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Giulio GiovannoniTuscany beyond Tuscany. Rethinking the City from the PeripheryFlorence: Didapress (Dipartimento di Architettura Università degli Studi di Firenze), CTS Critical Tuscan Studies Series, 2017, 182 pages. Softcover. Language: English. 30 €.ISBN-10: 8896080932

Recent global events have highlighted a special emphasis on an awareness for women's rights situation worldwide. A renewed critical reflection claims a place in all fields of knowledge regarding fundamental human rights, and so in architecture and related disciplines. There are different approaches to the understanding of both the social dimension of art or design practice and the figure of the architect itself. This is a scope full of tensions and contradictions, uncertainties, possibilities and discussions. Architecture operates at the intersections of various elements depending on contingencies, on contexts at a particular place and time. This field deals with a wide sets of power and production relations and has to face a complex set of cultural, political, economic factors as well as systems of representation, objects, forms and meanings. Following these premises, the first three International Conferences on Gender and Architecture (ICGA), opened in Spain in 2014, have created a pioneer space to meeting and debate about this need of questioning hegemonic positions to be able to meet unattended challenges. A debate that has arrive to stay.

De género y espacios (contenedores): hacia una deconstrucción de lo doméstico About Gender and (Storage) Spaces: towards a Deconstruction of Domestic Realm ResumenTras analizar la dialéctica entre espacio (urbano y arquitectónico) y (el reparto asimétrico de los roles generizados en el seno de la familia), el artículo se centra, en primer lugar, en las repercusiones urbanas y arquitectónicas de la evolución de nuevas estructuras de convivencia en la contemporaneidad y, en segundo lugar, en la (r)evolución de la relación entre arquitectura y mobiliario/equipamiento, con un enfoque específico en los espacios contenedores, que se convierten en un pretexto para reflexionar sobre las prácticas domésticas contemporáneas, para preguntarse si, de cara al futuro, retomar el enfoque materialista feminista que priorizaba una reestructuración del tiempo y la visibilización de la labor doméstica y de las vivencias de la cotidianidad puede proporcionarnos nuevas claves interpretativas y guiarnos hacia nuevos paradigmas habitacionales, trayendo ventajas para toda la sociedad. Palabras clave: género, domesticidad, vivienda, tiempo, mobiliario, almacenaje. AbstRActAfter analyzing the dialectic between (urban and architectural) space and (the asymmetric distribution of gendered roles within the) family, the article focuses, first of all, on the urban and architectural repercussions of the evolution of new cohabitation structures in contemporary society and, secondly, on the (r)evolution of the relationship between architecture and furniture/equipment, with a specific focus on storage spaces, which become a pretext to reflect on contemporary domestic practices, and to wonder whether, facing the future, the feminist materialist approach that prioritized a restructuring of time and the visibility of domestic work and everyday life can be resumed to provide us with new interpretive keys and guide us towards new housing paradigms, bringing advantages for all society.

This communication presents the works led by the architects Naomi Stead and Janet McGaw, based at several Australian universities. They share feminist approaches to their teaching and research practices, which encourage a deep debate on how the gender perspective strengthens pedagogical bases for a most equitable and inclusive teaching and professional practice. Base in the Universities of Queensland firstly and Monash nowadays, Stead is making visible the inequalities that female architects have in the contemporary Australian architecture discipline. Therefore, she is proposing solutions through the Parlour project. McGaw has been developing different workshops on 'minor architecture' with an interdisciplinary and transversal approach close to eco-feminist and postcolonialist thinking.