The Role of Architecture in Systemic Gender Inequality: National Organization for Women's Headquarters

Abstract

Nowadays, the world is facing an ocean of social problems and different types of oppressions and systemic inequality from east Asia all the way to North America can be found regarding this issue. With pointing social oppression out, a long list of groups of people is considered including immigrants, religious people, LGBTQ, black society, native Americans, Latinos and etc. as well as the difficulty of relationship between these people with other groups. Many of these problems are the outcomes of the government behavior and written laws in the country's constitution which caused an inequality in society and daily life.

Having said that, one of the most important questions is "what is the role of architecture here or what more can architecture do to solve any of those social problems?" In fact, the role of the governments is determinative and some of the social problems should be solved by the government, but architecture, in many different programs, could educate people to learn more about each other which in this case, in society scale, lots of social inequalities would be mitigated.

While looking at several studies about social oppression and learning more about different types of groups in society, I decided to narrow down the strata to find an appropriate audience for my thesis project. In my opinion, one of the most interesting group of people in every society all around the world is women. My main focus in this research is to discuss more about women's future in society and argue political issues that women are facing nowadays. According to the rich history of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and the wide range of activities that this organization has done for women's rights, I decided to choose NOW as my case study to re-imagine a new Headquarter at the middle of the Washington D.C in a very fast growing Navy Yard neighborhood at the intersection of the M Street SE which is main corridor of this neighborhood and New Jersey Avenue SE which is a direct way to the U.S. Capitol Building . To sum up, my goal in this project is to bring architecture to help the oldest women's organization in the U.S. in a new decade of politics for women.