by Jade French

Jon Astbury is Co-Curator of How We Live Now, a current Barbican exhibition that explores a series of important questions about our public spaces and designed environments. He takes us through the evolution of this multi-layered project.

“Our approach with How We Live Now was to broadly demonstrate to visitors how our buildings and spaces are not neutral and are shaped by a dominant set of ideas — ideas that too often exclude marginalised groups and voices. The work of Matrix (a radical 1980s feminist architecture co-operative) provided a way into this conversation, with a body of work that is little-known due to exactly this process of marginalisation. 

Exhibiting the Matrix archive took place alongside the development of the archive itself — the Matrix Open feminist architecture archive — which created a really interesting dialogue around what exactly that archive should be, how it should be treated, and importantly how it should be displayed. 

While the work focuses on how buildings and architecture can work better for women, it also offers a way into thinking about how this intersects with race, ethnicity, class and sexuality.

Rather than show Matrix in isolation, the exhibition ends with some examples of contemporary groups who have taken on some of these different ideas of who space is for and how we can make it work better for everyone, such as Part W, muf, Black Females in Architecture, taking place and the exhibition’s designers, Edit. 

There are also two contemporary films: Studwork by Winnie Herbstein, which considers how building trades are gendered through a focus on several groups in Glasgow and Street 66 by Ayo Akingbade, which looks at the work of Ghanaian housing activist Dora Boatemah. 

A key consideration for this project was to avoid treating the Matrix archive as an incredibly precious thing, to avoid valorising it. We wanted the questions raised by the materials to feel relevant and active and this required objects themselves feeling accessible too. This was achieved in part through small gestures, such as creating facsimiles of things like leaflets and magazines so that they can be handled instead of sitting behind glass or in frames. 

Matrix’s work was far more focused on the processes of design and architecture and how these could be made more accessible than it was on completed buildings. The more conventional ways of exhibiting architecture — through drawings and models — make it difficult to reveal or highlight some of these complex processes and discussions, so it was crucial that we included a range of different work and work from some of the many groups connected to Matrix.

Feminist architecture and design is about a process of design that listens to the needs of those who are going to use it instead of imposing a top-down approach based on assuming the architect will know these needs best. 

Matrix used several methods to work with the communities they designed for — methods which were often incredibly simple and easy to deliver in order to make architectural thinking accessible to all. These included using lengths of ribbon to demonstrate room sizes, demountable models where walls could be removed and the internal configuration discussed. The ‘brick picnic’ was the name given to a walking tour of London that Matrix and the Jagonari group went on, viewing other buildings to think about what type of brick they might like to use for the Jagonari centre. 

All of Matrix’s work was publicly funded and much of it was for other radical women’s groups. Some examples in the exhibition include the Dalston Children’s Centre and Jumoke Nursery, both of which involved creating a building in line with values of non-hierarchical teaching and childcare, anti-racism, anti-sexism and anti-heterosexism, and it is interesting to see how the design of a building can attempt to represent these ideas.

The reality of our built environment is that it still perpetuates many of the ideas that Matrix was challenging, and many of the conversations that Matrix’s work picks up on are still ongoing. Ultimately the work, and the exhibition, is about demonstrating how we might give everyone the license to think about and change how our built surroundings work for us, rather than treating them as part of a conversation that we have no access to.

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