Women's Display: Editorial

The Special Collection Women’s Display: Women’s Exhibitions and Exhibition Design in the 20th Century explores why, how and under what conditions women made exhibitions about the built environment and who these women were, to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the exhibitions themselves and their design across different individuals, collaborative groups, time periods and geographical contexts. Women were involved in the financing, planning, organizing, critiquing and staging of exhibitions since the 19th century, even though their contributions, aims and impacts are often little known. The articles aim to broaden and diversify the understanding of exhibitions made by women in the 20th century by focusing on subjects whose stories have been forgotten or marginalized in architectural history. For many women, exhibition design was not only an important career step, but also a political and social commitment and a collaborative form of work voicing critique and an experimental laboratory for testing new approaches. Exhibition design proved to be an accessible niche for many woman architects, who discovered in it a chance to gain a foothold in the profession and to have a platform from which to speak out publicly. The exhibition also opened the opportunity of trying out new design concepts and making a theoretical contribution. A series of exhibitions in Switzerland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Russia, Cuba, Canada and the USA from the 1920s to the 1980s are analyzed, using different approaches to the study of women in architecture, illuminating both individual biographies and collective works in the context of historical and social contingency.