Call for Contributions /// Expanding Agency: Women, Race and the Global Dissemination of Modern Architecture

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Expanding Agency: Women, Race and the Global Dissemination of Modern Architecture

Expanding Agency: Women, Race and the Global Dissemination of Modern Architecture explores four ways in which women and ethnic minorities had an impact upon the global dissemination of modern architecture and design. These include journalism, patronage, entrepreneurship, and institution building. The role of design businesses, real estate developers, and philanthropists will be addressed alongside that played by the shelter press in order to demonstrate the impact, largely unacknowledged, that women, African Americans, and other overlooked groups had and to explore their motivation, which often included, but was seldom limited to, the necessity to earn a living. This ERC research project is hosted by the UCD School of Art History and Cultural Policy in collaboration with the UCD Humanities Institute. It is led by Professor Kathleen James-Chakraborty.

Project Overview

The research to be undertaken by Expanding Agency is divided into six parts.

The role of ethnic minorities in commissioning modern architecture has been explored principally by considering the patronage of African Americans. The campuses of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) present an under-explored opportunity to examine architecture that profoundly shaped African American experience and was often commissioned and/or designed by African Americans. Post doctoral fellow George Francis-Kelly researched this subject paying particular attention to the degree to which changes in style did or did not relate to the emergence of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Kathleen James-Chakraborty co-authored The Belgian Friendship from the New York World’s Fair to a Virginia HBCU (University of Virginia Press, 2025) with Katherine Kuenzli and Bryan Clark Green. It tells the story of the journey of Belgium’s pavilion for the 1939 Fair’s to Virginia Union University in Richmond, where its tower, renamed for Pittsburgh Courier publisher Robert Vann became a counterweight to the city’s many Confederate monuments.
The way in which mass media marketed modernism to women is another of the project’s key themes. Doctoral student Pooja Sastry writes about a new type of modern bourgeois domestic interior space intended to be shaped by the new modern housewife in 1930s Bombay, British India, and part of her work considers material from 1930s Buenos Aires, Argentina. Postdoctoral fellow Ipek Mehmetoglu is investigating the dissemination of modern architecture in early feminist newspapers in Turkey from the 1940s to the 1960s. Former research assistant Kate Buckley chronicled the contribution early female graduates of University College Dublin’s architecture school made to the Irish Country Women’s Association. James-Chakraborty has written about how House Beautiful, especially during the years between 1922 and 1933 when it was edited by Ethel Power, shaped taste in the United States; supported women writing about architecture, design, and gardening; publicized women’s achievements in these fields, and introduced the magazine’s largely female readership to Art Deco and the International Style.
Women’s entrepreneurial activities also contributed to the global dissemination of modern architecture. The conference Minding Her Business, held in Dublin in June 2024, highlighted the ways in which women have developed and marketed innovative construction materials, engaged in real estate development, nurtured spaces for new ideas, and engaged in philanthropic activities. The resulting book, co-edited by postdoctoral fellow Alborz Dianat and Kathleen James-Chakraborty with contributions by sixteen authors, discusses examples from five continents and will be published by Leuven Press in spring 2026. Dianat is exploring a broad range of women’s other entrepreneurial contributions to modern architecture and design. Forthcoming outputs concern the curation of a brand of modern domesticity for Anglophone audiences in the journalism of Ise Gropius; the design and promotion of model homes by the neglected architect and psychological-consultant Grace Cope; the development of a convent by the nun and architect Sister Nesta Fitzgerald-Lombard; and the contributions of women administrators, directors and designers applying the Isotype graphic system to visualise women’s movements in Austria, Britain and the Western Region of Nigeria.
Kathleen James-Chakraborty is writing a monograph that examines how a number of twentieth-century women in the United States contributed to shaping the built environment in ways that privileged a concern for the user and the expression of her identity over adherence to the International Style. In addition to Power’s role as editor of House Beautiful, she is considering Ethel Bailey Furman’s designs for houses and churches in and around Richmond, Virginia; housing and urban design projects by Chloethiel Woodard Smith, who from 1963 to 1983 ran the country’s largest woman-led architectural practice out of an office in Washington, D.C.; Ruth Adler Schnee, a textile as well as interior designer who with her husband owned Detroit’s leading design store; and the architect and urban planner Denise Scott Brown. The book will also feature Maggie Walker, who as the country’s first African American woman bank president helped finance the development of a Richmond neighborhood named for Frederick Douglass, and Philadelphia activist Alice Lipscomb, the head of the organization that hired Scott Brown to develop alternatives for a proposed highway that would have cut through her neighborhood.
Other team members associated with the project include research assistant Paula Arning whose doctoral dissertation focuses upon the use of textiles in modern architecture, and visiting researcher Cláudia Libânio], a professor at the Federal University of Health Sciences of Porto Alegre (UFCSPA) in Brazil, who is investigating the experiences of contemporary women architects and designers.
Finally, in 2025-2026 an exhibition of the results of our research will travel to architecture schools in Europe and the rest of the world. Expanding Agency will support related programming at five architecture schools located in the European Union and five in the Global South.

Exhibition

The European Research Council funded project Expanding Agency: Women, Race, and the Dissemination of Modern Architecture announces its exhibition. This is intended to make available to architecture students in particular the results of our research and to disseminate more broadly its inclusive approach to writing histories of modern architecture. For more about the project please see https://expanding-agency.com. The project will make twenty-four A1 posters available for download as of 10 April 2026. Poster text will be in English, Portuguese or Spanish; other languages may be possible upon advance request. There will also be a small English-language catalogue. Proposals are also welcome from architecture schools in the countries included in Horizon Europe and from the Global South for grants of €4500 to support related programming. Applications for these grants, detailing how the money will be used, must be received by Theresa Schilling at theresa.schilling@ucd.ie by 1 February 2026, applicants will be informed of the results by 20 February 2025. The money must be spent by 1 December 2026.

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