Feminist practices in Spanish Recent Architecture. Equality and sexual difference

Abstract

Architecture, as a technical and humanistic discipline, has been echoing feminist theory for decades through academic research, teaching and professional practices. They take gender studies in general, and different feminist theories, in particular, as fundamental thinking to base a critique of modern architectural positions, linked to transcendental and idealism thinking that abstracts the differences among human beings. These feminist practices have the aim of proposing new ways of approaching the architecture profession and to connect it, from materialist positions, to the vital reality of the societies in which we live. Through three sections linked to an understanding of women as a historical subject, to the gender perspective, and to the feminine as a category, this text analyses different feminist practices, from egalitarian positions and from the sexual difference, that are having an outstanding presence in recent Spanish architecture practices. The objective is to organize them according to the way in which gender studies and architecture interweave, in order to facilitate their understanding from feminist thinking.