Space and (in)visibility practices in elite architecture firms in Australia

Abstract

This paper examines the complex intertwining of space and (in)visibility practices in professional service firms (PSFs) by drawing on open-ended interviews with thirty architects working in three of the largest and most prestigious architecture firms in Australia. Our findings demonstrate the ways in which space, gender, and inequality are deeply interwoven and played out on an everyday basis. In so doing, we contribute to the scholarship on PSFs, gender and space in two ways. First, we highlight the dynamics of space itself in enabling women to practice (in)visibility as a coping mechanism. Second, we argue that the persistent binaries of mother/worker, home/work invisibilize women’s socio spatial agency, that is, how women strategically (in)visibilize themselves, foregrounding how gender gets done in PSFs. These insights shed new light on why gender norms are perhaps slow to change in architecture and more broadly in PSFs and open-up new possibilities of change by allowing for the traversal of spatial and gender binaries.