Leading industry voices, writers and academics Dr. Harriet Harriss, Naomi House, Monika Parrinder and Tom Ravenscroft, have garnered international plaudits for their eye-opening book 100 Women: Architects in Practice. Showcasing the largely overlooked stories of women currently making their mark in the architectural world, there have been launch events and press coverage for the book from Dubai to New York, Uzbekistan to South Africa.
Now, for the first time, they will make their findings tangible and accessible to the public through 100 Women Architects: The Exhibition. Geographically balanced to feature architects from 79 countries across six continents, the exhibition will amplify their voices, and projects will be illustrated by photos and rendered as simplified 3D paper models, constructed by students from London’s RCA Architecture programme, under the guidance of Interior Design MA tutor Steve Jensen.
These highlighted projects will show the breadth of innovative approaches to be found in every region of the world, from reinterpretations of indigenous building types that offer passively-sustainable solutions to local housing, such as Laura Narayansingh’s Bush House on the Caribbean Island of Trinidad; to organic, contemporary forms that sit sympathetically within the landscape, such as Rahel Shawl of RAAS Architecture’s Aga Khan award-winning Royal Netherlands Embassy, Addis Ababa, a red-ochre building that references the hewn rock churches of Lalibela.
The book explores “the different worlds, different forms of architecture and the place-sensitive approaches” each architect has taken to fulfill their vision through a series of insightful profiles and inspiring imagery, some of which will be on display in the gallery.
Over the past decade, awareness of the need for gender balance in architecture has gained traction. Within the profession, women remain underrepresented, underpromoted and underpaid. Through this RIBA publication and Roca exhibition, women’s contribution to the built environment is rightly acknowledged and celebrated.
In addition to a range of new names, visitors will also see works by established practitioners such as Liz Diller, Farshid Moussavi and Yasmeen Lari. Areas of common focus, identified by the authors across their research and discussed in the book’s introduction, will be highlighted, including: practice innovation; care and connection; unpredictable participation; future place-making; and equity.
The team says: “Our aspiration is gender equity across all professions and disciplines. We wrote the book to play some part in increasing the visibility of architectural practitioners who all have the knowledge and talent to be a household name.”
About the Author / curators
Dr. Harriet Harriss (ARB, RIBA, PHEA, Assoc.AIA, FRSA) is an award-winning educator, writer, qualified architect and professor at Pratt Institute, New York, where she previously served as the Dean of the School of Architecture for three years. Her research and scholarly specialisms confront the relationship between the built (and un-built) environment, and questions of diversity, equity and inclusion - and - propose climate crisis and social justice curriculum and pedagogies. Harriet has spoken about these matters across a wide range of media channels including the BBC TV and Radio, Sky TV, and Fox Nation and was nominated by Dezeen as a champion for women in architecture and design in 2019. Her highly-regarded past publications include Radical Pedagogies; Architectural Education & the British Tradition (2015), A Gendered Profession (2016), Interior Futures (2019), awardwinning Architects After Architecture (2020), Greta Magnusson Grossman: Modern Design From Sweden To California (2021), Working at the Intersection: Architecture After the Anthropocene (2022) and Architectural Pedagogies of the Global South (2023).
Naomi House is a Designer, Educator and Writer. Director of Research and
Knowledge Exchange for the department of Design and Senior Lecturer in Interior Architecture and Design, at Middlesex University, London, she is an experienced academic who taught for many years in Critical and Historical Studies at the Royal College of Art, and previously at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, London Metropolitan University and University of the Arts, London. Naomi’s particular expertise is in the field of interiors using forensic methods as a strategy for exploring and questioning how objects, environments and their interactions can be analysed, interpreted and animated. She has recently published Greta Magnusson Grossman: Modern Design From Sweden To California (2021) and Working at the Intersection:
Architecture After the Anthropocene (2022). She is currently collaborating on various projects around themes of social justice and climate emergency, urban regeneration and practices of empathy and care, including Kilburn Lab (2022-23) and Endangered Domesticity (2023).
Monika Parrinder works at the intersection of design, research and education. Coming from a graphic design practice background, she has spent two decades in art schools, teaching contextual studies to designers, artists, curators and historians. She works at Central Saint Martins, with previous roles at the Royal College of Art and Goldsmiths, University of London, including external work in Europe, the US and India. Her cross-disciplinary experience feeds into facilitation for interdisciplinary funding bids and impact research. She is often commissioned to write about emerging patterns of practice and future trajectories, through writing, public speaking and convening events. Publishing includes magazines and essays in books, including ‘The Future of Publishing’ (2012); ‘Typography Today and Tomorrow’ (2015) and ‘Interior Futures’ (2019). Her books include Limited Language: Re-writing Design – Responding to a Feedback Culture (2010). Monika is a Trustee of the Arts Foundation, which provides funding for creatives, where a focus has been the long-running Materials Innovation awards, for which she convened The New Materialists event at the Design Museum, London.
Tom Ravenscroft is a multi award-winning architectural journalist and writer. He is currently the editor of Dezeen – the world's most influential architecture and design website. He holds masters in architectural history from both The University of Edinburgh and The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Tom's writing has been published in numerous architecture publication's including the Architects' Journal, RIBA Journal, Icon, BD, City Metric, Architectural Review and ArchDaily. Videos on architecture featuring Tom have had over five million views on YouTube.
Admission is free and there’s no need to book.
Image © Dorte MandrupIlulissat Icefjord Centre Greenland by Adam Mørk
Please note, photography or video recording is currently not permitted at Roca London Gallery.