Design practice
“The architect has no interest in establishing a real relationship (I mean of real awareness, a connection with others), since any fully aware relationship is a threat that might disprove his work. He cannot recognise the other because he would lose the sense of his own self: this is how he gets around, flatters, idealises or envelops the recipient with rhetoric.“The culture of relationships, on the other hand, belongs to women because they have always devoted and sacrificed themselves to relationships. But it is one thing to experience relationships and another to be aware of relationships. Here I see the potential for women to insert themselves as a conscious and active presence: to affirm their diversity in the way they conceive the object, to identify their values, instead of limiting themselves to leaving traces in history, instead of celebrating everyday life generically.“This is how I read the great absence of women from architecture not as a gap to be filled, nor as a diversity to be extolled, but as the expression of an impossibility of adhering to a design practice alien to them, which does not realise desires they see as vital. To me, it is a priority to become aware of the process through which I develop the project, by carefully listening to others, in relation to others. Relationships give humanity awareness; feminism is a encounter of different kinds of consciousness developing towards a new awareness, a different sense of history.” (ML 1982)
