Past Symposia

2025 Symposium

2025 IAWA Symposium – March 20-21, 2025

Building Connections: Networks Past, Present, Future

Call for Abstracts: September 15, 2024 – November 1, 2024 
Selection announced: December 1, 2024

In 2025, the International Archive of Women in Architecture [IAWA] celebrates its 40th anniversary. As part of the celebration, the IAWA opens the call for abstracts for the 2025 IAWA Symposium – Building Connections: Networks Past, Present, Future. The IAWA seeks to celebrate and uncover networks of women in architecture, historically, today, and speculatively. Mapping the informal and formal structures that connect and support women in architecture can reconfigure the constellations of the discipline, illuminating previously unknown connections, support systems, and ways of practicing architecture. The production of architecture is never a sole or individual endeavor; the 2025 IAWA Symposium seeks to draw attention to and examine the women-inflected networks within and across architecture, landscape, urbanism, and affiliated fields. We invite scholarship that uncovers known, less familiar, and potential networks between women in architecture, or that support women in architecture. We welcome papers that trace a wide range of networks: historical and speculative, global and domestic, formal and informal. We seek historical accounts as well as imaginaries of potential, future networks. The Symposium strives to create a forum for imagining ways in which women can support each other and be supported in architectural endeavors. We invite work that uncovers and documents networks that women have built and that connect women in architecture, across time and space. 

We invite papers that broadly interpret networks and connections. These may include, but are not limited to: collaborations within and between architects and firms; groups linked by their alma mater or experiences working in a particular office; mentors, influences and influencers; relationships between institutions; networks of patrons–individual and corporate–and designers; family trees of practitioners or academics; discursive networks created by formats such as magazines, journals, exhibitions, websites, or conferences; and professional organizations and advocacy groups. Potential paper topics might include: influences and impacts of networks of women in architecture; speculations upon how support structures could address contemporary issues in architecture and architectural practice; uncovering previously unknown networks or networks unrecognized as supporting women in architecture; trajectories of individuals supported by networks; technologies that have enabled building networks and connections; networks that have historically excluded women and the alternatives women constructed; relationships between women’s networks and other networks; the needs of women in architecture that have been or could be supported by networks; networks that include women who participate in architecture in ways outside of professional practice; and relationships between women’s networks and other networks.

The 2025 IAWA Symposium will be held at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA. Papers may be presented in person or virtually.

Please email 300-word abstract and a one-page CV, by November 1, 2024 to:
iawacenter@vt.edu
Subject heading: 2025 IAWA Symposium Abstract Submission

Please indicate in your abstract if you plan to attend in person, or present virtually.

Paola Zellner Bassett, Chair IAWA 
Sharone Tomer, Director of Symposia
International Archive of Women in Architecture Center
School of Architecture 
Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia   
The International Archive of Women in Architecture Center

Founded in 1985, the mission of the International Archive of Women in Architecture Center (IAWA) is to document the history of women’s involvement in architecture by collecting, preserving, storing and making available to researchers the professional papers of women architects, landscape architects, designers, architectural historians and critics, urban planners as well as the records of women’s architectural organizations, from around the world. The IAWA collects this information to fill serious gaps in the availability of primary research materials for architectural, women’s and social history research. These materials are held in Special Collections of the University Libraries. The Board of Advisors of the IAWA Center are a group of elected representatives from around the world, who oversee the research, publication, and publicity of the IAWA as well as identify potential donors (funds and work) for the archive.  

The IAWA is dedicated to:

• Find and preserve the records of the pioneer generation of women architects, interior and industrial designers, landscape architects, and urban designers and planners, whose papers may be lost or dispersed if not collected immediately;
• Appeal to retired women from these professions who have played a part in the history of the professions to donate their papers to the IAWA;
• Appeal to active women architects, designers, and planners to save their papers and to consider donating them to the IAWA at a later date;
• Serve as a clearinghouse of information on all women architects, designers, and planners, past and present, and to encourage research on the history of women in these professions through seminars, exhibits, and publications;
• Foster cooperation between all libraries or archives containing data on, or collecting material on, women in architecture, design, and planning.

The growing archive consists of sketches, manuscripts, books, individual projects, and the works of an entire career. Primary research materials (unique or original works) preserved in the Archive include architectural drawings, photographs and slides, manuscripts, models, and job files. To meet the need of serving as a clearinghouse of information about all women in architecture, past, and present, the IAWA also collects secondary materials such as biographical information in addition to books and other publications and exhibitions. Through many significant and diverse donations, the Archive is growing into a tremendous historical resource. The Archive currently now houses more than 450 collections and continues to grow in significance through donations from around the world. https://spec.lib.vt.edu/IAWA/

2022 Symposium

Within every woman’s body of work, there are known or identifiable breakthroughs: singular or multiple instances exist that have influenced the designer’s creative and professional path, and that may have advanced the disciplines in some manner, or expanded women’s standing in the profession.  Furthering last year’s theme, “1×1: The Potential of the Singular,” this year’s IAWA symposium invites researchers and practitioners to contribute papers or creative presentations that identify instances in the career of a woman designer that have been or should be recognized as a breakthrough: a relevant revelatory moment.

The call particularly seeks to uncover and give visibility to the material artifacts produced by women in practice or academia that have prompted this point(s) of inflection in their lives, careers, or in the projects or studies they have conducted. Such material artifacts – a sketch, drawing, note or scribble, study model, personal letter, collage, rendering, screen print, photograph, outline or synopsis of written work, academic project prompt – serve as physical markers. They record relevant advances and innovations that may have impacted their creator’s personal path, at a personal or at broader scales. Material artifacts illustrate how the designer may have influenced the histories of the disciplines, or altered the perception and development of the built environment. Furthermore, material artifacts may serve as evidence of the types of limitations – whether personal or imposed by the profession, academia or society – that women have transcended. 

Highlighting the myriad forms in which women have and continue to break through in architecture and related design fields, the call invites presenters to contextualize the stories revealed by the chosen material artifacts. The call also invites speculations about instances and artifacts that may not yet be identified as breakthroughs but could, from a present perspective, be confirmed or proposed as such. The call seeks to foster the discovery of individual precious artifacts that hold stories yet unknown. The call also seeks to draw attention to the collective impact that women have had on architecture, by framing singular artifacts in their aggregation.