Audacious and daring, courageous and brave, many words can be used to describe the women who made history with structures, furnishings, and objects that inspire awe and transformed the ways we navigate space, but none as poignant and precise as the word “bold,” encapsulating the confidence required to take risks and reimagine new ways of being in spaces that strike an emotionality of wonder and harmony of line and color. This year on Women’s Day, we celebrate the women of architecture and design as the embodiment of bold, risk takers who break the mold and make waves with designs that are undeniable in character and forthright in message, often groundbreaking in style and breathtaking in form.
From the pioneering early modernism of Charlotte Perriand, to the contemporary marvels of avant-gardism Anna Lindgren and Sofia Lagerkvist, from the sinuous, flowing forms of Zaha Hadid to the dancing bubbles and branching discs of a Lindsey Adelman lighting object, the work of women in design are as divergent and bespeckled with variety as are the women who made them, some bathing pieces in color in ways never before seen as with Paola Lenti and Patrizia Moroso, others finding remarkable ways to balance a neutrality of tone with delightfully novel shapes, as with Amanda Levete and Nao Tamura. Ingenious, innovative, and rousing at its core, women have fostered a revolution of progress in design and architecture, whether reshaping notions of function and form as grounded within the lived experience as with Eileen Gray’s E 1027 home, enveloping the modern in a rich tapestry of material and color as with Patricia Urquiola’s SenguBold and BioMbo, or reinventing public space with ambitious and explosively colorful geometries as with Camille Walala’s captivating corridor of color and pedestrian walkway in London.
Throughout history, bold women have rewritten the rules of engagement in design and architecture with experiments in new technologies like Nao Tamura’s Turn+ lantern and aesthetics that balanced a previously male-dominated field with clean, organic spaces like that of a Florence Knoll office, lithe yet dynamic curves like a Zaha Hadid Node Vessel, or a delicate softening of material as with Meret Oppenheim’s fur-lined Object. As we reflect on the women who arrested our consciousness with grace and a self-assured verve, dauntless in spirit and radical in vision, we honor the women who continue to inspire a mind-altering amazement today, with work as inventive as it is tempered with emotion, passionate, sensual, and indeed above all, bold.
March 2024
