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Is a "woman architect" like a "lady doctor"?

anon, I was just about to post the same thing. Can we reword this please? Offensive!!!!!!!!

3rd. I wonder if he got a cut from a box knife and had to visit a male nurse?

I'll just ignore the phrase "woman architect" for now.

In my first year of architecture school, we had to design a dismantlable cardboard chair. It was the most fun project that year. Still have the chair, though it's starting to show its age.

And I should mention that 70% of my architecture school class was female....

4th. A "woman architect" sounds like an architect that engineers women. Poor wording.

I think the use of "woman architect" was supposed to indicate that even the weakest among us can be trained in cardboard. Fancy that.

I really don't think Maxwell meant to sound like that. I certainly didn't mean that when I sent it to him. The main point was that if she thought this was an interesting course, it most certainly must have been. You gotta trust me that the person in question is VERY smart, VERY hip and has impeccable taste in everything.

Too bad that point got lost in the mix.

That's really cool. I want to build something.

I had to do this at RISD freshman year. Make a chair out of cardboard with no adhesives.

The PC police are writing citations today aren't they?

Clearly her gender was mentioned because "she" was someone Curtis worked with, and identified her as such, and the fact that she is an architect was mentioned to bolster her credibility: She isn't just a layman (layperson is rejected by my spell-checker) speaking here about this class, she speaks with the authority of one holding an architect's license. But, if one feels it is worth qualifying that an architect happens to be a woman, it might have something to do with the fact that only 10% of licensed architects in the US are women (source: Architecture Week).

Since we are all so sensitive, may I offer this rephrasing:

> A woman in Curtis' office went to these classes
> and came back with totally positive reviews. Her
> opinion is a credible one, she's a licensed architect.

If it is any source of inspiration/consolation the number of African-American women earning an architecture license annually has tripled in the past decade (source: UCLA white paper).

For further inspiration, everyone should check out Iraqi-born architect, Zaha Hadid's exhibit currently running at the Guggenheim through October 25th.
http://www.guggenheim.org/hadid/index.html

I have had the good fortune to attend lectures by Beverly Willis, FAIA...
http://www.bwaf.org/

...as well as Harvard Architecture Professor, Winka Dubbeldam, who's lower Manhattan Greenwich Street Project has earned her well deserved accolades and much recognition for her firm, Archi-tectonics.
http://www.classic.archined.nl/news/0102/winka_dubbeldam_e.html

And don't forget Eisenman protegee, Audrey Matlock, whose credit for the design of Time Squares' Bertelsmann building was stolen by SOM's David Childs, but vindicated in the book, High Rise: How 1,000 Men and Women Worked Around the Clock for Five Years and Lost $200 Million Building a Skyscraper, available new and used at Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/006092456X/qid=1062226776/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/102-4497375-3455304?n=507846&s=books&v=glance

To get back on topic, I will grant you these cardboard chair links:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxD9UuiSAFo

http://www.cardboardchair.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv

http://www.designboom.com/cardboard3.html
http://www.designboom.com/cardboard2.html
http://www.designboom.com/cardboard1.html

-Chris

chris (nyc) I think you nailed exactly the intent of the post with:
> A woman in Curtis' office went to these classes
> and came back with totally positive reviews. Her
> opinion is a credible one, she's a licensed architect.

That's assuming that alarmists don't get up in arms about assuming architects opinions on such matters are better than someone elses.

Chris(nyc), so what's wrong with saying "an architect Curtis works with"? why does her gender even matter? I know that neither Curtis nor Maxwell meant anything malicious or demeaning by referring to her as a woman architect, but words carry meaning, intentinal or not. I'm going to bet you're a Chris of the Christopher variety, and not the Christine variety, so the distinction might not be so important to you. But to a generation or two of women who have struggled to achieve "equality," the phrase "woman architect" is about as uplifting as a lead balloon.

[end uppity anti-patriarchal feminist rant]

I can't imagine that it would have EVER been written as a "man architect", can you? Really. I'm not being mean, but these things do matter.

regards,
trillium

Did any man architects enjoy the class?
I was really surprised and disappointed to see the moniker 'woman architect' on your site.

thanks for the perspective, chris. a group of women could easily a form an 'association for women architects' and it would be totally acceptable. weird wording aside, is this any different?

Being a Chris of the Christine variety, I have to agree with the "pc police." I'm not a pc freak, but I think the point being made is that sometimes, the way things are phrased makes a difference, and that usually (though I agree not in this case) when someone phrases something like that, it's to make a point about how weird or obscure or almost wrong it is that a woman is an architect/doctor/lawyer whatever, implying that they don't belong there. It implies judgement. On the other hand "Association of women architects" is descriptive. It may be true that most architects are men from a quantity standpoint, but women are definitely gaining ground, as in other fields. I'm not an architect, I'm a city planner who concentrated on urban design in school--and I found I still faced challenges with some of the professors who favored men. and, it wasn't my imagination, trust me. I was selected for one studio with something like less than 25 percent women in a program that was more than 50% women. This professor in particular was who I had issues with. Eventually, he came around, but not without some bold in his face intellectual confrontation and noisemaking. I think it would have been great to indicate that it was a woman in Curtis' office, AND that she was an architect--it's just the way it was done.

Anyway, the whole reason I looked at this posting was that I think it's way cool. I wish this was in DC so I could go to it, just for novelty sake, not because I want cardboard furniture.

yeah. If the fact of her being a woman was obviously relevant to the posting (which it was not) it would have been at least more acceptable. The fact that she is hip and smart and STILL liked the class is nice, but just the term "woman architect" is really kind of lame. even if it was worded "a woman Curtis works with (an architect)" would have been so much better than "woman architect".

how about one of "Curtis' co-workers"? that way gender is a total non-issue.

I'm usually one of the lone voices in the wilderness when it comes to defending the general idea of political correctness.

But I gotta say there have been so few comments about the idea of the class and so many comments about what was pretty obviously not an intentional slight that it's really amazing how many people have jumped onto this. It seems like there should be an entirely DIFFERENT kind of site dedicated to the discussion that cropped up.

I find classes like this fascinating. I love reuse of what we consider trash into something completely useful and intersting to look at as well. Very ReadyMade-esque.

(I'm not the same amy as above)

so inspiring and so very cool, thanks curtis and AT!

kt wrote:
> how about one of "Curtis' co-workers"?
> that way gender is a total non-issue.

And being an architect is a non-issue as well.

Good grief, he so blatantly pointed out she was an architect to add gravitas to her opinion, and he's being chastised for it by the PC police. No good deed goes unpunished. Look at the intent.

going back to kt's statement again:
> how about one of "Curtis' co-workers"?
> that way gender is a total non-issue.

So from now on, any time I mention a woman OR a man I know, I'll must simply refer to them as a "human"... oh, wait, feminist writers have told me that hum"MAN" is gender insensitive too, because its etymology is derivative of the word "man" and is therefore exclusionary to women... wait, I can't say "women" either, wo"MEN" is also derivative of the word "man", so I've been told by more than one femist vegan lesbian that I'm suppose to use the new politically correct term: womyn (I could never understand people defining themselves by they are not. In other words, isn't replacing the "e" just accentuating the fact that it is derived from the word "men", yet somehow, "not"?)... apparently I don't know how to pronounce it correctly either. From now on, I'll only refer to others as homosepians.

So Maxwell should have written:
> A homosepian in Curtis' office went to
> these classes and came back with
> totally positive review.

Curtis wrote:
> But I gotta say there have been so few
> comments about the idea of the class...

I posted these above, but I'll post again:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxD9UuiSAFo

http://www.cardboardchair.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv

http://www.designboom.com/cardboard3.html
http://www.designboom.com/cardboard2.html
http://www.designboom.com/cardboard1.html

Why do I suspect the fuss is over a typo?

Quite often, I type one word, decide another one would be much better, and don't edit correctly, leaving both words there. Usually it's something innocuous like "had went," where I merely look stupid rather than bigoted. So far.

Cool sofa... but of course, I'd be totally ape over constructing furniture from cardboard.

I am so absolutely thinking about a day trip to NYC just to take this class. Fantastic. Thanks for sharing, Curtis.

curtis, as a "woman architect" I am not phased by your wording because it speaks volumes of your character. Oh, and cardboard furniture was so done 20 years ago. Think of a more progressive post for next time.

Have you been to see the Zaha Hadid exhibit yet?
http://www.guggenheim.org/hadid/index.html

AWESOM-O 4000 3dsom this is arkaos.

The furniture reminds me of that guy out west somewhere who made furniture for his home a year or two ago out of Fed Express boxes. They were very inventive. He put up pictures on a Web site and somehow the media found out and started interviewing him on TV. When the suits at Fed Ex got wind of it, they got mad and threatened to sue him, I think. Did anyone else see this guy? Very creative.

P2, I don't think anyone is impugning Curtis' character, but it feels like the fact that both Curtis and Maxwell, both as progressive males as it's possible to have on this planet, let that phrasing slip by is telling. I think the fact that she's an architect is kind of relevant and interesting but her gender could have been noted much more subtly, something like, "An architect in Curtis' office went to this class and she came back with totally positive reviews".

Reading this I was reminded of an episode of "All in the Family" where Meathead gives Archie this puzzle, "A father and son are in a terrible car accident and both are very seriously injured. They arrive at the hospital and are taken to separate ORs for operations. The surgeon approaches the table, looks down at the boy's face and says, 'I can't operate on this boy, he's my son!" How can this be?" Archie and his buddies turn themselves into all kinds of contortions to somehow get the father to rise up off the operating table to get to his son's.

The answer should be obvious in 2006 but the phrase "woman architect" still carries a whiff of that 1973 thinking and I think that's what's getting undergarments twisted.

BTW, that class sounds totally cool but I don't think I really want a cardboard couch. And I'm glad an organization like ADA exists, adaptive design benefits everyone, not just those who need it to live their daily lives. So thank you for your post, Curtis!

Don't know why "woman architect" has everyone's panties/boxers in a bunch.

I say "male stripper" all the time!

Shout out to fellow RISDoid Robbie!!! (NOT implying *he* is a male stripper by the way.)

amanda-
Ain't nothing stopping you from contributing a "more progressive post". Enlighten us, architect of unknown gender!!

But perhaps Curtis could use the wording "snobby architect" next time. That seems often to fit.

Curtis' character is beyond reproach, btw.

Well, I don't think the architect I referred to as being a snob; I just respect her opinion.

Maybe she's the exception?

Ruth--
Unless I misread, I think Amanda was indeed doing some thinly-veiled impugning.

But I've definitely been wrong before, so apologies if so.

(I do understand the hoopla, and was just trying to lighten things up, btw)

Curtis--
The architect in question was not the one in your office. I'm sure she is a delight.

Ruth -

You're welcome? And thanks?

However, the word "character" was absolutely in amanda's comment, and I will take it to have been meant as written.

And congratulations, YOU get a prize for being the first person EVER to even marginally compare me to Archie Bunker.

Trust me, I'm more offended than either of you could be.

SHE gets the prize!!?!?

I've never gotten the prize!

How is that fair?

brilliant inspiring indeed, sponsored by A.D.A.
can we have a west coast version....

Enough bickering. For the record I'm a successful professional craftswoman and I don't find this wording offensive or even worthy of any particular attention. Who gives a damn!

Lets talk about the main matter at hand -- I AM very interested in this idea of cardboard carpentry, which is completely new to me. I think its potential is enormous!

Can anyone supply some more links or book titles on the subject? I have heard of two books already. They are titled "Nomadic Furniture: Volumes I & II" and are written by James Hennessey. I was about to buy a copy used online when I found it for free at the local library. I would love to know more if anyone has other suggestions.

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