On Thursday, July 13, 2023, a symposium entitled Made by Women, Celebrating women in socialist architecture and design will be held as part of the exhibition Retrotopia. Design for Socialist Spaces in Berlin’s Kunstgewerbemuseum, in which the co-curator of the exhibition dr. Cvetka Požar, MAO museum councillor, will take part with a lecture.

The event brings together international researchers who have studied the legacy of the 20th century women architects and designers from former socialist countries. It will profile several highly original but thus-far overlooked female designers and architects. Although gender equality in design and architecture during that period was hardly achieved and remained another utopian promise, the presentations will highlight the value of those women’s contributions to the discipline, in particular by creating designs that encouraged diversity and inclusivity.

Programm:

2pm – 3.30pm

• Welcome by Claudia Banz – Curator of “Retrotopia. Design for Socialist Spaces”
• Alyona Sokolnikova – “Women Designers of the USSR”
• Kaja Muszyńska – “Women Designers in Communist Poland”
• Cvetka Požar – “The work and role of women architects and designers in the 1950s and 1960s in Slovenia”

/ Break /

4pm – 6pm

• Mary Pepchinski – “Women Architects in East and West, 1945-1990: Differences. Similarities?”
• Helena Huber-Doudová – “Women in Architecture. Rethinking Collecting, Exhibiting, and Canon in the Expanded Field”
• Alla Vronskaya – “Women building socialism”
• Q&A

Moderation: Mary Pepchinski

The special exhibition “Retrotopia. Design for Socialist Spaces” is supported by the Kuratorium Preußischer Kulturbesitz and Museum & Location.