Cabinet of stories: rethinking the archive of women-architects under state socialism

Hardly a minority within the architectural profession in state-socialist countries, women often lacked access to leadership positions, and hence their names have been absent from institutional archives. To recover their legacy, this article thus proposes a rethinking of the notion of the archive itself. To do so, it develops the concept of ‘the cabinet of stories’: a collection of heterogeneous material and immaterial fragments. Collectively, these fragments allow not for the reconstruction of a monolithic individual ‘oeuvre’, but rather for that of the architect’s lived experience, in which the struggle for creativity and the fight against patriarchy were intimately intertwined. Such a concept, the article argues, responds to the self-perception of many state-socialist female professionals, who rejected liberal feminism in favour of ‘women’s movement’, which aimed at achieving professional success without sacrificing family and femininity.