The Woman in the Glass House: Lina Bo Bardi and the Pritzker Prize

A stone path with tall lush vegetation opens up to a well lit house with many windows.

Lina Bo Bardi, Museo de Arte de São Paulo, São Paulo, 1968. Aerial view. Photo: Nelson Kon

Nominations for UK-based collective Part W’s initiative to build an alternative, all-women list of RIBA Gold Medal winners. Of the 170 Gold Medals since the prize was established in 1848, 165 have been awarded to men and three to male-female partner

Architecture is a profession that has long struggled with major gender inequities in spite of recent strides. Significantly, there is growing awareness among architects that prizes like the Pritzker Architecture Prize, one of the field’s top accolades and largest monetary awards have played a crucial role in overlooking women’s contributions and widening the achievement gap between women designers and their male colleagues. This summer, Carnegie Museum of Art (CMOA) is showing its collection of works by many of the Pritzker’s 42 laureates. The show inevitably reflects how the prize has changed along with the contemporaneous architectural thought—from parametricism to postmodernism to progressive approaches to social housing. At the same time, viewing so many of the winners side by side also provides an opportunity to consider how little has changed. As it happens, of the 42 laureates, only three are women: Zaha Hadid (2004), Kazuyo Sejima (2010), and Carme Pigem (2017). Of those, only Hadid was awarded the prize in her own right—the other two were awarded along with their male partners.1

Posted August 22, 2019