"Les Girls en voyage": Gender, architecture, and mobility in the mid-twentieth century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines the role of travel and mobility in the lives of women in architecture. How did women, by traveling, writing, and designing, give voice and vision to their life stories? In contrast to linear biographies depicting universal and unique subjects, this study asserts partial, collective, spatial, feminist, and mobile life stories. It studies a group of women architects and planners who lived and worked in Canada, the United States, and England in the mid-twentieth century: Blanche Lemco van Ginkel, Jean Wallbridge, and Mary Imrie from Canada; Denise Scott Brown from South Africa and the United States; and Jaqueline Tyrwhitt and Alison Smithson from England. My focus on mobility provides a fresh understanding of these pioneering women and shows a completely overlooked dimension of their lives and work. Revisiting individual and collective stories through the notion of mobility helps to situate women as protagonists who shaped professional settings according to their needs. This approach encourages the recognition of the wide range of contributions by women to architectural knowledge, design, education, and networking in the mid-twentieth century. Moreover, zooming in on the mobile parts of their lives shifts the focus of feminist architectural history on the constraints that women architects faced, and rather offers a more positive, constructive, and inclusive history.By assessing alternative forms of evidence, such as diaries, home movies, novels, newspaper clippings, photographs, and letters, in addition to more traditional interviews and architectural sources, this study challenges institutional production as the singular means of professional status. The analysis of women’s movement reveals the extent of networks, mentorships, and friendships they formed in different geographies, institutions, vehicles, and landscapes. Mobility allowed women to blur gendered boundaries embedded in the architectural profession and the traditional genre of biography. Through the design, use, and representation of spaces and vehicles of mobility, women did not only transgress borders, but also claimed spatial and professional agency. Being mobile created new roles for women in architecture
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".