Upon my arrival in Lisbon mid-2009 after being invited to work for the Lisbon Architecture Triennale on the way to its second edition, I was not sure how long I would stay in Portugal. Two years later, I am still here and willing to remain here in the near future.  The city has become a reference point, a source of great inspiration and energy. The conditions that I found here were not at all easy or comfortable, but definitely encouraged and stimulated me every day to contribute; to contribute as someone from the “outside”. This might have to do – more than it has ever been the case before in cities like Berlin or Basel – with me being a woman in a male-dominated working environment.
    In 2009 I had just left the Swiss Architecture Museum in Basel, where I had been involved in a dense and intensive exhibition and publishing program, after previous training and preparation in Berlin. This path was not exactly concordant to the working and organizational practice here in Portugal. The task I was about to undertake in Lisbon was not less ambitious, less dense or intense – it was just very different and a game with different rules from the perspective of a 32-year old woman that was about to get out of her comfort zone.
     In the meantime, the second edition of the 2010 Triennale passed along and I am currently working on the upcoming 2013 Triennale. Our team involves 39 individuals (including the directory, supervisory and advisory board as well as the core team), among them only six women.
     I have appreciated the editions of JA under the present editors ever since I arrived, since they have been a highlight within a rather complicated (and for me most missed) environment of art and architecture criticism within the country. Following the series “Being…” and knowing that sooner or later the time would come for a “Being a Woman” entry, I started considering Portuguese women in architecture today, particularly women of my generation. One of the first and rare examples, which I had known about and been interested into, is the Architect Joana da Rocha Sá Lima, who, although still partly based in Portugal, had moved to northern Europe to contribute in a very active way to the debate, discussion and communication of the architectural practice.
     Had I possibly found the moment within “Being a woman” to exchange questions and share considerations with someone of my generation, who made her way from the south to the north, crossing during her training and working experiences countries and cities where I grew up and trained, having now, in the opposite direction, arrived to Portugal from the north to the south?

Julia Albani

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Julia Albani – If you recall the moment you left Portugal, what did you expect to change for you? And, how do you see yourself now?
Joana da Rocha Sá Lima – Well, I had the privilege to be born and educated in Portugal, and to have studied the Portuguese architectural heritage but this was never enough. Since my childhood I always had the urge to travel and later on, I had as excuse the need to explore other ways of thinking in architecture.  When I left Portugal in 2002, I had two very clear goals: I wanted to work with Rem Koolhaas, and to visit as many countries as poss-ible, that shaped my most relevant decisions, therefore my personality and my education as an architect.
By leaving at the age of 22, I opened up all possibilities and had an incredibly varied range of experiences. By living in Italy, Germany, Holland and now Norway, I have been contaminated not only by different cultures, but also with pluralistic ways of thinking that influentiated my detachment of cultural predispositions and prejudices.
Professionally, I have been exposed to contrasting and complementary creative processes in architectural and design development by working for some of the most interesting practices in Europe and to learn from very challenging people in the field.
After nine years I think I changed to become a more secure and independent person, sometimes too determined and always searching for the next big thing, reason why I created a magazine. With Conditions – Scandinavian magazine focusing on the conditions of architecture and Urbanism – I am trying to establish a debate platform to redefine existing needs and conditions in architecture.  How do I see myself now? I like to think I am fusion of different cultures, with the free spirit of a nomad, the passion of an explorer, the restlessness of a thinker. My home is still in Portugal but my house is everywhere.

You mentioned in our first conversation, that you intended to move back to Portugal after a long period being based and working in the Netherlands, Germany and Norway, but changed your mind, after the first attempt. Why?
Well, I always wanted to return one day, mainly because my roots and family are very important to me, but this has always been a long-term plan. When last year I decided to give it a try and come back, I did it for personal reasons and unfortunately I was still not professionally ready for such a big move. I tend to plan all my steps strategically and I usually don’t rush decisions without analyzing beforehand all pros and cons and being sure I am making the best choice. So, blame it on love.
Before moving, I had been living in Norway, where I co-founded the Conditions magazine, for almost three years. At the time I was also working as a project leader in a well-established office in Oslo and as a teacher at the AHO / Arkitektur-og designhøgskolen (AHO Architecture and Design University), so moving back was a difficult and risky decision. Nevertheless, after creating Conditions, and having accumulated some knowledge through past experiences, the next step was to found my own office. Doing this in Portugal seemed to be a reasonable option.
When I arrived I knew exactly the critical economical situation the country was facing.  Even so, I had many expectations and believed it was possible to start from scratch. I had the drive and the optimism, the ideal partners, and some interesting projects, but I wasn’t prepared for the cultural shock.
I denoted a prejudice against young people, which are considered to be incompetent, inexperienced or irresponsible before hand. Furthermore, women in leading positions seem to be still underestimated, a quite contradicting element regarding our matriarchal society.  And above all I was confronted with the resistance to change.
Suddenly a very conservative, quite bureaucratic and somehow castrating mentality struck me in the face. Compared to Scandinavia, working in Portugal seemed to be like traveling back in time, a quite demotivating and discouraging feeling.
I soon reconsidered my priorities and decided to move back to Oslo, although this move required cutting a lot of ties in Portugal, which was quite scary at the time. Since then, I have devoted all my energy to the Conditions magazine, and recently to the Conditions group, a think-thank devoted to the research and development of knowledge in architecture.
Furthermore, I still have several collaborations in Portugal and I truly believe that things can actually change. Portuguese have an enormous ability to innovate and regenerate – we just need the right leadership.

How do you see Portugal from the distance today? What do you most miss in this country?
I have a hate/love relationship and the reason is that I see so much wasted resources, so much incompetence and lack of ambition in a nation with so much potential. We have an incredible work force, a tremendous capacity of production but we remain too dependent on governmental initiatives. Unfortunately, the government is the only motor, mediator and investor and that hinders any participation of the private sector. We lack long-term planning and strategic development. Portugal needs thinkers, doers and a new critical mass in decision-making positions.
But what I miss the most, is a meritocratic system, a system that promotes high potentials: self-made individuals with a vision and the drive and professionalism needed to make it, independently of their gender, background or age. Our generation has extremely competent and valuable people. By not creating the right conditions, the intellectual core is attracted by other countries, where their skills set, entrepreneurship and knowledge are better appreciated. Unfortunately, this brain-drain will weaken Portugal’s cultural footprint in the future considerably.

Being a woman – is this an issue for you professionally?
No, and for sure not in northern countries where the bras were burned long time ago.
In my professional experience, being a woman has always been an advantage and never a limitation. I believe we have to accept the differences and learn how to use both our fragilities and strengths in the most productive way. Female architects have struggled to achieve professional recognition, but we have to realize that in a very short period of time, we achieved massive presence in top positions.
Not only are women born multi-taskers and organizers, but they can also tell what the big picture is and at the same time care about the details. We know how to use perception in a very assertive way and that is what makes us potentially better curators. We are getting educated to become better thinkers and critics, and I get increasingly overwhelmed with the growth of quality and quantity in female writers and designers.
Although I have not been confronted with the tick-tock of the biological clock, I wonder how that will affect me professionally.

Working in offices like OMA, was this of influence in the shaping of your career and profile as a young woman architect, architecture critic and teacher?
Definitely! As you know, selection in these offices is very strict. In this environment you get to work with some of the most challenging, inspiring, ambitious, smart, devoted and self-driven people in our generation. Most of my former colleagues are now the ones shaping the contemporary architectural landscape.
In OMA, I learned to use doubt and dissent as a creative process, words as design instruments and  research as a platform to generate design principles. I came across a new modus operandi, questioning previous references and ideals and constantly searching for knowledge in order to rationally, critically and effectively find arguments to justify our work. Every traditional problem was avoided, evaded or transcended in some way – that is the key to innovation and, most importantly, a methodology that has the flexibility to adapt to several processes of production and design.
The experience could be compared to be military training in a camp before a war, because the pressure is so intense, you push yourself to the limits. This prepares you to operate in different fields and contexts.  Working at OMA was by far the best career move I ever made.
The office is the hub for different cultures with different methodological backgrounds. Therefore there a personal compromise is necessary to be able out of the differences to achieve quality, to learn to communicate and moderate, to try to reach a consensus and make the ideas perceptible to everybody. This gave me pedagogically the drive to encourage difference and for that reason I try to motivate my students to search for their own language, to understand and have the knowledge and freedom to discover their own constraints and ideals.

Did any of your female bosses have a particular influence on you and your further working methods and spirit? Who, how and with what result?
In OMA I worked very closely to Ellen van Loon, a remarkable woman with a sharp and vivacious attitude. She is very secure and has a very special way of engaging and motivating her co-workers. Ellen is all over the place, she has this ability of controlling everything that is being produced and thanks to her, projects like Casa da Musica  and the Berlin Embassy were successful, and she still has the time to be a mother and a wife.
I was also very lucky to teach with Anne Lacaton, one of my favorite contemporary architects. With her I learned how to appreciate the simplicity, to favor quality of life and space, a most sincere, honest, human and social engaging approach in architecture.
But my most profound human and professional reference is my mother and her sister. They are the support for all my decisions and they “formed” me as I am today. They are intelligent, intuitive and very perceptive women. At the same time they are very feminine, sensitive and elegant, they manage to be dominant and strong, persistent, ambitious and great professionals. They both had a very conservative upbringing and did what was expected from a woman in their position in those times; nevertheless, they are the most liberal, open minded and progressive people I know.
They motivated me to believe that all is possible, and that if a put my mind on something, I will manage to achieve it. That is my greatest heritage.

How do you see women, their role and possibilities in Norway today?
In 1978 a special Gender Equality Ombud made Norway well-known throughout the world as a country that values gender equality. Many other countries look up to Norway for inspiration and ideas on how to promote equality between the sexes.
Norwegian women are very emancipated and independent; they are also the most privileged in terms of working and living conditions. Here women face no sex discrimination and no economical difficulties. Apart from giving birth, woman and man have the same rights and duties.
But being that privileged also has a downside; by having everything granted, women are not so interested in their careers, prioritizing family in most of the cases.
Norwegian education is grounded in social democratic values and the culture has been very influentiated by the Jante Law: “Don’t think you’re anyone special or that you’re better than us.” The term refers to a mentality that refuses to acknowledge individual effort and places all emphasis on the collective, while punishing those who stand out as achievers. This hinders ambition, therefore Norwegian men and women, in general, are not especially motivated to create their own business. The risk and experimentation culture is underdeveloped and not incentivized, therefore the private sector is suffering and the majority of women go for security and stability.
Nevertheless, there are remarkable figures and a significant difference to other countries is that in Norway women have more degrees of freedom in defining their career path.

“Everybody’s darling ­– or bitch” is a slogan that accompanied me constantly throughout my professional training in Germany and Switzerland, mainly embraced by women who paid a high price for their career  and realized first-hand that the strong underlying message is overshadowing the provocative wording. It is, yet for me today, not an issue or question – may be thanks to our previous generation, that broke essential barriers or, showed and lived a way that is not ours anymore.
Does this relate to any of your experiences? How do you see this statement today?
This is a very tricky subject, because the conditions and the position of women are different depending on the cultural background.
I was educated in a matriarchal catholic, but liberal family. Women were the decision makers, but in a very subtle and gracious way, gave the authority to men to communicate and fine-tune the decision, making them believe they had the control. I think they were trying not to emasculate them, preserving their virility and pride in their achievements. They were definitely the “darlings” and by abdicating the power position, they became the providers of a consensus and harmony in their homes and jobs. Nevertheless they remained professional and good in what they did.
With capitalism and the western influence women encountered new models of behavior, with the stereotypes of the yuppie generation, the harsh “bitches” and powerful women, that in order to gain respect needed to give up their femininity and become an exaggerated male version of themselves.  They indeed broke some barriers, taking it all the way to the extreme. Thanks to that subversion, today we can be both, and in being both is where the virtue and true power of being a woman resides. We are now stronger then ever before, educated, more beautiful, aging slower, having the choice of giving birth later on in life, being financially independent and in a position to have brilliant and successful careers. Above all, we are independent individuals with the intelligence and knowledge to create our own rules. Being a woman is not a limitation but a strength.
The problem in Portugal is that the previous generation, the generation educated in the regime, is still in power. For this reason I hope and believe that the new generation that has come out of the universities will now have the opportunity to change the current  landscape and to shake things up and educate the old “stick-in-the-muds”.

Considering Conditions as well as other architecture magazines and publishing entities, can you share your opinion about and experience with women within this practice?
Well, Conditions team consists of individuals and that’s how we operate, we never underestimate or judge the capacities for our collaborators or colleagues by their gender. Actually this is never an issue. We base our collaborations in talent, professionalism, in visions and ambitions. I refuse to consider the possibility of favoring people because their use a skirt or pants!
It is true that gender discrimination is still a very prominent and relevant problem in some societies, and I understand the necessity to devote an entire issue of JA to women, but I hope this trigger a change of mentality, at least in our field. In the future we should stop victimizing our condition as women and understand that is up to us to make the difference.  This is not no longer a Mans World.
Next Conditions issue (N. 9) is entitled New knowledge – new practices?  In this  issue we intend to find out who is really redefining the architectural practice  – a shift in focus from our previous concern with architecture politics and education towards the realm of the pragmatic. I would like to challenge all brave architects to help us find who is actually changing practice in architecture through new knowledge. |