Hannigan, Christine

English

UCL Discovery

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found athttps://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=yldn20The London JournalA Review of Metropolitan Society Past and PresentISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yldn20How We Live Now: Reimagining Spaces with MatrixFeminist Design Co-operativeLevel G, The Barbican Centre. Free. Until 23 December 2021Christine HanniganTo cite this article: Christine Hannigan (2021): How We Live Now: Reimagining Spaces withMatrix Feminist Design Co-operative, The London Journal, DOI: 10.1080/03058034.2021.1992828To link to this article:  https://doi.org/10.1080/03058034.2021.1992828© 2021 The Author(s). Published by InformaUK Limited, trading as Taylor & FrancisGroupPublished online: 16 Nov 2021.Submit your article to this journal Article views: 329View related articles View Crossmark dataEXHIBITION REVIEWHow We Live Now: Reimagining Spaces with Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative. LevelG, The Barbican Centre. Free. Until 23 December 2021.‘How We Live Now: Reimagining Spaces with Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative’ is thelatest exhibition of the Barbican’s Level G Programme, ‘an experimental platform for pro-jects that ask crucial social and cultural questions’. The question asked here is who createsthe built environment, and for whom; the answer is provided through a focus on the workof Matrix, a pioneering architectural co-operative founded in 1981. In their 13 years of oper-ation, the group worked solely on state-funded, social building projects, typically withwomen and children’s groups as clientele.Feminist design collective Edit created the physical structures of the exhibit to reflectMatrix’s concern with the informal use of space. Architectural drawings and photographschronicling Matrix’s work are fastened to plywood frames, alluding to a construction site.Curtains made by Cawley Studio hang from a metal rail snaking through the exhibit to sub-divide the space (Figure 1). Parting them to enter, the viewer is transported back to 1980sEngland. Panels display adverts for cars and household consumables with copy andimages demeaning women, bizarrely irrelevant to the product advertised. Heather Powell’sfilm Paradise Circus (1988) plays on a large television, cataloguing the hostility of Birming-ham’s built environment: its thoughtlessly designed housing, unsafe and creepy tunnelnetwork, and labyrinthine road layout that prioritised motorists and polluted the air. Thefilm examines the government’s decades of post-war slum clearances and replacementGarden City neighbourhoods. These suburban prototypes were planned and designed bymen who failed to properly consider the needs of anyone unlike them. The house was notviewed as a place of work, and accommodation for people moving through the city with dis-abilities, or children, or without cars, was nearly non-existent.This scene-setting brings Matrix’s radical approach, and the wave of feminism of which itwas a part, into full relief. Juxtaposed to these lazy, sexist banalities is Matrix’s manifesto, asingle sheet of unadorned paper which sets out:• a non-hierarchical, mutually supportive organisation• developing new relationships between cilent, architect, and builder• questioning and exploring different design and living possibilities• more intuitive decisions in design and organisation© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis GroupThis is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribu-tion-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in anymedium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, orbuilt upon in any way.the london journal, 2021, 1–5DOI 10.1080/03058034.2021.1992828The exhibit’s seating was designed by Material Habit, a Chilterns-based research projectby Guan Lee and Rachel Jones, the latter of whom dyed its textiles alongside Ciara Callaghanwith extracts of plants like ivy, birch, and willow from the Barbican’s surrounding area. Ichatted with Jos Boys, co-founder of Matrix and also its book group, who co-curated theexhibit alongside Jon Astbury. She outlines how the manifesto was enacted and reflects onsome of its complexities. Each project had two architects who shared the workload and sup-ported each other. Everyone, regardless of their role or experience, was paid the same, andfigure 1 A plywood panel displays Matrix print media from the 1980s. Image by theauthor.2 EXHIBITION REVIEWattended weekly staff meetings where decisions were made and projects shared, with someconsciousness raising thrown in (which, Boys noted, could make discussions exhausting).Matrix’s collectivism was another way of reframing architecture. Drawings weren’t signedby the individual who drew them, a practice Boys noted has become more commonplace.Designers collaborated with clients, using tools and parlance that didn’t require an architec-ture degree to understand. Rather than prescribe their own vision, the team first listened towhat the people who would be using the space needed and wanted.figure 2 Models similar to the ones Matrix used with clients in the centre of the exhibit.Image by the author.THE LONDON JOURNAL 3These tenets were operationalised in a variety of women’s projects, like the Dalston Chil-dren’s Centre and the Jumoke Nursey in Southwark whose clients, a childcare group, soughta non-racist, non-sexist, non-hierarchical space. The resulting nursery was delineated bypurpose, not age groups. The kitchen was not hidden in the rear of the space but placed inthe centre of the building, and play spaces were carved out of mezzanines scaled to children’sheights.A major project highlighted in the exhibit shows a fuller application of these principles.Matrix worked with the Jagonari Women’s Education Resource Centre between 1984 and1987, helping them develop their ambitions from what were originally plans for some Por-tacabins. These local Asian women won funding from the Greater London Council (GLC) tocreate a space for multiple uses, from ‘meetings and training courses to childcare and bad-minton’. The lead architects, Anne Thorne and Ann de Graft-Johnson, asked the clients tobring in photographs of buildings they liked, tested possibilities with demountable models(Figure 2), and sought their opinions on the façade in a ‘brick picnic’ – an outing wherethey toured other buildings to decide what type and colour bricks would suit their space.The centre complements its surroundings on Whitechapel Road but is distinct for itssecular Asian aesthetics. Metal lattice work over windows doubled as both decoration andsecurity — racists had already abused and attacked the clients.Technocratic fields like architecture and planning often wrongly assume their valuesystem, language, and processes are race- and gender-neutral. Boys describes the gruellingcompetitiveness of architecture school, and an insidious stereotype of the ideal student: con-fident, obsessive, individualistic, combatively defensive of his ideas, yet ‘you often literallycannot perform that stereotype if you’re female or if you’re a person of colour’. Biographicaldetails of the individual Matrix members and how they linked up are scant, but an article inthe exhibit by one of its architects, Ann de Graft-Johnson, grants a glimpse into her experi-ence. Her encounters with prejudiced professors and students continued into her career. Sheconnects how office cultures and the built environment reinforce racism and sexism in theother, including how and when people move through them:During my first few months [at Matrix] my awareness of how the environment iscreated primarily by and for white men grew immeasurably. My journey to workthrough the City of London perhaps highlighted this most. By day this area is streamingwith men in business suits, some white women and a miniscule number of black people.Late at night, or in the early hours, the people you see are women; they are black andthey are going to and from cleaning the City’s offices.To change the processes creating these conditions, Matrix aligned itself with women workingin related fields like urban planning and construction. The exhibit plays two films made in2018, Winnie Herbstein’s Studwork, which followed women learning building trades inGlasgow, and Ayo Akingbade’s Street 66, about Ghanian housing activist Dora Boatehmah,who fought for the resident-led redevelopment of Brixton’s Angell Town Estate, which hadbeen neglected by Lambeth Council. This co-operative ethos extended across a widernetwork of allied groups, including the Association of Community Technical Aid Centres(ACTAC) Women’s Design Service, Women’s Education in Building, Women in Planning,and the Women into Architecture and Building (WIAB) access course at the Polytechnic ofNorth London. Matrix’s influential book Making Space: Women and the Man-MadeEnvironment had a wide impact upon publication in 1984. Their other design guides, likeBuilding for Child Care: making better buildings for the Under-5s and A Job DesigningBuildings, highlighted how built environmental professionals could adopt feminist practices.Matrix was one of many organisations dissatisfied with professional norms and thus creat-ing new ways of working in the 1980s. Boys credits their relative successes in part to thefunding available; the GLC would pay the costs of projects and in-depth feasibility4 EXHIBITION REVIEWstudies. At the time, London was more affordable and it was possible to live cheaply; squat-ting was common and not criminalised as it is today, so people could survive on low wageswhile getting their ideas off the ground. By 2010, however, the same year David Cameron’sconservative government introduced ‘austerity measures’, the situation changed dramati-cally: Jagonari was priced out of the building it dreamed up in 1984, and by 2015, hadfolded entirely as an organisation. Historic England refused to list the building in 2018,which is now operated by a private commercial childcare provider.Significantly, the exhibit doesn’t end its focus when Matrix disbanded in 1994 but takesstock of its legacy in subsequent waves of feminism and anti-racism in organisations liketaking place and Black Females in Architecture. I ask Boys what she thinks about thefuture of the field. She is hopeful groups like Section of Architectural Workers (SAW), anewly-formed union nested within United Voices of the World, will further reform exploita-tive working conditions in architectural practice, as the NewArchitectureMovement (NAM)did in the 1970s and 80s. She points to groups like The DisOrdinary Architecture Project(which she co-founded in 2008) for enabling alternative creative and critical startingpoints such as ‘misfitting’ led by disabled artists and other non-normative groups. Shewants change to education and the profession to be process-driven and mindset-changing,not superficial patchwork attempts at ‘increasing diversity’. Similarly, ‘sustainability’ musttranscend carbon footprints alone to encompass social and equity elements. These oftendon’t involve glamorous high-tech interventions; Boys gives the example of providing freetoilets and seating in public spaces.Before leaving the Barbican, I paid a visit to the toilets on the same floor. They were diffi-cult to find. Three small stalls were arranged around a narrow, curved corridor. There wereneither changing tables nor disabled access. As I heaved the swinging door open to exit, amother with three small children was entering. We awkwardly danced around each otheras she struggled to shepherd them in. Once outside the disorienting, Brutalist Barbican, onmy bike ride home, I surveyed a few dozen of the hundreds of cranes slotted in buildingssites, erecting more glass towers. Who are they for?The Bartlett School of Planning, University College London CHRISTINE HANNIGANTHE LONDON JOURNAL 5

How We Live Now: Reimagining Spaces with Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative

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How We Live Now: Reimagining Spaces with Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative

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