Ecofeminism, Myth, and Maquis: The Sparoza House and Garden, 1962 to the Present

Objective

This project will investigate the contributions of non-professional women to modern architecture and environmental stewardship from the mid-twentieth century to the present. It emphasizes women’s labour in ecological care, domesticity, and community building while highlighting their involvement in the creation, preservation, and circulation of modern spaces in a period of environmental crisis. It focuses on the house and garden designed for British urban planner Jaqueline Tyrwhitt in 1962 and later cared for by the non-profit organization Mediterranean Garden Society, founded by Sally Razelou and run by volunteers since 1994, in Sparoza, Attica, Greece. The project will use an ecofeminist lens to examine the intersections among gender, environment, caretaking, community organisation, and modern architecture and ask how the personal stories, individual circumstances, social conditions, and plural voices of transnational actors intersect in the built environment. Through an examination of archival materials, architectural observations, and oral history, the project will interrogate patriarchal and mythic associations of women and nature. In so doing, it will reveal non-normative models of domesticity and gardening that women created through new social and professional subjectivities. Against conventional narratives of singular professional achievements usually ascribed to male architects, it assesses non-architect women’s spatial agency in using and shaping cultural landscapes with collective memory and intimate attachment and challenges gendered and age-related hierarchies embedded in the histories of modern landscapes. It will contribute to the existing literature on gender and architectural and landscape history with its particular focus on transnational and collaborative care.