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Simone Guillissen Hoa (1916 - 1996), a pioneering architect at the intersection of identities: how to embrace a new feminist narrative of modern architecture history

par Vranken, Apolline
Référence Research Student Symposium: Voices in Architecture (AHRA & Westminster University) (21 avril 2022: Westminster University, Londres)
Publication Non publié, 2022-04-21

Communication à un colloque

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Résumé :

Simone Guillissen-Hoa (Beijing, 1916-Brussels, 1996), a pioneering architect of modern architecture in Belgium, remains a little-known or even invisible figure among architects, architecture students and the general public. Our research investigates the life and work of Simone Guillissen-Hoa to highlight her important contribution to the history of Belgian architecture. She was one of the maker of an important turning point in the Belgian architecture landscape. As a second-generation modernist, her relaxed and serene architecture marks the emergence of an organic conception of composition. Intrinsically linked to the history of La Cambre school, she was one of the first women to graduate from La Cambre in architecture. In 1947, she was the first Belgian woman architect to build a house, the Villa Faniel in Uccle. The same year, she was also the first woman architect to be commissioned with an ambitious public programme, the construction of a sports centre in Jambes. This singular figure is also at the intersection of different identities and struggles - a woman with Chinese and Polish origins, jewish, a Resistance fighter and a single mother. This research explores the teachings of architecture and the profession in order to extract their foundations and applications in terms of gender and thus to propose a systemic critique. This work of distancing, fuelled by gender studies and reinforced by the history of gender, allows the proposal of an inclusive narrative of architecture, the emergence of new alternative points of view produced by a choice, a gaze. The proposed narrative deviates from the canonical history of architecture to carry other voices and thus reveal other histories, including those of gender, collaborations, pedagogies and practices. The article will explore the links between historicity, actuality and posterity: who is this research aimed at? Can we write the history of modern architecture echoing with today’s actuality? Why and how should history be adjusted? What proposal for a critical posture can be formulated from a methodology made of constellations, diffractions and movements?