A RIBA report says “stark displays of sexism” are driving women from the profession. If we don’t fight this systemic misogyny, we won’t just lose dazzling designs – we’ll have a world only fit for 6ft tall policemen
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f one were to think “Brazilian 20th-century modernist genius”, one might alight on Oscar Niemeyer, but see also the Italian émigré Lina Bo Bardi, who developed an Italian-style modernism with a Brazilian accent in her adopted homeland. Her Teatro Oficina, in São Paulo, was named by this paper as the best theatre in the world.
Five hundred miles away is one of my favourite residential buildings, A la Ronde; an eccentric 16-sided home in Exmouth, Devon. It was designed in 1796 by Jane and Mary Parminter (two “spinster” cousins, in the words of the National Trust) and relative John Lowder. The cousins, who were not professionals, had been inspired by their Grand Tour of Europe (an unusual undertaking for women at the time) and, in particular, the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy. The critic Lucinda Lambton described the cottage orné with Byzantine inflection as embodying “a magical strangeness that one might dream of only as a child”.
I thought of Bo Bardi and the Parminters when reading the recent report by the Royal Institute of British Architects (the RIBA) which found that “stark displays of sexism” were pushing women out of the profession, stalling their progress within it, or putting them off entering it altogether. The RIBA’s chief executive officer, Dr Valerie Vaughan-Dick – the first woman CEO in the organisation’s almost 200-year-old history – said that the report, which documented sexual harassment (including stalking and groping), unequal pay (a 16% gender gap), unsociable hours, and pervasive power imbalances, makes for “uncomfortable reading”.
