sehepunkte 25 (2025), Nr. 9

Jannie Rosenberg Bendsen / Svava Riesto / Henriette Steiner (eds.): Untold Stories

This book addresses a long-missed and overlooked subject in Danish modernist architecture, namely the role of female architects in the period of Danish welfare society from 1930-1980. Architectural history has often focused on this important epoch that saw the construction of the many roads, homes, parks, schools and public institutions in use even today by highlighting a few men and their works. By shifting the gender perspective, the publication investigates the contribution of women and thereby aims at telling a new story about the legacy of twentieth-century architecture in Denmark. The book is written by Jannie Rosenberg Bendsen, Svava Riesto and Henriette Steiner as part of the research project "Women in Danish Architecture" at the University of Copenhagen.

Untold Stories is broadly structured into a preface, an introduction, five main chapters, and a postscript. An index of names and places is useful, and the bibliography of unpublished and published sources gives an insight to the literature of the field and an overview of the archives used, private as well as public. The illustrations from newspapers and private and public collections are well chosen and relevant in relation to the text.

In the preface and in the introduction, the authors concentrate on describing the outset of the book and the methodological approach. In connection to the main starting point of writing a new story about twentieth-century architecture by turning to the untold stories of female architects, the authors choose to focus not on individual women but instead on joint work. The central argument here being that architecture never comes into being through individuals only but relies on the impact of cooperation between various individuals and institutions. The authors' attention to collaboration also springs from their wish to develop new approaches of researching and writing about the period's architecture. Where a focus on individual women architects would only add to the usual canon of architectural history, the emphasis on joint work allows an investigation of the creation of architecture. An important feature of the book is also the treatment of architecture understood as comprising planning, buildings and landscape. The central research questions revolve around examining which women contributed in shaping Denmark's architecture, how they worked and what significance their gender had in relation to their professional efforts.

In order to pursue the starting point the authors develop an in-depth archival approach. They have gone through a huge amount of different archival material such as newspapers, professional magazines, letters, drawings, and photo albums found in both public and private archives. Besides, they have examined archives of some well-known men in order to find traces or knowledge of the women there, and they have had dialogues with the women themselves or their relations. This profound archival research is a solid ground for the main chapters and produces reliable, precise and nuanced analyses.

Each of the following chapters explore a theme. Chapter one focuses on the rarely treated typology of the kitchen at a time when political interest in improving the working conditions for women at home occurs. The authors examine housing surveys, i.e. studies of floor plans and layouts of rooms, and the works of Gytte Rue, Rut Speyer and Ulla Tafdrup. The analysis shows that the women architects focused on creating a functional home, where the kitchen was placed in close relation to or even connected to the living room. They thereby brought their insights and knowledge into play in developing the good home.

Under the heading "Love", the second chapter describes three houses that functioned as both home and design studio for the architect couples Inger Exner and Johannes Exner, Karen Clemmensen and Ebbe Clemmensen and Rut Speyer and Eigil Hartvig Rasmussen. The analysis here draws on the sociologist Eva Illouz' relational perception of love and considers what it meant for the women architects' work and their self-understanding as architects to be part of a collaborative arrangement with their husbands. This situation brings about both openings and limitations for the women. The analysis here in many ways touches the heart of the architectural profession characterized and driven by collaboration, which is an intertwined and highly complex matter.

In chapter three the authors shift scale and investigate the approach to urban and landscape planning of Anne Marie Rubin and Vibeke Dalgas. In the midst of an enormous building boom that almost wrecked the Danish coastal line and demolished old villages, the two women architects developed new methods for working with urban planning and landscape. They observed, described and analysed their surroundings. They paid attention to and cared for the environment, and progressed methods for the later SAVE model (a system developed to map out and register cultural environments and listed building: Survey of Architectural Values in the Environment).

Chapter four mainly focuses on Susanne Ussing's and Anne Marie Rubin's prominent contributions to the exhibition "Alternative Architecture" at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk in 1977. As a counter-reaction to the failure of the 1960s building boom, the exhibition's purpose was to present alternative ways of building and living. Both Ussing (with her partner Carsten Hoff) and Rubin (with Gerda Tosti Nielsen) in different ways presented their ideas of participatory architecture where users become active co-creators of the architecture.

Chapter five explores the coming into being of one of the most outstanding buildings of the period: Kildeskovshallen - a sports venue and indoor swimming pool built in the 1960s. The chapter brings together the central themes of the former sections: collaboration across gender and professional disciplines above all. The authors' investigation of the building and the process points to the importance of looking at all the various and complex mechanisms at play in the realization of architecture. Only this way more nuanced narratives can take place.

Throughout the book, concise and brief biographies of the women architects appear in the margins. These biographies can be read separately and weave well into the main text and add a relevant layer of information served while reading. It is a clever and reader-friendly way of introducing basic and necessary knowledge without disturbing the overall narrative.

A small critique point is the lack of a more in-depth reflection on why women architects have been left out of the architectural history of the formative years 1930-1980. Such an investigation could perhaps lay bare some of the pitfalls of the past and help to ensure a more nuanced, inclusive and accurate architectural history of the future.

In sum, this book's original approach, profound research and well written chapters develop a new story about twentieth century architecture in Denmark and it is therefore foreseen to become a major reference point in Danish and international architecture history.