Miss Manners: Gender, Etiquette, and Architecture

This seminar draws architectural history's attention to textual sources from advice literature that formulate the normative and gendered standards of interior design, decoration and homemaking. Through a critical examination of advice ranging from Ottoman adab books to Western etiquette manuals, we will examine the various regimes and expressions of gender embedded in the skin of architecture.

How do we comply, condone, distort, or resist gender roles in our manners and social conduct? And how does this performance inform our spatial imagination? This seminar broadens the scope of what can be considered as source material for architectural history and theory by reading a set of historical and contemporary texts against the grain. Over the course of the semester, students will become familiar with vocabularies pertaining to gender, sex, and sexuality that are referenced in the narrative strategies of advice manuals and examine how these influence aspects of architectural discourse. In addition to this historical inquiry, they will independently explore texts, cases, or designs from the intersection of race, class, and gender, and discuss the materiality of sex within imaginary and/or real space configurations.

For centuries, advice literature has extensively examined the codes of propriety, or decorum, and ordered both the plot and the stage of domestic living provided by its rules about hosting, dining, decorating, or designing the private sphere. Although these manuals stood somewhere between fact and fiction, they always conveyed to their readers the performative nature of a home. From Italian books of courtiers (Alberti, 1434; Castiglione, 1528) to Ottoman adab manuals (Mustafa Ali, 1599; Mithat, 1894) to modern experts of etiquette publishing in newspapers and the read-write pages of the web (Gentlewoman, 2021; Judith Martin, 2023), this pervasive literature reflected norms and normative behaviors and still continues to feed into the exclusive designs of residential architecture. This seminar will draw the attention of architects to this extensive but also thorny collection of writings, which is replete with arguments about class, race, and gender.
The seminar is composed of three modules that arrange the main sources in a chronological and thematic manner. Subsequently, there is a workshop dedicated to the final assignment, during which students reflect on a selected text, case, or design of their choice.