Aino Aalto, founding partner and managing director of Artek, paved the way for women to pursue architecture and design careers.



Alice T. Friedman is the Grace Slack McNeil Professor of the History of American Art at Wellesley College; she has taught architectural history in the Department of Art at Wellesley since 1979. Her recent work has been concerned with the architecture of the twentieth century. The focus of her studies has always been on interdisciplinary history; she is particularly interested in cultural values and the social history of architecture, with an emphasis on issues of gender, ethnicity, and ideology. Her most recent book, American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture, was published by Yale University Press in 2010.

Mary McLeod is a professor of architecture at Columbia University, where she teaches architectural history and theory, and occasionally studio. Her research and publications have focused on the history of the modern movement and on contemporary architecture theory, examining issues concerning the connections between architecture and ideology. She is coeditor of Architecture, Criticism, Ideology and Architecture Reproduction, and is editor and contributor to the book Charlotte Perriand: An Art of Living (Abrams, 2003). Her articles have appeared in Assemblage, Oppositions, Art Journal, AA Files, JSAH,Casabella, and Lotus, as well as anthologies such as The Sex of Architecture,Architecture in Fashion, Architecture of the Everyday, Architecture and Feminism, The Pragmatist Imagination, The State of Architecture, and Fragments: Architecture and the Unfinished. She currently serves as a board member for the Buell Foundation for the Study of American Architecture, and has previously served on the boards of the Society of Architectural Historians and the Architectural League of New York.

Jasmine Rault is assistant professor in Culture and Media in Eugene Lang College at the New School. Rault works on themes of feminist and queer architecture and design, affective and cultural economies, and arts and social movements. Rault’s first book was Eileen Gray and the Design of Sapphic Modernity: Staying In (2011). Her current book projects are Unsettling Affects: Transnational Mediations of Feminist and Queer Activism; and Checking In: Feminist and Queer Labor in Networked Economies, co-authored with T.L. Cowan.