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Document Details : Title: L'architecte Simone Guillissen-Hoa dans la presse périodique belge (1948-1967) Subtitle: Des male et female daze au double gaze Author(s): VRANKEN, Apolline Journal: Tijdschrift voor Interieurgeschiedenis en Design Volume: 45 Date: 2023 Pages: 57-70 DOI: 10.2143/GBI.45.0.3292628 Abstract : In 1927 women were finally able for the first time to enroll in the architecture section of the Institut Supérieur des Arts Décoratifs (Higher Institute of Decorative Arts) or ISAD of La Cambre in Brussels within a broader educational context of diversity that was fostered by the multidisciplinarity of its workshops. Simone Guillissen-Hoa (1916-1996) began her studies here in 1935. The fourth woman architect to graduate from ISAD, she started her career during the first years of World War II in an economic climate of shortage of orders as well as in a binarisation system of genders and hierarchy between decorative arts and architecture, and between male and female practitioners. In a feminist approach to the history of architecture this article explores how these first Belgian women artists, and in particular Guillissen-Hoa, positioned themselves within the field of architecture and dealt with the gender expectations of their time, both in their constructed works and in their personalities as architects. The analyses of the reception of the figure of Guillissen-Hoa – the subject of this study both as a practitioner and as an object of representation – by the Belgian periodical press, both specialised and feminine, make it possible to identify in this architect a double strategy of emergence in practice as well in the press, which allowed her identification and demarcation with regard to the category of ‘women’ simultaneously. Thus, in rejecting or accepting normative frameworks to her advantage or not, the skein that makes up the woman architect’s life is part of a collective consciousness based on the female experience and forms a system within her relationship to the world, in extenso to architecture and even more to her own architecture. These intertwinings can therefore be understood as a singular way of being in the world, as the trait of a different experience, a different practice or a different gaze. These constituent parameters of her practice and its reception by the press allow the mobilisation of the concepts of the female, male and double gaze in order to apprehend the discourses, postures and strategies of Guillissen-Hoa in an embodied way and to think about a new dimension – sensory or phenomenological – of feminist objectivity. The story that ultimately emerges from this analysis pairs collective female consciousness and appropriation of the male gaze while taking into account the historical dichotomies that affect the creation of architecture. |
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