What it is for a woman to create? Marta Lonzi and the design approach as feminist revolution

What is it for a woman to create? This questioning of the subject has always been a less direct issue in architecture. Gender, space, and design are not crystallised categories but interconnected processes in constant change and redefinition. This essay aims to answer the questions "What are the possibilities for a feminist architecture? Or for a history, a theory, a critique of feminist architecture?" through the creative production of Marta Lonzi (Florence 1938 - Rome 2008), architect and exponent of Italian feminism in the 1970s. The peculiarity of this figure, in addition to the quality of the results of her work as a designer, lies in her critical reflection on the creative process, which starts from a subjective reading in a feminist key and then widens towards considerations on the culture of the project. Marta Lonzi, in fact, participated from the beginning with her sister Carla, an eminent figure of feminism in Italy, in the activities of Rivolta Femminile in Rome and the subsequent creation of the first Italian feminist publishing house in Milan in 1971. “I read the great absence of women from architecture not as a lack to be filled, nor as diversity to be exalted, but rather as the expression of an impossibility to adhere to a design practice that is foreign to her. For me, it is a priority to become aware of the process through which I elaborate the project, in an attentive listening to the other, in relationship with the other. Relationships give consciousness to humanity, feminism is a meeting of consciences towards a new awareness, a different sense of history.” With these words Marta Lonzi expressed herself in 1982, in an interview shortly after the publication of her book L'architetto fuori di sé. The book marks a heterodox testimony to the practice of architectural design, marking the profound diversity that women claim to their own authentic and therefore autonomous process of expression. From a direct confrontation with male creativity, its modalities and its instrumentalizations, in the autobiographical chapter "What is it for a woman to create?" the author analyses the creative processes of Wright, Mies Van De Rohe, Oscar Meyer and Le Corbusier to reveal the meanings behind the object once stripped of its symbolic disguise. Demystifying the conception of architectural design perceived in terms of absolute truth, she vindicates humanist culture by citing Borromini and his focus on confrontation with client and context. As in the design of the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri, for Borromini it is natural to explain all the steps of his design process even in concrete and in some ways banal terms of the constraints imposed by the client and the spaces in which he finds himself working, unlike Le Corbusier who presents the creative act as a luminous event which, by concealing the process, makes the project sublime. For the woman, moreover, accepting the sublimated dimension of creativity also entails “the implicit admission of the disavowal of her own biological creativity”. For in prioritising the identification of self in the object rather than in herself and her creative design process, the woman relegates herself to the order of things established by others, which excludes her as a subject. According to Marta Lonzi's experience, therefore, there is no female architecture, rather there are female consciousnesses that make architecture. Just as there is no male architecture, but rather male consciousnesses that make architecture. For the interest in the final object avoids the tension of relationships of real confrontation between consciousnesses. The object is the result of a creative process, and it is there, in the creative process, that we can look for diversity.