If one were to be the sort of inelegant person to point such things out, one might point out that despite all the egalitarian rhetoric, we still live in an architectural culture that cultivates dominance, not in the sense of dominion as rooted in domus, home, but in the dual senses of control and territory. The star architects we are assured we must look to, the big, bold, challenging buildings they erect, condition folk to see a casual way of acting act relative to ecologies, economies, cultures and justice as normative, ideal, something to believe in.

In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I spoke to Professor Hilde Heynen professor of architectural theory at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and Professor Lucia Pérez-Moreno, Professor of History and Theory of Architecture at the University of Zaragoza in Spain.

Together, Hilde and Lucia have gathered together a number of Hilde’s most significant essays in a new book, Architecture & Feminist Critical Theory: Selected Writings by Hilde Heynen, published by Leuven University Press in 2025 and which tracks an evolving position, which emerges out of critical theory into feminist theory and latterly towards an environmental justice, but always proposing another way of seeing things in search of another path, one that is subtle, integrated, just and with just a little less man character energy.

Hilde is on LinkedIn can be found at work, Lucia does do the socials and can be found on Instagram and on LinkedIn. The book is linked above.

Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick

Image credit: Source: Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Matrix of Man.