Where have all the women gone? Tracking female voices in the architecture collectionWhere have all the women gone? Tracking female voices in the architecture collection

Text Lara Schrijver

In 2025, I spent the wintry months of January to March seeking out women who had impacted the built environment in Rotterdam in the 1970s and 1980s. The season turned out to be a fitting metaphor: in the dark days of the Rotterdam winter, the path to finding these women was dimly lit. Despite the many efforts in recent years to recognise women architects in history, there are still many gaps. As a woman who had studied architecture at the TU Delft, I was curious about the generation of women preceding my own, some of whom I had encountered during my studies. However, tracing the women from the architecture programme at the TU Delft in the archives of the Nieuwe Instituut turned out to be more challenging than I expected.

My own cohort entered the profession in the optimistic mid-1990s, after the high tides of 1970s and 80s feminist activism, and after the SuperDutch wave. At the TU Delft Faculty of Architecture, there had been a prominent women’s network (Vrouwen Bouwen Wonen) and an active women‘s studies section, led by Anna Vos and Heidi de Mare. However, this section had been all but dismantled by the mid-1990s, as the urgency of feminist critical thinking had seemingly waned. Yet from today’s perspective – and with the benefit of hindsight – the field now appears substantially less equitable than the women in my class had imagined it would become. This prompted me to trace the career paths of various women who, I knew, had come before us, but who (still) seem less visible in recent histories of Dutch architecture.

The visibility of these women architects has improved, partly due to a growing awareness among the younger generation of the lack of other voices in current debates, recent histories and archival collections. Workshops and feminist assemblies have been held in Delft and at the Nieuwe Instituut, various publications have been completed, and the recently launched website and book Gebouwen door Vrouwen by Sofie van Brunschot provides a field guide to projects in Rotterdam by women architects. At the Nieuwe Instituut, the Collecting Otherwise working group with Setareh Noorani has made major inroads, and the recent acquisition of the Vrouwen Bouwen Wonen archive under curator Hetty Berens was a significant milestone. However, I still felt there was more work to be done on tracing the networks and careers of women in Rotterdam and at the TU Delft between 1970 and 1999.

Where to begin? Since architecture archives are typically arranged around primary authors, whether designers or offices, it is difficult to trace items without prior knowledge of their names. The archive’s various tags do not include gender as a selection criterion. And simply using ‘women’ (or ‘vrouwen’) as a search criterion leads not only to the Vrouwen Bouwen Wonen archive, but also to projects such as ‘women’s housing’.

This means that the starting point for seeking archival information on women in architecture is typically through names already known or names accidentally found. When they are known, it is often because they had established offices (usually with male partners) and remained visible through their buildings or their publications. Luzia Hartsuyker-Curjel (1926-2011), for example, is one of the few female architects represented in the national archives of the Nieuwe Instituut. She ran an office with her husband Enrico Hartsuyker and had, in some ways, a classic architecture career, completing various buildings and lecturing locally and internationally. Her work is known in feminist circles for its approach to the ‘female-friendly’ floor plan, yet her professional career is not limited to feminist projects. The office’s archive provides evidence of the everyday concerns of a practising architect as well as valuable clippings, articles, notes and insights surrounding a more feminist approach to housing.

This more traditional archive intersects with the Vrouwen Bouwen Wonen archive, since Luzia Hartsuyker attended and contributed to the network’s study days. The Vrouwen Bouwen Wonen network was founded in the 1980s by a group of female architects who felt there was still work to be done towards ensuring equal rights and agency for the women who started their studies at the TU Delft in the 1970s and 1980s (up to around 40% of the student body). With the acquisition of the Vrouwen Bouwen Wonen archive, the Nieuwe Instituut gained a crucial entry point for understanding various questions regarding the role of women in architecture, the importance of emancipation, and the culture of architecture studies and the profession in the 1970s and 1980s. The archival material comprises a collection of key members, not all of whom were trained as architects, but all with a deep-seated interest in the built environment and its capacity to help or hinder women’s rights and wellbeing. It thus forms a coherent entry point into activities formerly found only on the margins of traditional archives, if at all.

While archives such as those of Hartsuyker and the Vrouwen Bouwen Wonen network provide insight into the concerns and work of women actively engaged in emancipation and feminist approaches in the built environment, they do not necessarily reflect the broader architectural culture of the time. For this, the repository of journals in the Nieuwe Instituut’s Re-Centre proved indispensable and illuminating. Given the limited time available to me, I studied three sample journals I knew to be important to the professional community and that had a wide distribution: Wonen/TABK (later known as Archis), de Architect and Bouw. Each has their own particular character, and a quick scan of a number of years (focusing mainly on the 1970s and 1980s) revealed some interesting initial insights.

For example, Wonen/TABK originated from a journal of Stichting Wonen, which featured articles that would not typically be included in the later directions of Archis, such as discussions of elementary school workshops on the ideal home. In contrast, prior to the merger TABK included a more recognisably artistic orientation and heroic narrative, highlighting what they felt were important ideas and prominent architects. Bouw, a publication of the Bouwcentrum in Rotterdam, had a clear local focus and in 1975 included an issue on emancipation in the built environment, as the UN Year of the Woman received great attention in Rotterdam. De Architect was a journal aimed broadly at practising architects and included many practical issues, yet also invited experts from other fields to share insights relevant to building.

These journals therefore provided a sense of the field that the women entering the profession aspired to. I had initially expected these journals to provide valuable background information, but they steadily became more central as their different approaches and tones offered a rich rendition of the professional and public debates of the time. At first, I had underestimated both their importance and their accessibility. The way these journals as a whole rendered their own time was invaluable, but their time-bound nature simultaneously made them less accessible: only in study centres such as the Nieuwe Instituut does one find them in their complete series. Moreover, these journals preceded the born-digital, yet at the same time they are historically so recent that they are often not yet digitised.

By focusing my attention not only on the articles, but also on the editorial boards and contributors, I discovered women previously unknown to me, like Mia Deltour, who was on the editorial board of _Wonen TABK _for many years. Going through the issues page by page, I found articles that focused on projects by women but did not highlight them as individual designers, such as a 1971 article on ‘Afrikaniseren’ in TABK that discussed Elizabeth Poot’s proposal for the Rotterdam neighbourhood of Afrikaanderwijk. This suggests that women’s contributions in the field, even when acknowledged, sometimes fade from view because they worked in other roles, for example as curators, editors or municipal planners, which have been less documented in architectural histories. Additionally, the field of architecture was transforming only slowly, as evidenced by the absence of the rich debates on emancipation and women’s rights that were so prominent in the Vrouwen Bouwen Wonen archives. This suggests that journals often perpetuated the dominant (male) narratives and, intentionally or not, performed a level of gatekeeping.

Finally, two publications from the 1990s were particularly helpful in tracking down names that have not survived in historical studies. Architectes (1990) presented practising female architects in the Netherlands of the time and included a selection from different generations, educational backgrounds and types of practice. Vrouwen bouwen aan Rotterdam 1945-1995 was a 1995 publication which provided a similarly broad selection of women who impacted the built environment, this time with a focus on Rotterdam. These overviews included women who had built substantial careers as lead architects or urban designers as well as women who were less in the spotlight, such as restoration architects or municipal planners.

My efforts to track the women architects of the 1970s and 80s made it clear that purely archival research would not be enough. Moreover, seeing their contributions only in terms of built projects would not do justice to the myriad ways in which this generation contributed to the built environment. I was particularly interested in those whose contributions were clearly articulated and traceable, yet it is equally the women who knuckled down and got on with it, in many different ways – quietly or loudly, modestly, politely, or forcefully) – who helped make inroads into a profession strongly defined by conventional heteronormative, male, able-bodied and privileged narratives.

My explorations of the archive and the Re-Centre, as well as some detours to the Rotterdam municipal archive, demonstrated that, alongside the acquisition of women’s archives, it is important to map out the networks and understand the many roles that constitute ‘working on the built environment’. For example, the NIROV archive contains material from workshops on emancipation and committees that evaluated the inclusiveness of urban plans, but I only became aware of this because Lidewij Tummers (of the Vrouwen Bouwen Wonen network) had directed my attention to it.

Most interestingly, my archival journey revealed the particular challenges involved in studying the last few decades of the 20th century, especially with regard to the lesser-known contributions of women. Over the past decade, many publications have reclaimed an early generation of female architects from the margins of history. This work has often been aimed at the early or first-time achievers (such as Julia Morgan, the first woman to be admitted to the École des Beaux Arts, or the first female graduates of the Delft architecture programme) or those who worked alongside well-known male architects (such as Blanche Lemco-van Ginkel in Le Corbusier’s office). Although previously unacknowledged, these women were typically more visible because they were unusual for their time.

The situation is somewhat different for the women who graduated from architecture schools in the late 1960s. These women actively entered the workforce in greater numbers in the 1970s and 1980s, but they often had atypical careers, and those who followed the classic career path often remained less visible. Addressing this gap is urgent, as many of this generation are still alive and available to reflect on their careers. This provides an opportunity for researchers to track this generation and ensure that their voices are not lost, but instead are amplified and made accessible for future generations.

Thanks to the Jaap Bakema Study Centre and the Nieuwe Instituut for hosting an archival research period, and to UAntwerpen and the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) for providing time and funds for sabbatical leave. These reflections were presented in an initial form during a workshop at the Nieuwe Instituut on 3 April 2025. Sofie De Caigny and Dirk van den Heuvel provided valuable suggestions for this final version. More importantly, my work on this time period would be much more difficult without the efforts of many other scholars currently working on these topics. In addition to those mentioned in the essay, I would like to thank Catja Edens, Catherine Koekoek, Maria Novas and Laurence Ostyn for their work in documenting and making space for other voices and perspectives.