into what has traditionally been male control spaces and places. Thank you, Sorry for my mess up earlier. Thank you so much, Gill. That was really, really interesting. Now, it is my pleasure to introduce Julie Collins. Dr Julie Collins as a researcher and curator at the Architecture Museum at the University of South Australia, with a PhD and Bachelor of Architecture. Julie is an active researcher focusing on various aspects of architectural history, from therapeutic places to architectural drawing collections and heritage.

Her book, 13:33 - The Architecture and Landscape of Health: A Historical Perspective on Therapeutic Places, from 1790 to 1940, was published in 2020 by Routledge – so just this year. Previous research projects include working on women in the architectural profession, the influence of climate on colonial architecture of Adelaide, the history of psychiatric asylum landscapes and early tuberculosis sanatoria in Australia. So over to you, Julie, thank you. Thank you very much. I’m really pleased to be here. So, I’m going to have an attempt to do a screen share now so we’ll see how that goes and, okay. So, thank you. As an introduction I’m going to talk a little bit about what I do in my role as curator and researcher here at the Architecture Museum at the University of South Australia, which is where I am right now, and I’ll talk about some of the challenges involved in trying to deal with what have been described by archivists Waverly Lowell and Kelcy Shepherd as big, beautiful and unwieldy architectural drawings. So, the collection itself was privately started in the mid 1970s by Donald Leslie Johnson – some of you might know him as author of Sources of Modernism, which was quite a good book.

He started with the cooperation of architects and their families to do a bit of an 15:17 - archival rescue mission, saving many architects records and drawings from the bin, literally. He started taking them home and hiding them and putting them under his bed. I’m not quite sure why not, but then in the 1990s, he gave the collection to the University of South Australia and it’s now housed in the Kaurna Building at City West Campus in Adelaide. So, the Architecture Museum has as its aim to acquire, collect and preserve documents, which are relevant to South Australia and privately practicing architects, planners, as well as associated professionals say interior designers, and landscape architects as well. So, I guess I’ve got a bit of a different Big Data issue then Gill, which is physically trying to fit it all in the room.

We hold more than 200,000 documents, which include over 16:22 - 20,000 architectural drawings, around about four or 5000 antiquarian prints of architectural subjects, plus a 4000, plus volume library of books, journals and trade literature, as well as a small number of artifacts, mainly drafting tools. Quite often we hold some of the sole surviving copies of plants to South Australian buildings. So, staffed by myself just three days a week, with occasional research assistance. The Architecture Museum endeavors not only to generate research based on the records itself, but also to develop specialist knowledge about the records. This is increasingly becoming important as we move into the digital realm.

We have yet to accept our first donation of born digital records, 17:15 - but we’re well underway in preparing for them when they do arrive. So, it’s also important, because we’re housed within a university, that we produce outcomes. So, journal articles, conference, papers, books and exhibitions, were open to the general public as well and we have around about 350 in person researchers visiting to look at records each year, and about double that number in terms of people contacting me with inquiries, so they’ll be looking for particular architects work or buildings. We also run tours for students and interest groups throughout the year. So, while we’re called a museum, it effectively operates as an archive and research facility, we don’t have a huge gallery space.

So, we exhibit, we mount exhibitions 18:11 - in collaboration with external parties. So, the Office for Design and Architecture, we have helped from the architectural practices, for the Institute, as well as private architectural firms who support us as well. So, we use galleries, which are either on campus or off campus to display our exhibitions. Architectural record towns, in other libraries, as well as galleries, university collections and archives across Australia. So, when they do arrive, this is pretty much what we get and once we’ve accepted a donation, the sheer volume of architectural drawings and their physical state can often make it really difficult to do any kind of assessment or accessioning.

Unfortunately, they generally arrive with no 19:09 - list. So, the task of unrolling large format drawings, some which have been rolled up for, you know, half a century quite often can be a challenge in itself, and a process which I’ve been often known to compare with wrestling and octopus. Now as soon as you get one corner down, then the other corner springs up and it can be really quiet time consuming the flattening process. Flattening them can take around about three to six months, depending on the paper type and how long they’ve been rolled and also the damage which has been caused to them. It sometimes requires a little bit of conservation work.

But once they’ve been unrolled and catalogued 19:54 - and given their own number, they’re safely tucked away into metal plans, filing drawers, from there we can get them out when they’re requested by users. For correspondence, ephemera, reports and specifications, they luckily fitting boxes and after cleaning and numbering, we rehouse them in poly sleeves into our standard archive boxes. So how are these records used? Well, as I said, we’re open to the public, so quite often, we have heritage architects, we have building owners, we have family historians, we’ve even had a few novelists coming to look for settings for imaginary worlds. We have students from all of the universities in the state actually coming to use us both for history projects, as well as architectural projects, the staff here at UniSA. Quite often, if they’re doing adaptive reuse studios, the original plans that we hold here will get students familiar with how to use architectural plans that are not on their screen.

21:05 - I learnt to do architectural research during my PhD and bachelor’s, and these days, I focus mainly on architectural history. So some of the buildings that I’ve looked at have included the plans of the small Home Services South Australia. We hold some of the therapeutic building, so tuberculosis, sanatoria, and asylums, we also have a really good collection of heritage reports on various buildings. So, they’ve been really valuable in terms of research resource too. So, these are just some of the types of items that we hold and it’s amazing once you kind of get them scanned and put them on a screen, that something which might be a scruffy drawing, can turn out looking pretty spectacular and once you get them in a frame and on the exhibition wall, they’re really quite impressive, impressive works of art, some of them in themselves.

But I think 22:13 - what I find most interesting is the cultural significance of these architectural records. Moving forward, I’m currently working on visual literacy and borne- digital design records and also continuing looking at architecture, planning and disease, which is something which suddenly this year has taken on a whole new meaning. So, I think I’ll finish up there. It’s just a very brief introduction to my work and I look forward to having a bit more of a conversation with you now. Thank you so much, Julie. That was really interesting and both you and Gill deal with such vast amounts of data. Macarena and I were wondering if you could talk to us a little bit about how you go through such large amounts of information and decide on what’s relevant.

What’s the kind of 23:10 - process that you take? Maybe Julie, you can go first and then we can get Gill to jump in. Yeah, so thanks, I think research can be really time consuming and really laborious and for me though, it can actually be going through all the records, which might amount to boxes or drawers of them. But it’s kind of only by going through and putting in that time that sometimes you can find that smallest little clue which can set off the research or kind of make it relevant. Something which might be a tiny, innocuous piece of paper, can all of a sudden lead you off, I guess it’s down a rabbit hole with one way of looking at it. But it can also kind of set you off into looking at things in a new way.

So for example, 24:03 - the Marjorie Simpson collection, which we received good many years ago, she had a little note in it, which she wrote to Jack Cheesman saying, “Hey, thanks a lot for letting me look through the Small Home Service records, they’re really invaluable and really, almost forgotten group of records.” And I thought, “oh that’s interesting”. So, it was just a tiny little square piece of paper, handwritten note, and it just made me think, okay, I’ll just dig into this Small Home Service I’ve heard about. I thought she was talking about Robin Boyd’s Victorian Small Home Service. But no, it turned out there was a South Australian one too. So this tiny little record, in amongst all of her other work, then ended up being the beginning of some research I did and I ended up with two journal articles produced on the Small Home Service and some something which I’ve kind of, yeah, really hope to bring to attention in South Australia that we were doing a few interesting things here too.

So, I think sometimes it’s the labour that goes into big data. In archival sense. That is the payoff and yes, it can be boring and time consuming, but it’s worthwhile. Yeah, cool. Does that same process work for you, Gill, and finding those little gems to kind of go down the rabbit hole? Oh, yeah, there’s lots of rabbit holes to go down. You know, with my PhD, I interviewed over 70 architects, which was way too many. So, I had transcripts, which was like 1000 pages of transcripts and the only way to do it is just to keep going over and over and over the material and something that will jump out at you and you still think, “Oh, that’s interesting, but does anybody else say the same thing?” And then you find someone else does and then you start gathering it.

But also, you can get people with someone you know, just say 26:07 - something, you think, “Oh, that’s interesting” and nobody else repeats it and you can’t cherry pick, which is always a great temptation. But yeah, you just have to bury yourself in it, really, and you go through it. it’s time consuming, but it kind of pays off and for me, there’s always something that kind of bugs me, it keeps me going. You know, I mean, the situation of women in architecture has been bugging me for decades. Which is why I felt really privileged to be able to do the PhD associated with that with that work.

26:45 - But often, it’s something I’m not so interested in things that I think a wonderful or anything like that. I’m interested in knowing why and I’m bugged by something. Why? Why is it like that? And how, how can we explain it? So that’s, that’s how I keep going. Thanks. Thanks, Gill. I guess another question for both of you and Julie kind of already touched on it. But we were interested in knowing something that had come up from your research that surprised you.

Because Gill you were just talking of, 27:24 - you know, what keeps you going, what is it that you’re looking for? But then there are things that come up that are totally unexpected, like what Julie was saying about? Robin Boyd, so if you both would like to share something that has surprised you that you weren’t expecting? Oh, there’s always lots of surprises. I think one of the things that sort of surprised me, but also really annoyed me was when we were doing the work on public transport and safety for women. We found out women, researchers have been researching this for 40 years, and been saying more or less the same thing – that women’s experience in public transport is different from men’s. And yet everybody who designs public transport thinks the generic commuter, you know, is the only person that uses public transport. So that, you know, I mean, to find out it’s been going on for years have been ignored for 40 years, was sort of both surprising, and also kind of not surprising, and you know, kind of a bit par for the course, sadly.

28:36 - One of the things that came out of my PhD, though, was something to do with specialisation, and a lot of women specialise within the practice and it’s a way of making themselves distinct. And it seemed to help with their continued employment. So, I thought that was kind of interesting. When I was looking at smocks, and the wearing of smocks and architecture, I found a little clip, which was about University of Pennsylvania School of Architecture and the first-year students were not allowed to wear smocks. But towards the end of the year, they had to fight one of the second- year students and get the smocks of them and you still like, oh my god, the strange kind of rituals that go on, you know, it’s just kind of bizarre, really. It’s kind of fun when you find that sort of thing.

Julie? 29:40 - I think, I think I guess I was surprised by the global pandemic because everybody else, but in a way that surprised me. I’ve been working on my research around therapeutic buildings and health over the past two years and one of the big findings out of that was how important ventilation was and air circulation and space and distance and what we now call social distancing, how important that was in terms of modern architecture and when I say modern, I mean going back into the 19th century as well, modern ways of living, and looking at tuberculosis sanitorium, looking at the way light, air and openness, the kind of the modern credo emanated from fear of airborne disease, and fear of a respiratory disease, and how our architecture kind of reflected that in the spaces which were created in that early 20th century. And all of a sudden, now that we’ve got COVID 19, all of a sudden, we’re thinking in possibly a similar way to the way that people were thinking back in the late 19th century about what’s airborne, what are germs? How is it transmitted? And how is our architecture going to respond to this? It’s surprising, looking back at the conversations, which were going on in that kind of late 19th, early 20th centuries, and seeing similar things being mentioned today in terms of the language. We’ve got different phrases around them. But essentially, people are people, people behave in certain ways that people behaving and when you don’t have a cure, or a vaccine, all of a sudden architecture can be really significant and I think that surprised me this year very much. So. I’m just on that line, something that bugs me, I’m going to try and properly share my screen this time.

If you’ve ever visited Villa Savoye, you know, Le 31:59 - Corbusier’s pièce de résistance. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s a washbasin right by the front door. How about that! Aand it was one of those things that puzzled me when I first saw it, but this year, I sort of think, no puzzle at all, wash your hands as soon as you come in the door! And it would have been designed after the Spanish influenza. So now it’s a no-brainer, but when I visited back whenever I thought it was really kind of odd, That’s amazing, great photos, I think it’s really interesting how we can suddenly understand, you know, on a level, which I certainly couldn’t understand before, April this year. It was all a little bit academic, so to speak, now, I understand how they would have felt in my very being, which is really kind of really interesting in terms of understanding history at a different level.

33:03 - Yeah, amazing how short our memories can be. We have a question from the audience. Ingrid Pearson. Ingrid, would you like to ask your question? If you turn on your camera, and microphone. Are you there? Yes. I had two questions, one for Gill, which was about the safety and how women don’t feel as safe in public spaces. So I wondered whether the CPTED and principles of safe design that we have in New South Wales – I don’t know if it’s state, you know, other states have it – do, they help create a much safer environment for women where they feel safe, because CPTED of the principles that are used in in the CPTED? So that’s the first question for Gill. The question for Julie is, you’re saying you haven’t received any sort of digitized new works come into the museum as yet.

But I used sort of fairly up to date with until 34:11 - all the hand drawn documentation or even AutoCAD automated documentation has happened for some of the buildings, but you know, can’t be digitized, I mean, can’t be recorded. Hello, I’ll go first. The CPTED principles, they work to a certain level, but you really need to sort of put a kind of gender lens over them. So, we kind of combine them with women’s safety audit stuff. And there is a limit to how much design can do because it’s also about who’s in the space. You know, if you go into a space and there’s just a whole bunch of 18-year-old guys, you’re not going to feel terribly safe.

And that’s got nothing to do with the design of it. But we’ve, um, we did some work with a charity called Plan International, and they had an app, crowd mapping thing, which look asked young women to choose safe and unsafe places around Melbourne and then we were working with ARUP and a lighting designer there, Holly Yang, who went out, and she measured the light levels, and all the safe places and all the unsafe places throughout Melbourne. And she discovered that actually, the lighting in safe places, was within a kind of quite narrow band of color, temperature, luminance and all the other kind of typical stuff that I don’t quite understand what it means. That was really surprising. We were not expecting that, so often people say, you have to put more lights, we’re going to have more lights, more lights, more lights, but there’s problems with more lights, more lights, more lights, it does terrible things to the local flora and things like that. So, her reading is you don’t need more light, you do need to think very carefully about lighting and think about how it’s done and how, you know, just a big floodlighting is no good at all.

So, so CPTED works to a certain amount and 36:32 - I think there’s a lot more work to be done in lighting and Holly is now doing her PhD on this, which is really exciting work. So, it works to up to a certain limit, but not everything. Julie> Yeah, so in terms of born-digital records, our paper records, which we’ve been accepting, they reach into the 2000s. Now, so we’ve got documents in the collection up to about 2005. Generally, we only receive donations, once they’re no longer current records. So, the firm has closed down, or the architect themselves has retired and that’s when we’ll receive the records. Born-digital quite often this your current records and at the moment, as I said, we’ve got paper documents, so people will have printed out on paper. Basically, plan, section elevations, those kinds of records and we’ve received them. So, they might have been born-digital, but we haven’t received the digital files. Moving forwards, we’ve done a few tests, in terms of looking at how we recover born-digital file.

37:52 - So, the ones which were created in the 1990s, we’ve had to do a bit of forensics in terms of recovering these records. It’s surprising how few people used file- naming conventions in the 1990s and also, I mean, there’s hardware and software issues as well as licensing issues. So, the software which they may have been created with either might not exist anymore, or there, we might not own that software, or have that version of software. There’s a few projects going on around about around the country and across the world, trying to look at how we’re going to recover this there possibly will be a digital dark, digital Dark Age, so to speak of records, which were created in that late 80s, into the early 2000s. Where because of record keeping project, poor record keeping kind of issues. Not many might not survive. We’re not still not really sure.

We’re putting in systems and 38:58 - a collections policy going forward. So, we’ll be able to at least keep some stable copies of some of the records. They won’t necessarily be able to view them in the similar way to that to what though quite when they were produced, but at least we’ll be able to capture the information. It’s quite, alarming how quickly files become corrupted. And one of the things we’re saying to most architectural practitioners now and we’ve been working with Natspec on a project.

This 39:33 - is running check sums over your files to find out whether there’s corruption, storing three copies of each file, hopefully two copies in two separate places. And these are digital files and then at least your kind of covered and also, just check your check what your cloud server conditions are and what happens if the cloud goes broke. So, there’s a few basic things like that and moving forward These are things we’re going to have to deal with because it won’t be physical storage, that’s an issue anymore. It’s going to be digital storage and also corruption of files and also looking at who owns digital files? What are the original copies? And if you do keep things saved in cloud servers and things like that, who owns the data are other issues. So, there’s a lot of quite big issues to do with those, which in a way makes paper documents look mighty easy to deal with. Yes, totally. Totally. Julie, thank you.

Thank you both for that and thank you, Ingrid, for the 40:44 - questions. I would like to invite Catriona Quinn, to pose her question. I think it’s a question that would also apply for Gill, as well thinking about the XYX Lab and Catriona if you don’t mind? Sure. Sure, I actually entered video switched off so I can’t give you a picture of me, but yeah, my question. I think in a time when both the teaching of history of, you know, interior design and architecture is under threat and associated archives are under threat.

41:23 - I’m really interested to know whether you’ve been able to, Julie, to integrate your archives and insert it into undergraduate curriculum and master’s degree curriculum in a more structured way than just open access. That’s my first query. Then, my second question, I’d love to know a bit more about what your interior design holdings are and if you’re actively collecting in that area, Yeah. So in terms of the educational setting that we work in, we’ve actually got really, we’ve got a great set of staff here at UniSA. And they’ve actually, most of them, spent a bit of time here. I’m lucky, I’m on the ground floor, and everyone has to walk past the Architecture Museum on the way up to their offices and studios, and vice versa, and also on the way to the coffee shop.

So hence, I get a lot of drop ins from staff who, when they’re planning 42:20 - their studios for the semester. So basically, they drop in here. For the interior staff, they’re quite often looking for existing building plans. So, they’re really engaged in terms of what we’ve got here in the collection, really engaged – so adaptive reuse as well for the architecture students –but really engaged with using real buildings with real plans and real problems. Which, they’ll take the students out to visit and then the students will use original drawings as well, which is great. In terms of a hands-on, it’s kind of object based learning, as well.

So, 43:00 - this year, the students are very engaged, they’re really excited when they get to see original plans and drawings. There’s still nothing like nothing like a beautifully water colored elevation to capture the student’s attention, which is great. So, yeah, I think we feel really quite embedded in terms of the way the school works. And interior design, as a profession, and its history is kind of, yeah, understood. We’re actively collecting interior design practitioners’ works.

43:42 - I have found though women are very reticent to donate their works, and this is something I’ve read about in the past. But gradually, we fit with. We actually find sometimes it’s their daughters or their sons who will make the donation, quite often after they’ve passed away. Their family who are proud of what they’ve done will actually donate women’s works more than women will donate their own records. We’ve got a few interior design collections, but we’ve also got interior designers’ documents that are donated within architects’ collections and also within an engineer’s collections, surprisingly. So, we’ve got people who call themselves interior specialists in the 1920s and 30s. We’ve got some of their works.

So, there’s 44:35 - the kind of, you know, before there was a real specialisation, which developed, we’ve got a few, quite a few beautiful interiors, there. We’ve also got quite a good pamphlet and journal collection, which captures a lot of the photographic work, which was photographed of interior specialists in that time, 20th century period. That’s so fantastic to hear. Is any of that digitized or not? So, we don’t as I’m only three days away. We don’t have a big digitization online digitized collection. But we digitize on demand for people. So, once researchers have contacted me if they’re interested in particular items, if they’re interstate or overseas, I can digitize them quite often, or just maybe a quick camera shot and then if they’re interested in high resolution copy, I can get that to them.

We’ve got our collections lists online as PDF finding aids. But yeah, I’m, I’m, as I said, we get hundreds of inquiries every year and most of them come through me. So, I’m quite open to having conversations with researchers and people who are interested in this, about what they’re looking for, and whether we can help them out by providing them with this kind of information and it’s a community, kind of, it’s a professional and community service, really, we’re hoping to just, you know, improve the understanding of all of our professions, as well. Totally, Gill I don’t know, if you would like to talk about if you have a relationship between the XYX Lab and architectural curriculum at Monash in the same way you were talking about the museum. Not at the moment, but it’s something that we’re kind of working on. Yeah.

So, we have, 46:39 - there has been a studio project that was run but it was mainly with the Design School. Okay, next question is from Justine if you want to ask it. I love this. I love this when I’m not feilding the questions. My question follows on a little bit from what Julie was saying about women being reluctant to donate their material. Julie, I know, you’ve researched many, many things. But one of the things you have looked at is women, women in architecture and I guess so the question is really, for both of you, how do you find women in the archive? So, sometimes you might have a collection of a particular woman, but quite often, their records are slim, and I know Gill’s done her own detective work in the past on finding women in the archive.

I just wondered if you might talk a little bit to that. Both of you. Well, I did my Masters by Research project, which was called Sex, Lies and the Barcelona Pavilion, catchy title. I was part of it, I was looking at the presence of Lilly Reich, in the process of making of the Barcelona pavilion, which of course, we all know is Mies van der Rohe’s great heroic work and all the rest of it. But, and I didn’t have access to it – she does have some papers, and they’re in New York, but they only survived because they were mixed up with Mies van der Rohe’s papers. She had kept those. Anyway, so I was looking at the way historians were writing about Mies over the 1920s and 30s period and I started seeing some little kind of disjunctions.

48:42 - You know, there was a difference to his work over that period and there were all these kinds of little type of hints. So, it was a process of kind of just kind of uncovering those little hints and things. But what I kind of realised that 10 years after I’d done that work, was I kind of portrayed Lilly Reich as a as a victim. Both of Mies van der Rohe as being a bit of an asshole, basically, to her, but also the historians not giving her proper place in history. And then I realised I’ve done the same thing, I’ve made her into a victim and so I did a SAHANZ paper in 2002 about that.

Where I was sort of thinking, I was reflecting on my work and thinking, 49:34 - “why the hell did I do that?” But, you know, it’s kind of really important that, you know, even when you’re making someone a victim, somehow you are still exposing them and getting them moved into the right place. And then you’ve got to think again and sort of think, oh, okay, so this process of uncovering women, it’s, they’re often very, very, very slim to traces. So, you’ve got to be really careful how you do it. And you can’t sort of say, well, they don’t exist because I can’t find the papers. You have to have to kind of be a little bit devious about it really? Yeah. So, it makes a difference and we do have to know that history. Otherwise, we will repeat it, once again, disappear from the history will be wiped out. If you don’t mind jumping in here, there is a Spanish researcher that just this year has tried to make a bit of justice with Lilly Reich and the pavilion – so I just put the links there on the chat. It’s a first step, but it’s been done. Sorry, Julie, I stopped there, it was your turn. Okay, I think detective work is kind of the key, detective work and also, family history methods can work quite well. So, you know, quite often, especially once a woman has become married and decided to change her name, that can be a bit of a, all of a sudden, they can become a little bit lost.

So, I think family history methods, and also I mean, Trove, 51:25 - which I think most of us will have heard of Trove, which is the National Library of Australia’s aggregator, which has newspapers digitized for quite a few years of Australia’s history. You can actually track down using, you know, births, deaths, and marriages and things like that, track down women and work out where they were and what they were doing a fair bit. I think, also, sometimes they might become lost to the profession of architecture. But that doesn’t mean they’re lost in their own lives or something. So many of the women who might, who might have studied architecture, but then pulled back and decided to take a different path, have done wonderful things.

I’m Esther Lago, goes on to became an incredible photographer, whose work was then 52:21 - exhibited nationally. There are other Margaret Wollaston, who’s another person who trained as an architect, became a draftsman and then had an incredible career as a potter in ceramics and exhibited her work globally as well. So, it’s surprising actually, how many women who trained in architecture became incredible crafts people, and incredible artistic, having an artistic career, and also wonderful having wonderful roles in terms of mothering in terms of other fulfilling lives in terms of charity work. So, not everyone who gets lost to the architectural profession might be doing it, because they’re a victim. They might be doing it because they’ve chosen that “Actually, no, I want to live my life in a different way”.

I think this has been, really, 53:11 - this can be a comfort, as well to some of us who have chosen. I mean, I didn’t choose to go out and practice, I kind of went down a different route, and then ended up being a museum curator and writing history, something I never thought I’d be doing when I was studying architecture. I did have a side career as a florist for a while after I graduated and that, in itself, I think, was really valuable and actually taught me quite a lot that I’m drawing on now in my, you know, yarn bombing and crafting side of my life. So, I think women’s stories are diverse, and they’re rich, and they’re wonderful and just because they didn’t end up in the architecture museum with an archive I’ve doesn’t mean in their lives, were not incredible. I think that’s absolutely right. There’s also still so many, many women, go, you know, moving into other areas, trained in architecture doing really important and significant and interesting and fulfilling things. So, I think That’s mind you.

I would like to add that if anyone has got architectural women who have got 54:14 - a South Australian connection, please encourage them to donate their records to the Architecture Museum, because that’s another active area of collecting and I think, across Australia and the world as well. please encourage professional women to donate their records to archives and libraries and museums, because they’re part of the story of our lives. There they’re doing stuff and the men are not going to be I’m sorry, I shouldn’t generalize. But quite often the men are really happy to get out there and donate where the women are quite possibly a little bit holding back on donating their records but I think it’s really important these people’s careers, across all the professions and all the areas are, you know, there to tell stories. of how we lived our lives today. Yeah, that’s, that’s great. Julie, thank you. There are a couple more questions that are a bit too specific.

So, I hope that the audience doesn’t mind that we begin to wrap up, 55:18 - there was something about this series that we want all of you to leave kind of with a key takeaway aspect of these two women’s work. So Julie, and Gill, if you don’t mind, you know, what would be, you know, very, very concisely a key takeaway from the work you do, and that you would want the audience mainly, you know, also practicing architects to keep in mind in their daily work. Oh, that’s not a small question is it! I think, I think my thing would be about you do have to be vigilant, about the erasure that kind of happens to women over time. It’s, it hasn’t stopped with the 21st century. It hasn’t stopped with the advent of Parlour, or any other of these things.

So, you do need to be vigilant and you do need, as Julie says, definitely donate your work. Make sure it’s not destroyed, because there will be generations who will want to kind of find them. And, yeah, gender is very sneaky. In gender bias. It’s very sneaky. It just slips sneaks in, and when you least expect it, it’ll knock you out at the knees and your just sort of like, “How the hell did that happen?” It’ll happen. So, you just got to be vigilant. Vigilant in one word. To sum up, I think, I think I kind of hinted at this in my last answer to Justine. I mean, I never expected to follow a writing architectural history path.

I never expected to become a curator 57:22 - of a collection. But I’m really happy that I’m doing this now and I think if you kind of follow your interests and follow your path, somehow big data and things which seem insurmountable, can actually have really, really big rewards. So yeah. And anyone who’s in Adelaide and wants to pop into the architecture museum feel free. I’d really love you to see it in person. And I’m really glad that you decided to wrestle with those octopuses. Yeah. Yes, I’ll definitely be taking a visit. Next time I go to Adelaide and Gill, I will be staying vigilant.

Thank you so much, both, Gill and Julie, for your fantastic presentations and 58:16 - conversations today. That’s almost up for time. So, before we end, if anyone has would like to get involved with this series, or has any comments or feedback, please let us know. We’re really happy to have people join us as hosts or, or if anyone’s willing to share their research, we’d love to hear from you. A big thank you to UQ for hosting and SAHANZ for collaborating on this project and for Parlour, for trusting myself and Maca to lead the charge of this research talking to practice series. We’re really excited by the potential of the series, and so happy to have you all here for this first event. So, thank you also to Parlour’s Partners.

59:02 - And it was lovely to see everyone’s faces today. What a great start to the week. Thank you all so much. And we’ll see you next month for the Parlour LAB number two Looking forward to it. Thank you all. .