Recently, I acted as a member on a Te Kāhui Whaihanga New Zealand Institute of Architects Awards jury panel. It can feel a bit cheesy to say these things but it really was an honour. The ecstasy of architecture: looking up at the detail of a brick soffit as if in prayer, trailing a hand over a balustrade, staring up into a vault of light, sighing at an exquisite handle. The experience is a roller coaster of intimacies; you are invited into people’s homes, and over the thresholds into the architects’ heads. I saw homes that were worth millions of dollars. In the same week, I was warmly welcomed into neat-as-a-pin, one-bedroom public housing apartments and then, later, sitting snug in the cosy corners of a small house designed for youth facing homelessness. This is an issue that disproportionately faces Māori and Pacific young people.

Architecture does touch everybody. This is its ecstasy. And it is this quality that makes the debates underpinning the profession, the practices and the community of practitioners so compelling and critical. As a jury panel, we debated everything from a façade to a garage floor. Is the façade a familiar typology made new or is it a troubling lack of commitment to the city’s urban fabric? Are we in favour of, or opposed to, carpeting for cars in garages? What appeared to me in these discussions was they were more fully enriched when assumptions were tested, stretched and considered, across experiences and world views.

While we made our votes known to each other in the jury panel, the cultural, social and political came into focus, revealing values systems and lived experiences coalescing around the ecstasy of architecture. As we argued and hotly complained over downpipes (the sin of a wiggly downpipe – the absolute sin), an elephant sat in the jury room with us: the under-representation of women, amongst other marginalised peoples and groups.

As an Indigenous Pacific woman myself, the question remained for me: what is the industry doing to ensure Māori and Pacific success? These dimensions are intersectional and should be considered so. That said, I heard a turn of phrase that spoke so specifically to the cultural rhetoric that, I will argue here, is partly responsible for the low representation of women in the industry’s awards. Interestingly, it was a turn of phrase also voiced in an academic setting of which I was a part only a week later: “I wouldn’t want to get an award for being a woman”.

We are living in a time of #metoo; we are also living through a longer moment of under-representation of women in senior leadership across academia.¹ In the US, a study showed that Covid-19 produced a childcare crisis that meant that women left the workforce at four times the rate that men did.² The country’s architecture industry is not sealed off from these social phenomena because they are global and they are structural.

When I consider the ecstasy of architecture as a profession that touches everyone, literally, I think about what it means to take up a personal position in the industry informed by my lived experience; I, also, don’t want to receive an award for being a woman. But, what I really mean, when I think and say it, is I don’t want the work for which I am recognised undermined by others thinking it is awarded only because I am a woman.

It is worthwhile spending a touch more time in the space of this admission because it is where, for me, some of the rub lies. What bothers me when I consider that my work could be undermined by my peers is a reputational loss. It must be because, truthfully, I like awards, especially when they have my name on them; doesn’t everybody? This is especially so when they are bestowed upon you by your peers and when they are those peers that share in the same ecstasies as you do. It makes the long hours, the compromises, the time away from loved ones, and the ups and downs seem worth it in the past, and worth the gamble in the future. If it is a reputational consideration that sits at the heart of it, the statement shifts from “I don’t want to get an award for being a woman” to “I want my work to be recognised in the appropriate context”.

The emphasis then becomes on recognition that is attuned to context rather than concern about reputational loss. In the longitudinal study conducted by the Future Cities Research Hub at the University of Auckland School of Architecture and Planning by Professor Errol Haarhoff, Associate Professor Paola Boarin and Dr Natalie Allen, Architecture Graduate Progression to Practice in New Zealand: 1987–2018, the contextual shape for the country’s women architects and graduates
is given light.

My experience in the industry, both as an academic and as a jury member, had somewhat prepared me for the numbers but still the rate of change struck me as somewhat slow. This is especially true given the stakes: equity in the profession that shapes the experiences of everybody. In 1987, women constituted 20 per cent of graduates; in 2006, parity with men was first reached³ and this was the year that I, myself, graduated. In terms of industry qualifications, between 2007 and 2018, the average rate for women being registered was 39 per cent, compared to 61 per cent for men.⁴

These data points bring up some interesting contemplations: 1) the issue of women being under-represented in the industry is not an issue of pipeline⁵ – over the past 15 years, men and women graduates have been of equal numbers; and  2) given the ramifications, paradigm shifts are not only necessary but are long overdue. We have to consider more meaningfully the sort of professional culture we are creating through our words. For, as startling as the statistics are for women, there is still work to be done in the representation of black women, trans-women, women of colour, indigenous women and differently abled women across the industry.

My students often show me that the work of making architecture more inclusive is as much a collective effort as it is an individual one – their work demonstrates their capacities for sensitively, and bravely, working with identity in architecture that is affirming, inclusive and endlessly creative. The professional world we create in which they can flourish begins with the words we use to describe our personal positions, made poignant because their architecture will go on to touch everyone. This is its ecstasy.