Inaugural Lecture: Professor Barbara Penner

Barbara Penner’s inaugural professorial lecture explores feminist architectural history through the life and exile of architect Ella Briggs.

About

Barbara Penner will deliver her inaugural professorial lecture 'Briggs, Biographies, Blue Plaques: Reflections on Feminist Architectural History'.

Feminist architectural historiography is flourishing. New biographies, monographs, and the first global encyclopaedia of women architects, together with renewed public interest in commemorative schemes such as Blue Plaques, are part of this current boom. This talk explores how feminist aims and methods have played a significant role in reshaping and revitalising these genres, opening up exciting new possibilities for writing the histories of women architects.

The entry point for these reflections is my recent contribution to the collective biography Finding Ella Briggs (Princeton University Press, 2025). Although little known today, the Austrian-Jewish Briggs was the most eminent female refugee architect to Britain. When she arrived in London in 1936 and set up a studio in Gower Street, Bloomsbury, she was a well-established European architect, one of only two women to build major housing projects in ‘Red Vienna’.

Barbara traces the story of Briggs’s often precarious career in exile and explores how feminist life-writing can illuminate complex themes of exile and resilience, exclusion and agency in architecture.

Please note this event has limited capacity and operates on a first-come, first-served basis. Doors close at 18:40.

Speakers

Barbara Penner is Professor of Architectural Humanities at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. She is the author of Bathroom and Newlyweds on Tour, and co-editor of Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects. Her writing has long engaged with feminist themes through co-edited collections ranging from Gender Space Architecture to Sexuality and Gender at Home. Her recent publications include contributions to Post-war Housing and Well-Being, Women Writing Architecture, and the collective biography Finding Ella Briggs. She wrote the foreword to the reissued classic Modern Housing by Catherine Bauer. From 2021–23, she held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, during which she developed her forthcoming book Subject to Design on the influence of housing research on American homes. She is a contributing editor to Places Journal.

Iain Borden is Professor of Architecture and Urban Culture at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. His research focuses on architecture, cities, and culture, with particular interests in skateboarding, urban experience, and the social life of space.

Jane Rendell is Professor of Critical Spatial Practice at Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. An architectural designer, writer, and educator, she explores the relationships between architecture, art, feminism, and the practice of site writing.

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/events/2026/mar/inaugural-lecture-professor-barbara-penner