WOMEN, DOMESTIC SPACES, CITIES: « LA MACHINE LIBÈRE LA FEMME »

Can interventions on a single room in the house have impacts on the entire city and on the mentality of space related to the gender? This Session aims at recognizing the studies about the relationship between space (from room to city) and women, with a particular focus on woman emancipation through the increased housework facilities. The aim of the Session is to draw the evolution on the comfort in the kitchen space, starting from pioneers like Catherine Beecher, Christine Frederick, Benita Koch-Otte, Grete Schutte- Lihotzky and, the last but not the least, the intervention of Charlotte Perriand in Marseille’s Unité d’Habitation. The mission is to achieve an up-to-date elaboration about the evolution of forms in relation with the evolution of mentalities in the perception and management of feminine and domestic space, at the architectural and urban scale. Example of this concept is the Frankfurt Kitchen: fully equipped with efficient objects and created in thousands of samples, it produces a space conception whose effects glance beyond the limited example of the specific room, reaching the urban and social scale and influencing the birth, the construction and the achievement of a woman well-adjusted in the mechanisms and the logics of the industrial civilization