Waves of women: creating physical realities that transmit the feelings of an ongoing social issue

Abstract

This is a preliminary research on approaches highlighting the attempts to design architectural representations of women and aims to prevent further hate crimes and misogyny related behaviours towards women. Misogyny is an ongoing global issue for women which ends up in discrimination, sexual harassment, physical or psychological violence and even femicides. Sexism is the foundation of hatred towards the female gender. This paper intends to find out if architecture can be used to erase mental boundaries between different social groups and in this case between opposed genders.

The structure of the thesis starts with introducing ongoing issues towards women and the manipulative role of art and architecture to create an awareness for social issues. The first chapter aims to understand the design decision of the chosen architecture case studies to find out how they were shaped through the social issue they highlight. The chosen case studies include Jewish Museum Berlin, Murdered Jews of Europe, National Holocaust Monument and other phenomenological constructions which create a sensorial experience with the visitor. The chapter concludes with the importance of the relationship between form and the identity of the discriminated group and their experience of discrimination.

The second chapter focuses on representations of the woman’s body through art and especially sculpting to understand the shaping woman and the embodied emotions to be able to create a design strategy which is focused on the body of woman, while also highlighting the social issue through different shape distortion techniques.

The last chapter is a design reflection of the previous research and results in creating a design methodology with mixed multimedia techniques which includes figurative collages, hand sketches and clay sculpting. Therefore, the final outcome is about distorting the real shape of the woman with architecture, in order to achieve a sensational hand-crafted design.