How We Live Now: Reimagining Spaces with Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative

‘How We Live Now: Reimagining Spaces with Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative’ is the latest exhibition of the Barbican’s Level G Programme, ‘an experimental platform for projects that ask crucial social and cultural questions’. The question asked here is who creates the built environment, and for whom; the answer is provided through a focus on the work of Matrix, a pioneering architectural co-operative founded in 1981. In their 13 years of operation, the group worked solely on state-funded, social building projects, typically with women and children’s groups as clientele. Feminist design collective Edit created the physical structures of the exhibit to reflect Matrix’s concern with the informal use of space. Architectural drawings and photographs chronicling Matrix’s work are fastened to plywood frames, alluding to a construction site. Curtains made by Cawley Studio hang from a metal rail snaking through the exhibit to subdivide the space (Figure 1). Parting them to enter, the viewer is transported back to 1980s England. Panels display adverts for cars and household consumables with copy and images demeaning women, bizarrely irrelevant to the product advertised. Heather Powell’s film Paradise Circus (1988) plays on a large television, cataloguing the hostility of Birmingham’s built environment: its thoughtlessly designed housing, unsafe and creepy tunnel network, and labyrinthine road layout that prioritised motorists and polluted the air. The film examines the government’s decades of post-war slum clearances and replacement Garden City neighbourhoods. These suburban prototypes were planned and designed by men who failed to properly consider the needs of anyone unlike them. The house was not viewed as a place of work, and accommodation for people moving through the city with disabilities, or children, or without cars, was nearly non-existent. This scene-setting brings Matrix’s radical approach, and the wave of feminism of which it was a part, into full relief. Juxtaposed to these lazy, sexist banalities is Matrix’s manifesto, a single sheet of unadorned paper which sets out: