Research | Work(space) in Progress
Work(space) In Progress, an exhibition, public presentation, and publication, documents research on the intersections of Frank Lloyd Wright’s workspace designs and conceptualizations of gender. This investigation highlights the work of Nancy Willey, an influential client who shaped the open concept kitchen in Wright’s designs.
In the early 20th century Frank Lloyd Wright participated in the movement to liberate the housewife from the confines of cooking duties by merging the kitchen with the living and dining room. This new domestic model did not appear independently with Wright’s designs, but it progressed from earlier kitchen adjacency models, European architectural trends and demands from both feminist and non-feminist women’s organizations. The female client who occupied the workspace was often the catalyst for changes to Wright’s domestic architecture and yet, he stifled progressive attitudes of domesticity by maintaining that her designated spaces were dominated by the male gaze.
Wright’s open concept kitchen, or the ‘workspace’ as he labelled it, was canonized in his Usonian home designs and catalyzed by the style-mediating project, The Willey House. Investigation into the spatial adjacencies, context, and scale of domestic architecture before and after Wright merged the workspace with social spaces is one way to understand the possibility of an alternate future within the contemporary open concept workspace.
This project was generously funded by the Howarth Wright Graduate Fellowship, 2017-2018 at The University of Toronto.
Exhibit photos are credited to Pooya Aledavood, 2018.