Between passion and possession: women architects and the houses they built for family, love and work

Abstract

This article discusses a specific architectural type: single-family homes designed by and for heterosexual couples who were both architects and collaborators, and who dedicated a particular space in their home to architectural work. My examples are a handful of modest houses built in the suburbs of Copenhagen with state-supported mortgages during the post-war period by Inger and Johannes Exner, Karen and Ebbe Clemmensen, and Rut Speyer and Eigil Hartvig Rasmussen. Taking the woman architect’s perspective as a starting point, my architectural readings reveal the wider implications of the intermingling of professional and private lives in these houses’ economic, cultural, and suburban contexts. The article, thus, contributes feminist architectural readings as well as a theoretical framework that highlights women architects’ conditions of creative work in the post-war period. In doing so, following sociologist Eva Illouz, the article takes seriously the post-war period’s institutional, spatial, architectural, cultural, and economic conditions for love, life, and work. This article builds on research carried out in the project Women in Danish Architecture 1925–1975 (www.womenindanisharchitecture.dk).