Gender Issues in Teaching Architectural History

1988/01/01 by Karen Kingsley
Arts and Humanities · #Architecture, Art, Education #Architecture, Design, and Social History

paper · doi:10.1080/10464883.1988.10758472

openalex publication_date 1988/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29

Abstract

This essay looks at gender issues in the teaching of architectural history. It argues that when perspectives and materials from scholarship on women are brought into the traditional curriculum, our knowledge of both history and the process of architectural production are enlarged. Using Peggy McIntosh's successful model for curriculum revision in the liberal arts, the architectural history syllabus is evaluated and ideas are proposed that would lead to a more integrative curriculum. Bias and exclusion in some of the more popular recent texts in architectural history are examined and alternative readings are suggested. The issues raised are applicable, too, for rethinking teaching approaches and attitudes in the design studio.

Related

• Feminism and architecture: origins and evolution from reflection to design practice
• Whose historical thinking? Representation of women in the Digital Inquiry Group’s Reading Like a Historian world history curriculum
• The Emergence of Architectural History As a Discipline in Iran: A Twenty-Year Narrative of the Iranian Architectural Studies Program (2005–2025)
• Reflections on teaching art history in art schools paper given, 4th January, 1966
• ‘The history of architectural history. The genesis and development of a scientific discipline between national perspectives and European models’. Report on the international Symposium of the Technische Universität Dresden at the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca in Rome, in cooperation with the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris Sciences & Lettres Univerity