Expanding Agency: Women, Race and the Global Dissemination of Modern Architecture

Expanding Agency will explore the role that women and members of ethnic minorities, primarily African-Americans, played in transmitting modern architecture and design internationally, including within Europe, between 1920 and 1970.

Strands devoted to patronage, journalism, entrepreneurship, and institution building will offer alternatives to accounts that focus primarily on architects.

This will expand our understanding of who had agency in this important story and more generally in the shaping of the built environment.

Taking a global approach that stresses comparisons across continents will also help build a more nuanced understanding of how architecture, landscape architecture, interior decoration, and the design of furnishing are transformed by new ideas that emanate from a multiplicity of sources.

This in turn can help support a more diverse profession that, in the wake of #metoo and Black Lives Matter, is better prepared to engage with a broad public, including to address such social challenges as the integration of migrants and sustainability.