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A. Simionovici:
"On a century of the invisible";
Talk: 8th European Conference on Gender Equlity and Higher Education, Vienna University of Technology, Austria; 2014-09-04 - 2014-09-05.

Simone de Beauvoir alludes to the anatomic visibility and invisibility of men´s and
women´s sexual organs respectively, and connects these thoughts with socially produced differences
between men and women. Women´s private parts are inside and `invisible´, whereas the male penis is
not only visible but immediately graspable and almost soliciting active attention. Just like their bodily
pudenda (private parts), women in arts and architecture are therefore often passive and the subject of the
work of art rather than the author thereof, for example.
By initially taking a look at fin-de-siècle Vienna and the world of art and architecture surrounding Adolf
Loos, this contribution discusses the changes regarding the way women are perceived in the
architectural and artistic discourse during the past 100 years. It critically debates women as the subjects
in arts and architecture, but also whether the requirements these have to satisfy in order to even enter the
discourse have changed over the past century. When Adolf Loos published the photograph of the
bedroom for his child-woman wife Lina, which he had designed shortly after they married, he publicly
exposed a certain, rather passive (fictional) image of her. After their breakup, Lina commissioned Loos
to reconstruct her bedroom in the new apartment. Again, photographs of the design survived but they
show another image of Lina, one, which maybe she herself wanted to stage.
Subsidized contemporary housing projects in Vienna want to proliferate and accommodate a variety of
family forms and socio-cultural roles. By looking at some contemporary examples, for example by
SUPERBLOCK architects, the last part of the contribution will analyze the contemporary reflection of
how women are perceived and included into or excluded from the architectural discourse.

https://gender2014.conf.tuwien.ac.at/programme/