Summary

Architectural historiography has addressed women’s agency in architecture through two predominant, yet often isolated, approaches. On the one hand, it has relied on biographical methodologies that highlight leading figures as designers and decision-makers who stood out in the conception of buildings and infrastructure, following the pioneering work of Susana Torre (1977). On the other hand, scholars have sought to recognize the collective role of women as part of the labor force, often categorized as unskilled workers within contexts of precarity (Jha, 2020; Melsens, 2024 Milheiro, 2025). Based on this dual approach, this session focuses on the construction site as the central stage for expanding women’s role in architecture, metaphorically shifting the drafting board to the place where the project is actual built. The aim of this session is to interrogate the physical and social dimension of architectural construction not merely as a site for project execution, but as an ecosystem where diverse forms of female agency also existed. We are looking for papers that intersect biographical histories of women – ranging from designers, work yard supervisor, craftswoman, and others who possessed technical or vocational training and earned wages (Kleinöder, 2022) – with construction sites. By investigating these professional and labor trajectories within the construction site, this session seeks to question: In what ways did the physical presence of women on-site alter construction dynamics and the material culture of architecture? How did gender shape technical authority across different geographical and chronological contexts, with particular emphasis on the 18th, 19th, 20th century?

By combining archival material and oral history, this session seeks to expand the historiographical canon by recognizing the construction site as a space of social negotiation where intellectual and manual labor meet, thereby revealing the complexity of women’s participation in the materialization of the built environment.

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