Making it new: gender, identity and modernism in English architecture

This lecture will consider how new forms of self-consciously modern identities created new forms of architecture in 1920s and 1930s England. It will trace how gay men and women, determinedly single professionals and pioneering social reformers worked with architects to produce transformed and transforming spaces both private and public.

Elizabeth Darling is Reader in Architectural History in the School of History, Philosophy & Culture, Oxford Brookes University, UK. Her work focuses on gender, space and reform in the 1890s-1940s, and the genesis and nature of English modernism between the wars; and sometimes the intersections between the two. Her publications include Women and the Making of Built Space in England 1870-1950 (Ashgate, 2007), Re-forming Britain, Narratives of Modernity before Reconstruction (Routledge, 2007), Wells Coates (RIBA Publishing, 2012) and Suffragette City: Gender, Politics and the Built Environment (Routledge 2020). She is currently writing a book on the architecture of BBC Broadcasting House."