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De-pioneering the history of architecture: from Simone Guillissen-Hoa (1916-1996) to her constellations

par Vranken, Apolline
Référence De-pioneering the history of architecture: from Simone Guillissen-Hoa (1916-1996) to her constellations(Octobre 2023: ETSA UPV, Valence), ICAG 2023 - VI International Conference on Architecture and Gender, ETSA UPV, Valence
Publication A Paraître, 2025

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Résumé :

Critique of the pioneer canonRecent research and publications that articulate the history of architecture and gender describe figures qualified as pioneers. The method adopted establishes lists of portraits of the first women to study - graduate - build - photograph - and sell (delete as appropriate) in a chronology "outside of the world" [“hors du monde”]. These narrative methodologies and language elements outline "a new canon, that of women artists’ art history" - from which the field of architecture is not exempt - "just as excluding as the one it seeks to denounce". Indeed, using the analytical and semantic field of the pioneer does offer a narrative, a seemingly new and different "feminine" history, but it is incomplete because always disconnected from an historical genealogy that is still under construction. This truncated posterity highlights what Nochlin already denounced in her essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?: these female artists are pioneers only according to the criteria of a canonical, male and patriarchal referential system.As a figure of the Belgian modernist movement, Simone Guillissen-Hoa (1916-1996) allows us, on one hand, to understand the specificities of the second modernist wave in post-war Europe and, on the other hand, to understand, through an intersectional reading of her identities and commitments, the gendered mechanisms in her practice, its reception and the construction of the history of architecture. Simone Guillissen-Hoa began her studies in architecture at the Institut Supérieur des Arts Décoratifs of La Cambre in 1935. She was the fourth female architect to graduate from the Brussels school and began her career during the early years of World War II in an economic context of scarcity of projects and in a binary and hierarchical gender system between design and architecture, female and male practitioners.Giving voice to networksThus, while Simone Guillissen-Hoa represents an inheritance and a model of empowerment, the analysis grids of individual and collective empowerment need to be specified. Indeed, we will be attentive to distance ourselves from the "mythology about artistic achievement", this “mysterious essence, rather like the golden nugget in Mrs. Grass’s chicken soup, called Genius or Talent”. If the reconstruction of the history of women architects and their work involves monographic research, it must also explore its limits and biases: the phenomenon of starification, the enunciation of a subject disconnected from its constellations, etc.At the edge of the canon, in tension between the monographic methodologies and collective portrait, this article proposes to weave several threads towards the specific and diversified tools, resources, and networks that Simone Guillissen-Hoa had to develop to claim her place at La Cambre, to follow the architectural curriculum, obtain a diploma and emerge professionally.Simone Guillissen-Hoa's constellationsWe want and we are looking for methodological and narrative tools that give voice to networks in order to think about a collective history of architecture and thus surpass the dominant canon. In a narrative polyphony, the mapping of networks, influences, actors, and relays - identified such as colleagues, family, friends, Simone Guillissen-Hoa's relationships, and inhabitants/users of the architect's achievements - offers an oral and expansive dimension to the official and conventional data preserved in the archives. Therefore, to destabilize hegemonic classifications and understand the nature and complexity of Simone Guillissen-Hoa's subjective constellations, three case studies will be developed: The role of male facilitators: the case of Alfred Roth; Ambivalence of associations with a male collaborator: the case of Jacques Dupuis; Architectural sisterhood: the fellows of the Union des Femmes Architectes de Belgique.