Women landscape architects in Sweden 1900-1950. Towards a professional identity by Associate professor Catharina Nolin, Dept of Art History, Stockholm University

Catharina Nolin, Konstvetenskapliga institutionen, Stockholms University

2007-2008

The aim of the project has been to investigate and analyse how women landscape architects in the first half of the 20th century gained a professional identity. Most women establishing themselves during this period hade both public and private commissions, but are today fairly unknown. The investigation is made thematically with gender and profession perspectives and focusing on the following questions in: How did the women find their ways into the profession, and how was their training organised? What were their possibilities and did they have other commissions than their male colleagues? What did their social and economic background look like? Did they publish themselves and did they participate in competitions? I have followed the original intentions, but for some women I have had difficulties with finding more accurate sources than already known.

Most important results

One of the most important results is that most women during the period were trained abroad (Denmark, Germany, England), mainly because they had difficulties in arranging the training period they needed to be able to enter the gardening schools, and that the special schools for women did not aim at a professional career. The women's own writings, ranging from presentations of their own design, debates and obituaries to handbooks, form an important research material. Here, their contributions to the discourse and their professional strivings become obvious. In studying their authorship I have been able to show how they theoretically and professionally connected to the occupation, how they consequently used their writings to present their own work and to participate in the professional debate about the aesthetic and practical dimensions of their profession.

That the women's sex could be an obstacle is obvious through the debate in the 1910s and 20s, focusing both on them as professional persons and their clothing and appearances. The Fredrika Bremer Association had a prominent position in striving after giving women the possibility to establish themselves within the field. The fact that most women stayed unmarried and that they were running their own offices is for me a sign of their difficulties in uniting work with marriage and children, and furthermore difficulties to get employments or work in public administrations, to advance and to have anything else than subordinated positions. Here, parallels to women architects are obvious.

The historiography of the 20th century landscape architecture has mainly had a male practice as a starting point, focusing on the men's work (big projects, urban parks, infrastructure etc). This has resulted in women's subordination, shown in the status of different types of commissions. One example is Inger Wedborn, whose invisible position in comparison with her long-standing partner Sven Hermelin, can be traced to the period after her death and to a historiography that stresses his role at the expense of her. My investigation of Hermelin's and Wedborn's work and authorship shows that they were more equal in their profession.

By using the creation instead of the creator as a starting point, women will get a more correct presence in the historiography. Most hopital gardens in the first half of the 20th century were designed by women, often in collaboration with well-established male architects. While the drawings for the houses often are in public archives, the drawings for the gardens rarely have survived, which makes it difficult to analyze the environments.

Private gardens seem to have been categorized as a women's domain long after they were made. As a matter of fact, private gardens were the most usual commission for both sexes in the beginning of the 20th century. There has been a tendency to connect private gardens with a women's practice and women's occupations at home. In deciding what a women's practice is, a gendered historiography has been constructed. Landscape planning by housing was one of Ulla Bodorff's most common commissions. Up to now her work has mainly been categorised as romantic functionalism and as a discreet design with the existing nature as a point of departure. In my research she stands out as an exceedingly initiated landscape architect capable of leading bigger building projects, including city planning issues, radical landscape transformations as well as plant planning in detail. The investigation is an important contribution to research on housing construction, which seldom includes landscape planning.

People's parks were one of Bodorff's most common commissions. In general, they have been studied as an isolated building type of the popular movement, but I can show that they quite often were planned in cooperation with the municipalities and that they served as urban parks. The great number of People's parks (nearly 100) and housing areas show that Bodorff had great impact on many people's ordinary lives, as well as having a leading role in a professional perspective. A comparison with international research shows similarities with the development in the US. Women established themselves at about the same time and worked under similar conditions, they have also been washed out from the historiography under similar circumstances. On the other hand, women established themselves earlier in Sweden than in the other Nordic countries.

Most important research result

The project has so far resulted in six publications (see list of publications), of which I regard the following as the most important: "Ester Claesson und die deutsch-schwedischen Beziehungen am Anfang des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts", Die Gartenkunst Heft 2 2009 and "Publicering och professionalisering. Om kvinnliga trädgårdsarkitekters författarskap som en väg till etablering och legitimering" in Bebyggelsehistorisk tidskrift no 60/2010. The reason for this is in the first case that I have been able to analyse Ester Claesson's work in relation to an international as well as a Swedish context, and to state more precisely her work in Germany. Claesson is often introduced as inspired by the British Arts and Crafts tradition, but I would like to stress the influences from Joseph Maria Olbrich and Paul Schultze-Naumburg, and the meaning they attached to her work, expressed through her leading position at their offices and how she later on introduced them to a Swedish audience as some of the most important pioneers within the field. Olbrich is often described as the Great Artist managing all the projects on his own, but I can show that Claesson had a leading position at his office and that she was working independently on her projects.

In the second article, I can show that women used publications as a means of gaining establishment and legitimacy, and as a way of participating in professional debates and discourses. They often had a defined strategy in establishing a young profession in a professional context and to establish themselves as active participants in defining a profession for both men and women on equal terms. I am preparing a manuscript for a monograph, an essay on Ulla Bodorff and a contribution to an American anthology on women landscape architects.

New research questions

New research questions generated during the project deal with women landscape architects in relation to the institutionalised cultural heritage. The very limited discussions concerning gender in relation to cultural heritage opens for questions such as what are we protecting and whose work are we protecting? Does gender have any role when it comes to a discussion about our common cultural heritage? No work by a woman landscape architect is for example listed.

Presentations

Presentations at seminars, conferences, lectures etc:
"Kvinnliga trädgårdsarkitekter i Sverige under 1900-talets första hälft. Mot en professionell yrkesidentitet", research seminar and lecture, Dept of Art History, Stockholm University 2008.
"Arkitekter, trädgårdsarkitekter och allmänheten. Om 1930- och 40-talens yrkesdebatter inom trädgårdsområdet", paper, Forum för trädgårdshistorisk forskning 2010.
"Ester Claesson - Schwedische Gartenarchitektin und unbekannte Mitarbeiterin von Joseph Maria Olbrich und Paul Schultze-Naumburg", paper at the research network Frauen in Gartengeschichte annual conference, Stralsund, Germany 2010.
"Landscape planning, social aims and an eye on eternity. On Ulla Bodorff's creative activity",
lecture, master course Landscape Design Studio, School of Architecture, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm 2011.
"Landscape architects and women landscape architects. One or two histories of landscape architecture?", paper at "Uncertainties: Concepts, Aesthetics and Values. Research in Progress at the Dept of Art History, Stockholm University with Janet Wolff 2011.
"1900-talets begravningsplatser - ett kulturarv värt att bevara? Conference on ecclesiastical Cultural Heritage, Dept of Art History, Uppsala University 2011.
"Upphovsman: okänd kvinna. Om östgötska parker och trädgårdar skapade av kvinnliga trädgårdsarkitekter", lecture, Östergötlands museum 2011.

Papers at international conferences in 2012:
"Landscape architecture, historiography and today's practice", the conference Architectural history and practices, at the Dept of Architecture, Chalmers and the Dept of Conservation, Gothenburg May 2012.
"Women landscape architects, cultural heritage and recognition", the session "Theorizing Gender in Heritage Studies" at the conference Re/theorization of Cultural Heritage Studies, ( Association of Cultural Heritage Studies), Gothenburg, June 2012.
"Modernist residential areas in Sweden - a cultural heritage worth preserving?", 12th International Docomomo Conference, "The Survival of Modern - From Coffee Cup to Plan", Helsinki, August 2012.
"Gender and class issues in relation to urban space and green areas in Sweden c. 1940 to 1970" 11th International Conference on Urban History, Prague, September 2012, (European Association of Urban Historians).