Women often feel constricted to a home-life setting, simply by a city's organization and the architectural design, according to a prominent architect and author who spoke Tuesday as part of UB's Gender Week.
Leslie Kanes Weisman's lecture at Crosby Hall, "Creating a Woman-Friendly City," focused on the necessity for changes in the organization and design of housing, work and public space to foster gender equality.
"Ever since the beginning of time and homeownership for the woman, the home became both the altar and the prison where rooms such as the kitchen belonged to them, and the smoking and billiard rooms to the man," said Weisman, an author and architect professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. "Nowadays, with increased rates of divorce, single women are living in apartment complexes that foster the needs of single working women who no longer spend their time behind a stove."
Weisman stressed the need to encourage society to increase gender equality.
"Assaults in urban public places, to a great degree, are crimes of opportunity," she said. "While the design of our physical surroundings does not cause sexual assault, it plays a significant part in creating opportunity for it."
According to Weisman, a study done in 1977 about the design of a homeless shelter in New York City for women found that the shelter had 47 beds and turned away 2,000 women in need of a place to sleep. At the same time, the men's shelter had room for several hundreds and placed more in hotels where they were welcome to free hot meals.
"This study goes to show where the focus of the male architect lies -- not on the needs of the woman but the man who controls and occupies the houses of government and the houses of commerce," Weisman said.
Sarah Bayer, a first year architecture graduate student, said that Weisman's lecture put her thoughts about architecture and its effect on women in perspective.
"Now I have a more clear perspective on how classes and gender affect urban planning," Bayer said. "I no longer see architecture in the same light."
Oliver Milot, also a first year architecture graduate student, echoed Bayer's thoughts.
"This lecture sure gave me insight on urban planning and design that was foreign to me," Oliver said. "I am glad I came today and I see how this lecture serves not only for the female architect but to the male architect as well."
Weisman said the main goal of her speech was to create an overall awareness for women, and to use her lecture as a tool of reflection.
"I just want an equal piece of a poisonous pie," she said. "Women should stop compromising and trying to fit in with society, but making a difference in not only in architecture and urban design and planning but within themselves."
