Exploring Difference and Power in the Built Environment
All too often, explorations of diversity and difference in the built environment have started from segregated spaces, whether Black freedom towns in the Southern United States, Hispano towns in New Mexico, or all-male mining and lumber camps. While these studies allow us to zero in on aspects of difference and enrich our understanding of the wealth of the built environment, I argue for the necessity of expanding our view and exploring difference in every part of the built and designed landscape. Why? Because our cities, buildings, interiors, and landscapes are built and designed by humans for humans, to fit us, to communicate to us, to shape us, to serve us.
The built environment is expressive of and participates in shaping the categories through which we understand ourselves as humans—gender, age, status, race, ethnicity . . . These categories are not only essential to how we understand ourselves but are also the basis of the structures of power within any culture: patriarchy cannot exist without gender; white supremacy is predicated on race. Cultural norms provide a general outline of who has what kind of power and in what circumstances. Buildings, cities, and things participate in these systems of power, making arguments about who matters and shaping what is possible for different members of society. We can read the built environment to understand these norms, how they are naturalized, and how they are enforced. Understanding how the built environment participates in these norms also makes it possible to imagine and build more liberatory and more just buildings, cities, and landscapes.
In my new book, Exploring Gender in Vernacular Architecture, I examine the relationship between the built environment and gender. Comparing how the same building type is designed for men and women allows us to easily see how buildings participate in the construction of gender. Ideals of femininity and masculinity are visible both in decoration and in plan. For example, women’s reading rooms in libraries express the association of women and domesticity through their furnishings, including rocking chairs and carpets while also segregating women from the larger general reading room and the knowledge contained in its reference works (Figures 1 and 2).
Figure 1. Ladies’ Reading Room, Buffalo Public Library. The throw rugs, rocking chairs set at various angles, and fireplaces suggest a place of leisure based on the norms of a parlor. The Buffalo Library and Its Building: Illustrated with Views (Buffalo, NY: by the library, 1887), opp. 30.
Figure 2. The ladies’ reading room in the Lister Drive Carnegie Library and Reading Rooms, Liverpool, UK, is separated from the general reading room by a vestibule, which can also be directly accessed through a discreet ladies’ entrance. Thomas Shelmerdine, 1904, public domain, Wikimedia Commons.
Examining the plans of summer camp bathrooms, we can see how boys and girls are socialized into their gender roles, as Abigail van Slyck demonstrates. The association of femininity with privacy and cleanliness is visible in mid-twentieth century summer camp bathrooms for girls which provided girls with private shower stalls, private toilet stalls, and, typically, individual washbasins (Figure 3). Showerheads greatly outnumber toilets, suggesting the importance of keeping themselves clean. In contrast, contemporary summer camp bathrooms for boys had multiple entrances, gang showers, collective urinals, and significantly fewer showerheads than toilets (Figure 4).
Figure 3. Camp Fire Girls Shower House plan. This washhouse provides six shower stalls, each with a dressing room, and just two toilet stalls. Adapted from Camp Fire Girls, When You Plan Your Camp (New York: Camp Fire Girls, 1946).
Figure 4. YMCA camp washhouse for boys. This washhouse provides a small space for showering, with no private stalls. Plan of Unit Washhouse for a YMCA Camp, John A. Ledlie, ed., Layout Building Designs, and Equipment for Y.M.C.A. Camps (New York: Young Man’s Christian Association, 1946), 48.
As Carla Yanni argues, privacy is similarly emphasized in dorms designed for female students which typically provide multiple single rooms opening to a hall (Figure 5). The entrance and exit are through a single staircase, leading to a single building entrance that is easily policed (Figure 6). In contrast, dorms for male students more typically have multiple staircases, allowing residents full freedom of movement (Figure 7). Dorms express the idea that young women need to be watched over and controlled and while young men should have freedom, enforcing that gendered difference of freedom of movement through the ways that students move through their dorms.
Figure 5. This plan of the second floor of a women’s dorm shows rooms along a double-loaded corridor, accessed by a shared staircase. The coming and going of women students and their guests is easily surveilled by controlling access to the staircase. Plan of second floor of Green Hall, University of Chicago, 1893–1898, Henry Ives Cobb, architect. Drawing by Tabi Summers.
Figure 6. Ridenbaugh Hall, a women’s dormitory at the University of Idaho, is typical in its single entrance and comparative lack of openness at the ground floor, ensuring women students’ rooms are shielded from those outside and facilitating surveillance. Postcard, c.1910.
Figure 7. In this men’s dorm at Yale University, rooms, organized into shared suites, cluster around multiple staircases, and students can come and go without central surveillance. Portion of Calhoun College (now Grace Hopper College), Yale University, 1932–1933, John Russell Pope, architect. Drawing by Tabi Summers.
Cultures are structures of power, which are expressed and constructed through the built environment. However, power is contested and complex; people do not just follow the rules. We need to understand the rules: to understand gender, we need to recognize the workings of patriarchy; to understand sexuality, we need to see heteronormativity; to understand race, we need to examine racial hierarchies and white supremacy. But we should not stop with the norms; we also need to pay attention to how and when those norms are followed, challenged, adjusted, or ignored, as the built environment is often part of resisting and transforming norms.
Women’s organizations, for example, have made use of architecture to make arguments about women’s role, pushing at the boundaries of gender norms. Early YWCAs and settlement houses often reused an existing grand house, signaling that the activities within them were an extension of women’s association with the domestic realm (Figure 8). Over time, as YWCAs gained more legitimacy and women made greater strides within the public realm, architecture helped them make a claim for their place within the modern civic realm.
Figure 8. YWCA, Binghamton, New York, in repurposed grand domestic building. Postcard, c. 1908.
The 1913 Dayton, Ohio, downtown YWCA is a grand purpose-built edifice, including among its services a swimming pool and over 90 apartments serving single working women (Figure 9). Its resolutely non-domestic design presents the YWCA as a civic club and hotel, part of the downtown world, while its size and the permanence of its construction make a claim for the YWCA’s prominence and role within the downtown. The YWCA continues to use this building to serve the community, most notably as a domestic violence shelter.
Figure 9. The Dayton, Ohio, YWCA is a picture of middle-class respectability and prosperous permanence. It presents the YWCA as a solid, respectable, and modern organization. Postcard, c. 1910.
Similarly, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Mormon Ladies Relief Society used their buildings in part to make claims for themselves as actors in the public realm. Between 1961 and 1921, Relief Society women built over 120 Society Halls. Through these buildings, located centrally in towns, they presented themselves as businesswomen. For example, the Fifteenth Ward Relief Society Hall in Salt Lake City is a two-story building with a meeting hall above and a shop below, very much in line with typical commercial buildings of the era, in which a shop with large windows and a center entrance is topped with a space that could provide offices or a rental hall (Figure 10). The prominent lettering on the cornice announces that the building is created by and houses the Relief Society, proclaiming the Society women’s importance in the public space of the street. These buildings were seen as a challenge by the male church leadership who in 1921 pushed back against the independence expressed in buildings like this one, declaring that women’s Relief Society meetings should be held in the local ward meetinghouse, a space controlled by men, rather than in an independent building.[1]
“The built environment is expressive of and participates in shaping the categories through which we understand ourselves as humans—gender, age, status, race, ethnicity.”
Figure 10. The Fifteenth Ward Relief Society Hall, in Salt Lake City, Utah, is a resolutely commercial building, from the prominent lettering on its façade to the glass-fronted store on its first floor. Used by permission, Utah State Historical Society.
Domestic spaces are particularly expressive of gender, because cultural norms of family composition and roles are based on gender. Typical American houses reflect a hierarchy between the parents, assumed to be a heterosexual couple, and children (Figure 11). The master bedroom has been growing over time, with ever larger bathrooms and closets, and is increasingly physically separated from children’s smaller bedrooms and shared bathroom. A typical suburban house is an ill-fit for extended families or more egalitarian families of choice.
Figure 11. In this c.1960 ranch house plan, the master bedroom is significantly larger than the other three bedrooms and has a private bath. House plan 7224 from “Garlinghouse Split Level Homes.”
Some affluent queer people have been able to build houses like the 1941 Weston Havens House in Berkeley and the 1972 Anthony Donghia House on Fire Island, that have multiple equivalent bedrooms (Figures 12 and 13).[2] More often, however, queer households have inhabited heteronormative houses against the grain, using rooms in the way that best suits their household, decorating their interiors and often exteriors with signs of queer identity, and using their kitchens as spaces for political organizing as well as for meals (Figure 14). Respecting inhabitation as place making is central to taking gender seriously. Furnishing and decorating transforms the meaning of a place, reminding inhabitants of who they are as well as communicating to outsiders. To study gender well, we need to pay attention not just to the ways that gendered ideologies are built into a space, but also how the ways that people live in it, decorate it, and think about it changes what it means.
Figure 12. The 1941 Weston Havens house in Berkeley, by Harwell Hamilton Harris, has three bedroom suites, each with a private bathroom (highlighted in this drawing). Drawing by Tabi Summers.
Figure 13. The three bedrooms in the 1972 Angelo Donghia House on Fire Island, designed by Horace Gifford, are strikingly nonhierarchical. Plan showing circulation drawn by Tabi Summers, based on Architectural Digest, Nov./Dec. 1973.
Figure 14. Rainbow flags like this one declare a queer presence in suburbia just as they do in cities, marking ordinary single-family houses as queer space. Suburban rainbow flag decoration, 2021. Photograph by Nicole Schroeer.
My own research focuses on gender, which is notably different from many other social categories. Neighborhoods and communities are often organized by class, ethnicity, and race, and members of a household often share these facets of identity. In contrast, we rarely organize neighborhoods by gender difference, and most households include people with different gender identities. Trying to read gender norms from single-gender spaces is demonstrably inadequate. However, looking only at single-class, single-race, or single-ethnicity spaces is similarly blinkered. We live in complex societies and can best understand difference within them by exploring how all of the built environment is entwined with power and understood through experience. Exploring how cultural categories like gender, class, and race are built into our physical world, and also how they are enacted, transformed, and resisted through individual experience, will allow us to see every aspect of vernacular architecture, and all buildings and landscapes, more fully. In Exploring Gender in Vernacular Architecture, I suggest ways to start that exploration, from the kinds of questions we can ask to the wide range of methods that can help us get at how places are experienced.
Notes
[1] Carolyn Butler-Palmer, “Building Autonomy: A History of the Fifteenth Ward Hall of the Mormon Women’s Relief Society,” Buildings and Landscapes 20, no. 2 (Spring 2013): 69–94.
[2] Annmarie Adams, “Sex and the Single Building: The Weston Havens House, 1941–2001,” Buildings and Landscapes 17, no. 1 (2010): 82–97
