The University of Auckland School of Architecture and Planning are holding events to celebrate their Centenary during The Festival of Architecture 2017 - A+W NZ are re-installing the A+W NZ Timeline (with additions) to highlight the work of many of the graduates from the Auckland University.
Thursday 7th September 2017
— Saturday 30th September 2017
Level 2 link, School of Architecture and Planning, UoA
Free
Sponsors:
The opening function was on Thursday 7 September, 4-6 pm with all welcome.
(This opening was shared with the SoAP Student Exhibition opening, on
Level 3 - history and contemporary in one evening!)
Where: Level 2, Conference Centre (Building 423)
22 Symonds Street
When: 7-13 September, 9am - 5pm, Monday to Saturday
Cost: Free
After an introduction by A+W NZ Co-Chair Lynda Simmons, speeches were given by HOS Dr Julia Gatley and Research Fellow Dr Lucy Treep.
Thanks to the NZIA Auckland Branch for assistance with design and printing costs and to original Timeline creators Marianne Calvelo and Joy Roxas,
for handling additions to the Timeline from the other side of the
world. Additional research by Dr Deidre Brown, Lynda Simmons, Ashleigh Smith and Alex Pirie.
The display we see on the walls here offers a fresh perspective of the profession
Research Fellow Dr Lucy Treep, transcript included here;
Dr Lucy Treep , Research Fellow, SoAP
A+W NZ Timeline Opening 7 Sept 2017, 5pm
Auckland University of Auckland, Level 2, Building 421
Tena koutou e rau rangatira ma, kua hui mai nei i tenei wa, tena
koutou katoa. I’m honoured to be asked to speak at the opening of this
wonderful exhibition.
The display we see on the walls here offers a fresh perspective of
the profession. In celebrating women in the architectural community, the
exhibition adds of course to not only our knowledge of those women, but
also of that community as a whole. And by raising our awareness of
those women we are made more aware of the gaps in historical
representations of the architectural profession.
Yet, as suggested by the stories told in the exhibition, women are
part of the fabric of the School of Architecture from very early on in
its history. For the last 18 months or so I have been a research fellow
here at the School, with the very enjoyable task of excavating the
lively and sometimes unexpected facts, and fictions, of the hundred
years of School life we are now celebrating. Excitingly, when searching
the early university calendars for details of the fledgling School, I
found that they contained not only graduation lists but also class
lists, and even more interestingly, with students of each class ranked
in order of achievement in the end of year exams. Graduation lists only
tell a partial story as so many women, and men too, have attended the
School but not graduated, or have graduated decades after first
enrolling. But, there in the class lists at the back of the calendars we
can see that in 1926 Laura Cassels Browne sat… and in 1927 she,
Beatrice Smith and Merle Greenwood sat… And it’s obvious that the women
did very well amongst their peers.
But it’s not all about unearthed facts. One of the frequently spoken
stories about women in the School has turned out to be a kind of
fiction. As a general observation it’s quite correct to say that women
formed a small minority in the School until the 1970s when that minority
slowly stated to grow, but it wasn’t always as small as it seemed.
Drilling through the calendars, other class lists, letters and
photographs, I found that in 1945 six women were enrolled in first year,
and 15 of the 126 students enrolled at the School were women. That’s
just under 12% which is quite a lot for that era. These women weren’t
shy either. We know from talking with her that Dorothy Gawith, later
Dorothy Mahon, was annoyed to be left out of a major student prank by
the young men in her class and was bold enough to challenge them on
this, hiding in the bushes nearby and dashing out to join in when it was
too late to stop her.[1]
And we know that Barbara Parker and Marilyn Hart were part of the group
of students who joined Bill Wilson and others to write a manifesto
calling for changes in the School. The annual newsletters written by
Professor Knight during the war years frequently feature the careers of
previous women students, especially doing war work, and I think for
those women students reading the newsletters, an architectural career
would have seemed very attainable.
But research doesn’t always lead to predictable conclusions. One
highlight of my research, but with an unexpected twist, was the
realisation that Peggy Knight, one of the first year class of 1945, was
the daughter of Professor Knight, the Head of School. And, that she is
still alive, very alive, in Sydney. Surely here was a great chance to
talk to someone who witnessed the student dissatisfaction of 1945, but
who would also have inside knowledge of Professor Knight’s attitudes to
the student activism. The very charming Peggy was happy to talk with me,
but my hopes for inside knowledge was shattered. Peggy was an
architecture student only as a protest against being banned from
attending veterinary college due to its male only policy. Not at all
interested in being an architect, though at the School entirely by her
own choice, Peggy was a disruptive student and was even reported to the
Head of School by staff who didn’t know she was his daughter. She loved
that. She had no interest in the student revolts of the School, focussed
as she was, on her own protest actions against sexist university
protocol. She left after two years and became a very successful
biochemist.[2] But her story is part of the School’s history and of course she’s an important link to her father Professor Knight.
I tell this story because I really liked Peggy, because it
illustrates some of the fun and unexpectedness of my centenary research,
and also because it talks of the complexity of being a woman student in
the 1940s, and probably 1950s and 60s, when female architecture student
numbers plummeted, and the School was still years away from having even
one woman on the staff. And Peggy’s story is an echo of the position in
which many women architects find themselves, in a profession that is
still not entirely gender neutral.
I’ve spent many happy hours following the various threads that weave
through the School history, and that make it the heavily textured thing
that it is! And one of the significant threads has been that of
woman students and staff at the School. As the proportion of women
students here grows well past 50% of the student body it’s even more
important than ever to acknowledge the long history of women in the
School.
And it’s obvious that the women did very well amongst their peers.
01A+W NZ Timeline #04
additional research by Alex Pirie and Ashleigh Smith