Architect Edit on the need for a rewrite

By any accepted norm, is feminist practice Edit a practice at all? On paper, it would seem not. Forming in 2018 with a proposal for the 2019 Oslo Architecture Triennale, the six postgraduate female students have yet to complete a physical building. All currently working, with varying degrees of time commitment, for different firms or in teaching, neither are they formally bound into the quotidian culture of a practice. And, with no studio space, they don’t technically have a base to work from. So why do they feel like one?

Perhaps it’s because Edit is not interested in norms but in pushing accepted social, gendered boundaries. Its Oslo work Gross Domestic Product subverted a vacuum cleaner to ‘question domestic labour and capitalist assumptions that housework is most efficient when done individually’. They reset the way of work: the GDP vacuum can only be used by three people. In 2020 during the Covid pandemic Edit looked at potential in the requisitioning of the domestic environment as a pedagogic space. Honey, I’m Homeschooled! saw it working with Open City in a programme of creative tasks charging kids to engage with their homes and look critically at the space about them, to generate collages that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Richard Hamilton’s This is Tomorrow. 

A year later, in 2021, it’s as if it channelled Richard Wentworth in its Barbican installation ‘How We Live Now’, to display the work of Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative. Like Fellini’s film 8 ½ , this was a show about the making of a show, expressed in the architectural language of the home. Timber studwork made dividers, plumbing pipes became tracks carrying curtains that could be drawn open to reveal the installation’s softness to its surrounding concrete, or closed to form intimate seating nooks; a feminised domain resisting the muscular megastructure around it.

As they are itinerant, I interview one half of Edit at the RIBA, a building that retains traces of male hegemony and imperial power. But that doesn’t stop Alberte Lauridsen, Hannah Rozenberg and Sophie Williams feeling right at home. Edit hung a washing line on the RIBA’s piano nobile balcony between its stone totems last year, not just to bring the pomp down a peg or two but to raise questions on gender bias and contemporary power relationships bound into the act of hanging out laundry. ‘In most leasehold contracts you can’t hang washing out to dry,’ says Lauridsen. ‘Now, cases of damp and mould are blamed on tenants by landlords because they do this indoors or put the kettle on – breathe even. If your environment can’t facilitate basic functions like this, architecture is simply failing its users.’

During our chat ideas slip and slide fluidly between the three, a result of time spent forging a sense of common purpose. Williams picks up where Lauridsen leaves off. ‘The laundry idea feels very British as it’s so bound into the class system and council estates. In Spain or Italy, it happily adorns streets, reminding us that laundry here is a cultural phenomenon; it’s not natural or inevitable that we need to hide “mess”.’ Rozenberg interjects with a broader idea of shared bathhouses and laundries born of ideas of hygiene as part of the ‘modern project,’ noting the recent Design Museum project of Edit’s Marianna Janowicz: ‘In her residency 1001 Drying Rooms she researched the now-lost laundry spaces of the GLC estate.’ Everything feels political about Edit, veering from the micro to macro, from domestic to societal, and of an energy much like FAT’s early interventions; they don’t so much sit in the RIBA as occupy it.

With four having met during their Masters at the RCA, all draw on experience in different aspects of the profession. Rozenberg works at set design and production company 59 Productions, while teaching at Birmingham. Williams is with Lambeth’s regeneration team working on community-based projects for grass roots organisations. Janowicz, an architect, formerly at the Design Museum, is on maternity leave, while Alice Meyer is an architect at Haworth Tompkins and Saijel Taank Nathwani is completing her Part III at David Chipperfield Architects. Lauridsen holds the Edit fort and teaches part-time at UCA Canterbury and LSA, whose think tank Radical Sharing – Redesigning the Housing Block for Public Luxury, sums up their fascinations, in part at least.

How do they find time to work together? They don’t indulge their political interests at the day jobs, explains Lauridsen, but do it after hours ‘around a kitchen table’. They too are subject to the vagaries of a capitalist market economy, whose very effects they seek to highlight: ‘With the precarity of the work, there’s a negotiation with how we progress without increasing overheads. We’d like our own space but that will only be through scaling up over time,’ she concedes. So its collaboration with DSDHA on Camden Central Somers Town masterplan is all the more  remarkable; Edit is designing a public realm at its Purchese St Open Space that is inclusive for all.

 ‘The pervading design view is that boys play and girls spectate: we want to question that assumption,’ says Williams. ‘To challenge hierarchies of sports spaces with “serving” spaces around them,’ adds Rozenberg. Edit is working with local youth groups and teenage charity ‘Make Space for Girls’ to tailor spaces for them. Fenced MUGAs with their single point of entry and exit and an ‘aggressive boundary’ can be intimidating to girls but for Edit it’s about not just security but groupings: ‘We want to include different types of play equipment and scales of seating depending on who you are, what mood you’re in and the size of group you want to hang out with that day,’ says Williams. It explains Edit’s fence-free, inclusive semi-circular hoop pitch and play spaces and furniture that are ‘tantalising and non-specific’.

Meanwhile, Edit’s public artwork with People’s Museum Somers Town continues, with GLA ‘Untold Stories’ funding. A riff on the group’s laundry theme, Camden is placing an installation of three laundry posts on highways land between St Pancras International and Euston stations. Edit seems almost surprised at how it has overcome risk mitigation procedures, since ‘there’s a vagueness about how these will actually be used,’ but it’s elated that Camden is enabling it.

In its work on the home, Edit feels the best way  of further interrogating this realm will be via an open-minded client willing to entrust it with a domestic extension (any offers?) but this doesn’t mean it hasn’t got one eye on the communality prize of larger scale housing à la Lacol architecture collective in Barcelona. The politics are riven through every scale it works at. ‘We need to radically rethink the way society lives together,’ presses Lauridsen. ‘The nuclear family as a unit of capitalist consumption simply doesn’t work in a climate crisis. It’s not just about building more efficiently but living more efficiently too.’ Getting to the nub of things, as any good edit should.