Thank you for including Jocelyn Lambert Squires? review of the documentary City Dreamers in your August issue. The international surge of interest in uncovering the work of women architects and designers has helped Canadian women in architecture ?slowly and surely? (in the words of Blanche Lemco van Ginkel) become household names. Women in architecture need role models, and we should be proud of the many contributions Canadian women have made to pioneering in this traditionally male-dominated profession, and to shaping the cities, building and landscapes we know and love today.
As the list grows, however, I wonder if it isn?t time for more critical reflection. When Denise Scott Brown penned her now famous essay ?Room at the Top: Sexism and the Star System in Architecture? years before she was overlooked by the Pritzker Prize committee, she was writing as an accomplished architect and educator painfully aware of being outshone by her equally accomplished partner.  Based on her personal experience of her husband?s transformation into designer demigod by the architectural public and press, she wrote: ?the star system, which is unfair to many architects, is doubly hard on women in a sexist environment, and ? at the upper levels of the profession, the female architect who works with her husband will be submerged in his reputation.?
At the time, her ideas were bolstered by the rising wave of the women?s liberation movement in North America, and the conviction, felt by many, tha...