MoMA on Women in Architecture and Design
Throughout history women have had to quietly endure unofficial inferiority in almost every realm, and unsurprisingly, this notion infiltrated the realm of architecture and design. Designing Modern Women, an exhibition held by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, validates that women didn’t hold a place on their own in the past.
The displays in the exhibition demonstrate that women have to ‘share physical space with men who made their work palatable to a larger consumer society’. Though it can be inferred that there was a significant amount of concession, these women worked with those they love – Ray and Charles Eames, Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, Lella and Massimo Vignelli - to be able to demonstrate their own creative talent. The exhibition boasts many of these women’s designer pieces, but they are coupled with their own counterparts.
In some ways it is a back-handed compliment, to concern the public with female works that are interwoven with male influence. The pieces, a bed by Lily Reich, a kitchen by Charlotte Perriand and a chair by Ray Eames, are accompanied in the exhibition by their male equivalents-Mies Van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Charles Eames.In turn, the set up almost sabotages the progress made with women in architecture and design, one that has had an arduous history, where women were forced to submit work under their spouse’s name or under ‘anonymous’.
Juliet Kinchin, the curator for the exhibition, explains that, almost deceivingly, the exhibition is not aimed at just things that women contributed to the world of design, but rather is centered more on the objects that were tolerated to be designed by women-textiles, kitchens, children’s toys, as well as spaces to which women were ‘relegated’, ones that they gently undermined.
Similarly, Designing Modern Women includes works by male artists like Herbert Matter, Jules Cheret, and Charles Mackintosh, whose works speak to the versatility and range of ways woman can create; as muse, consumer, curator, architect, artist, etc. In this way, Kinchin made clear the nuance of the exhibition title, ‘Designing Modern Women’, as women are both designed and designers.
The centerpiece of the exhibition, Corbusier’s and Perriand’s Unité d’Habitation kitchen, was built in 1952 to pacify the need for bigger and more resourceful housing post-war. Unité d’Habitation was literally, abstractly, and physically built by and for a woman; a template to maximize efficiency in spaces that were predominantly occupied by women. Its centrality to the exhibition validates a subtle but incredibly crucial idea: women shaped domestic modern design unnoticed.
While MoMA hasn’t always been so tolerable of women’s exhibitions, with the founder of the Architecture and Design Department at MoMA (Phillip Johnson) instituting biased collecting and hiring practices, this exhibit stands for two symbolic ideas: as an autonomous identity, and as a reflection on the larger museum. A piece by Joanne Stramerra, which displays the words “Erase Sexism from MoMA”, acknowledges MoMA’s history & curators’ discreet engagement in changing and maneuvering it.
Chief curator of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Helen Molesworth, sums up the exhibit’s subtle message most gracefully saying, “It is a revolution of the deepest order to insert women artists back into rooms that have in fact been structured by their very absence.”