In the call for papers for this symposium, a worker's tool kit and a courtesan's reticule are cited to illustrate the difference between accessory as useful and as ornament. Presumably the courtesan's reticule is that which is ornamental and the worker's tool kit is useful. And yet ... a tool kit might be carefully aged to give an illusion of experience and a reticule might contain condoms. So who can say which type of accessory is more necessary to the work or even the very survival of the person that carries it.

There are two things that interest me in this illustration, one is the inherent crude polarisation of gender: a woman and her accessories are decorative and a man and his are useful. Although the text speaks of there being no sense in privileging either of these positions, it exists. What also interests me is the notion that an accessory carries with it an idea of identity. Can a worker be a worker without tools and can a sex worker survive without condoms? It seems that accessories are more than either just useful or ornamental but are integral to survival, legitimacy and identity.

Thus, accessories within accessories give clues. And so I want to access this notion of theory as accessory to architecture by combining these two interests and conducting a parallel investigation into another accessory: woman. In particular the way she has been accessorised in a certain building: the Barcelona Pavilion (fig 1). First built in 1929 for the Barcelona International Exhibition but demolished soon after, the regard for both the pavilion and its architect, Mies van der Rohe, was such that it was reconstructed in 1986.

I find myself in an odd position here because when I speak of woman I also have to speak as a woman. I cannot separate the accessorising of woman within architecture from my own search for survival, legitimacy and identity in this same world. They are entwined. And this search for a place in the world of architecture has been shadowed by a force that has constantly marginalised me and other women.

I began with a search for role models. I used to collect the names of women architects as some kind of evidence that before myself and my contemporaries there were others. They were the names of women who in earlier days had to fight society's stricture that married women did not work and so practised in partnership with their husbands. But her name would slip under his and not be seen again. Or women who chose career over family and never married. They were rarities, oddities and therefore unable to be classified. Or women whose interest in architecture was propelled by a middle class concern with helping the 'less privileged,' work firmly rooted in the domestic realm and so deemed of interest only to sociologists not to those compiling histories of architecture. Or women involved as patrons who supported, encouraged and guided the building of architecture.

One such name is that of Lilly Reich, Mies van der Rohe's seldom acknowledged collaborator. She is a shadowy figure, existing almost exclusively in the margins and footnotes of books, between the lines, and in the lapses and discrepancies of accounts of Mies' life and work. It is, however, a strong shadow. I believe that someone of importance cast it.

Lilly and Mies met sometime in the mid-twenties and in 1926 she moved her studio to Berlin from Frankfurt. Most historians mark this move as being the beginning of their collaboration^[1] which lasted until Mies emigrated to the States in 1938. This period includes the Barcelona Pavilion. That Lilly Reich has impacted on the work of Mies can not be denied.

Prior to working with Lilly, Mies was foundering badly in his attempts to translate his theoretical ideas of the early twenties into built form. Even as sketch designs the individual theoretical works are neither complete nor consistent. The 1923 Brick Country House, for instance, has plans and perspectives that are impossible to match up. With his first commission for a built modern work, the Dexel House, obtained in early 1925, Mies failed to progress further than a couple of small vague preliminary sketches.^[2] Mies' procrastination was legendary: "chronic dilatoriness and indecision [is] mentioned in all first-hand accounts of Mies,"^[3] and the work produced during their collaboration is marked by the speed of its execution.^[4] After the collaboration, Mies' work did not in general maintain the sensibility of the collaborative period:

There was a change in his later work - a new coldness, a relentless austerity that many found offensive ... Arthur Drexler spoke of Mies's 'freezing down' in America ... Philip Johnson agreed, 'An architecture of sensibility seemed more than he could bear.'^[5]

David Spaeth writes that "Reich's influence was less in the realm of ideas than in the application of those ideas which, prior to 1927, Mies was only beginning to address - colour, texture, and furniture."^[6] To describe Lilly's influence as being 'limited' to furniture and other such details (thereby implying a lesser significance) runs counter to classic Miesian lore which maintains that 'God is in the details.' Even if her influence is considered confined and limited only to the 'application' of Mies' ideas (denying her any design input) then her role must still have been absolutely critical and vital in producing the buildings described as Mies' masterpieces. For the success of the European work is precisely its realisation of ideas by attention to detail, colour, interiors and furniture.^[7] Lilly's skills place her at the very core of 'Miesian' architecture.

Collaboration was also denied by Mies. He maintained that: "When an idea is good and it is a clear idea - then it should only come from one man."^[9] In response to Gropius advocating collaboration in the creation of a building, Mies once said, "But Gropius, if you decide to have a baby, do you call in the neighbours?"^[10]

The erasure of Lilly Reich from the history of Mies then, was necessary to promote him to genius and his work to the realm of Art. But this view of architectural history requires not just the erasure of the work of a collaborator, it also requires the erasure of the work of women.

Genius in the art canon has always been an attribute of men: men who deviate from the traditional norm, transcend it and set new rules. Women (and people of different race) may also deviate from the proscribed rules and norms, but they do so from a different position. They are 'others,' struggling to be normal - and failing. Women basically do not "stand in the same relation to cultural traditions as do men."^[11] "Women perform lower-level conversions of nature to culture [children, education, cooking] but when the culture distinguishes a higher level of the same functions, the higher level is restricted to men."^[12] A woman's role in the production of art is tightly circumscribed: Chadwick argues that historians consistently attribute "to the woman artist ... diligence rather than invention, the locus of genius."^[13]

Lilly Reich is consistently portrayed dealing with the details of building with precisely such diligence rather than the flair attributed to Mies. Her work, influence and impact is modified to fit into acceptable cultural definitions of a woman's role, especially that of "behind every great man is a woman."^[14] Thus, she is defined as an interior designer or fashion couturière, (although her talents ranged widely enough to challenge any such classifications) and descriptions of her are of the "vine around the figure of a great man" variety.^[15] Reich is seen as having a purely administrative and supportive role, of carrying the weight of everyday life so that Mies might concentrate on another world.^[16]

This level of bias within the history books meant that even once I had found the names of women and uncovered their work it made no difference: no name carried the status of any of the men, regardless of talent. And then I discovered a strong history of women's involvement in building architecture. Reaching far back into pre-history, women were the original builders and for millennia in nomadic and so-called primitive cultures, women have designed, built, controlled, and owned the structures that sheltered them and their families. Adam's First House in Eden? Eve would have built it.

But this still wasn't enough, there always seemed to be a way the information I was finding could be sidelined: it was building not architecture ... it was interesting but not today's reality ... it was essentialism ... Something very complex was at work to keep me illegitimate and in the shadows.

In frustration I decided that nothing I could do or say could make any difference because I was missing the point. It meant nothing that there had been others and that I could prove that women had been involved in architecture since time began. It seemed I could never be legitimate as I was missing the most essential accessory required to be an architect: the phallus. But before I resigned forever from the field, I decided that there might be a clue in this overly simplistic and pessimistic analysis: that the body has some kind of hold on architecture.

The body has a long history in Western architecture. From Vitruvius via the Renaissance theorists such as Alberti, di Giorgio, and Filarete, and sealed into the very foundation of Western architectural thought is the idea that the symmetry and proportion evident in the human body are natural laws of beauty. Therefore, the form of the human body should generate architectural form, its proportions define architectural proportions, and its parts supply the measures necessary for building.^[17] The body centres the world and architectural rules and configurations.

But the body concerned is not ungendered. It is unquestionably male. Vitruvius writes of "a well-shaped man" and his words generated the classic drawing of a man centred in the circle and square (fig 2). But at the precise centre of this drawing/view that posits the male body controlling architecture, and forming a pure circle to the hands and feet is the navel. The navel marks the body's dependence on, and connection to, the body of woman. So, laying aside for the moment fears of biological determinism and essentialism, I began to further search for the body of woman in architecture

Investigation reveals some odd information about this sculpture by Georg Kolbe. It holds the curious distinction of being the only part of the composition to have survived the dismantling of the original 1929 pavilion. Although there was for over half a century a persistent rumour that the pavilion was held in storage in a warehouse somewhere in Spain (or Germany, or Iowa) potentially awaiting reconstruction, the truth is that all materials were sold to defray the high cost of the building.^[19] Not even the furniture survived. Reproductions were made from original drawings.^[20]

The statue is known by a number of names: The Dancer, Morning and Evening are all used but none with sufficient authority to be definitive. Hays^[21] and Frampton^[22] and the Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Art^[23]use The Dancer. Tegethoff^[24] and Constant^[25] write of Morning. In a similar vein Quetglas^[26] writes in Spanish of Amanecer translated as Sunrise in Quetglas^[27], Schulze^[28], Drexler^[29] and James^[30] all use Evening.^[31] Others sidestep the issue by writing of a 'statue of a dancer.'

In Euripides, Aphrodite says "I am mighty among men and they honour me by many names."^[32] This and other phenomena surrounding the statue seemed to me to refine it as a kind of ancient goddess figure. The goddess is commonly perceived in a triple form as virgin, mother and crone. She is the archetypal trinity representing a cyclical view of life ruled by the continuing roll and flow of the seasons; of birth, death and rebirth.^[33] She is often and most powerfully symbolised by the moon and her triple face portrayed by the phases of the moon. The three distinct names attributed to the statue are suggestive of a trinity and the names themselves are evocative of the phases. Morning: the waxing light of the new moon; Evening: the waning light of the old moon; and the pitch and pivot of the full moon reminds me of T. S. Eliot's lines: "At the still point of the turning world ... there the dance is."^[34]

The raised arms gesture is an ancient one; fig 4 is of a painted terracotta female figurine, the bird-faced goddess of pre-dynastic Egypt, with her arms raised to invoke the power of life:

One of the clan-ensigns of the Chalcolithic Age had been the uplifted arms so commonly depicted as a human gesture on funerary vases or clay figurines or the rock paintings of the desert, a gesture perhaps expressive of the invocation or reception of divine force. In the days of written texts this was the symbol of Ka, the single life-energy [potentiality].^[35]

Applied colour in the pavilion is most notably used in the other, like the statue, non-constructional but still architectonic elements of the pavilion: the white furniture, red curtains and black carpet. These are also the colours of triple goddess and correspond with phases of the moon: "the New Moon is the white goddess of birth and growth; the Full Moon, the red goddess of love and battle; the Old Moon, the black goddess of death and divination."^[36]

This overlap between the qualities and attributes of the statue and those of the goddess seems to me to mark a series of coincidences that implicate the statue as representing a goddess figure.

So, if the statue can be seen as an ancient goddess figure, might this make the Barcelona Pavilion a pagan temple?

That the pavilion might be seen as such is certainly a provocative, perhaps even a perverse, idea; and these observations might seem somewhat circumstantial, an interesting story but ... if it wasn't for the fact that the work of Mies, and the pavilion in particular, have consistently provoked comparisons to religious buildings.

Drexler states that "Mies has designed nothing but temples."^[37] Tegethoff writes of the statue in the pool being like the cult figure in the cella of a Greek temple.^[38] Glaeser suggests formal analogies with a Basilica.^[39] According to Scully, the basilica form is derived from the architecture of Greek temples to the Goddess Demeter. "Demeter's sites ... formed a link which ran beneath the normal surface of Greek design and connected the older architecture of the religion of the goddess with the new architecture of Christianity [the Basilica].^[40] Even earlier sacred spaces and temples link very strongly to the body of woman. Predating the Demeter sites are the sanctuaries at Malta where the plans have a clear correlation to the shape of carved goddess figures of the same era (fig 5).

What the body of woman probably represented at the time was "the conception of a pervading principle, not in this case their own creative power, but a life substance through which that power could act, conceived already in the form of maternal fecundity."^[41] What is being spoken of here is potency and power which seemed to belong to woman. As the source of the power, she was therefore deified as goddess and sacred places honoured her sacred body. Labyrinths were ancient sacred spaces that required ritual in order to be entered. They symbolised "the female womb, only penetrable if one is pure and perfect."^[42] Every time a sacred space was entered, it was the reenactment of entering the body of woman. Guidoni describes a ritual of the Australian aborigines which involves the use of a sacred pole, symbolic of "contact between the earth, the subterranean world and the sky as well as of the male sex ... [The pole] represents the link with the most sacred."^[43] If the phallus is the link with the most sacred, then that which is most sacred is the interior of the body of woman.

But perhaps this is not the question because there is another body of a woman that I feel a need to place in the pavilion: my own (fig 6). As a woman walking through the building, it disturbed and unsettled me. I felt alienated by it. The purity of its detail and space, its simplicity and the slick lines attract; but a woman alone in a foreign country is ever wary and weary of slick lines, the pick-up lines.

The pavilion's simplicity makes it seem almost bland. But what is disturbing for me is not this blandness, this seeming self-effacement; but the near total effacement of woman. Her position in the pavilion may be pivotal, but it is highly ambiguous: Lilly Reich is buried by history, the statue is bounded and frozen by walls, and if the body of woman ever underwrote the building it has long since been overshadowed.

This bondage reveals a powerful need to circumscribe and contain the body of woman. The presence of rules to control women in many cultures, past and present, marks a consistency so prevalent that Rapoport argues that the position of women within a culture has a decisive impact on the format and meaning of the whole built environment of that culture.^[44]

In Ancient Greece, the desire to control woman is clearly articulated. Women were never a part of that public world that has bequeathed us the great Greek temples and precincts. These places were for the citizens of the city who were men free-born, not slaves nor women. Their world was the house which (in stark contrast to the public architecture) had a straight-forward, utilitarian purpose namely the "shelter of moveable property."^[45] According to Euripides "a sympathetic wife is the greatest ktema (possession)."^[46] Women were possessions necessarily secluded to maintain legitimate child birth to ensure "the transfer of wealth with the right to citizenship from one generation of men to the next."^[47] Enclosure amounting to captivity, was an economic and legal requirement within the culture.

A further reason women had to be kept under control may have been because her body was once considered sacred. The Greek term muchos is the word for the women's quarters, but it can also refer to Hades (the underworld) and a prophet's shrine.^[48] Sanctity carries a notion of polluting: one can only enter a sacred space if properly prepared. The handling of sacred objects or the conducting of rituals is always subject to very detailed and precise instructions, for the sacred has the power to destroy. So too do women. Ruth Padel argues that Greek systems of thought held the view that woman can threaten male order and men's life and sanity because they are open to both passion and daemonic infiltration.^[49] Women endanger men by being enterable. Mark Wigley argues that woman was seen as not being able to control herself, and so she required walls to both contain and define her.^[50] She was polluting and needed to be edged and contained least she leak and contaminate the world.

The site of that deemed necessary control, seclusion and enclosure is the house. A certain fear of woman's openness to invasion which stems from both cultural and biological notions has continued through the centuries. Consequently, underlying architecture has been the idea that the house functions to enclose and control woman. A man's home is his castle, but kept within is woman: it is quite simply the container of woman. Within, she appears to be controlling it, embodying it even in poetic images, but is at the same time utterly trapped by it. Superficially only, does she command the walls that imprison her.

Luce Irigaray pinpoints this relationship as the foundation of male identity:

woman has been represented as the space or place by and in which man can find a position and locate himself. As the corporeal horizon of his existence, the mother cannot be seen as occupying a place of her own. She is space, place or 'home' and consequently has none herself ... Women, especially mothers, are considered the dwelling, home or haven from which man comes, his nostalgic place of origin. But this is a place the man must leave in order to create his own.^[51]

Rousseau believed that "when the mistress of the house goes wandering in public, her home is a lifeless body which is soon corrupted."^[52] Henrietta Barnet who founded the Hampstead Garden Suburb, regarded the woman's body as "the shell of the home."^[53] In this suburban house is literally embodied 'the feminine mystique' which Betty Friedan identified in the early sixties: a woman's place is in the home. And that home is "the stage set for the effective sexual division of labour ... a spur for male paid labour and a container for female unpaid labour."^[54] Architecture seems to exist to control the body of woman.

Yet even contained, woman still threatens. Although the apron-strings actually securely tie the woman to the house, there is a fear that they might too ensnare the man. Freud speaks of this fear in his investigation of the uncanny (unheimlich):

Freud makes much of the fact that ... one might see 'heimlich' [homely] as a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, 'unheimlich.'^[55]

I too have a fear, perhaps the fear of the trapped. I have felt muted, circumscribed and barely visible in this world of architecture. I have sat at drawing boards in frustration trying to ease the rigid lines drawn before me. I have wondered that maybe I was simply gilding the cage and blinding the bars of some kind of trap for myself and those for whom I was designing. I have sat in libraries reading, and felt the words cut and enter my body in unconsenting surgery. Words built on slithers of fact and slathers of assumptions slicing my body to twist and confuse and render it invisible, obscured, but above all silent. And I have feared that there was no other way of being, that I had no choice.

The condition of woman in architecture has been so bound and constricted and acts so against us, it implies the impossibility of women being architects ... almost. But before this argument assigns us a place settled deep within the status quo, we need to examine the controlling images and metaphors of the position. For within architecture, woman is tightly controlled and circumscribed, both in actuality and as an image. The male or masculine is seen to overlap the human, to represent the universal. But the body of woman has been bound tight within the role of maternity. So tight, that in architecture it is literally that of a mummy. Not only is she defined by her maternal function and her womb, she is also defined by the weaving of the bandages that bind her. In architecture, the womb is assigned to closure: either as a closure that failed or is unreliable because it rejects; or as the ultimate enclosure of a both safe haven or claustrophobic prison.

As it stands now, architecture can be seen as being constructed with piercing and painful foundations on the body of woman. In some traditions, the foundations of any new structure were slaked with a blood sacrifice. Yet although the body of woman lies at the foundations of architecture, it is actually a bloodless sacrifice (no less painful or destructive for women for being bloodless). Because it is precisely her blood that is excluded. For blood is life and life is necessarily that which has been excluded from architecture. Adolph Loos maintained that "the art in architecture is preponderant only in the tomb and the monument."^[56] Neither are for the living.

As a tactic, it is possible to let blood flow and to re-read the body of woman in architecture. This is not to argue a form of biological determinism, nor to invoke the nostalgia of a lost feminine paradise, but to consider its potential as an image and metaphor in other ways. To speak of the body of woman as more than the womb, or at the very least to speak more accurately of the womb. To approach the body of woman without fear, awe, reverence or other notions that create separation, isolation and alienation. To uncover other modes of the feminine than the maternal.

According to Irigaray "the relation to the body is always a symbolic one."^[57] It is possible to re-interpret and consequently alter symbols, which is why I speak of the body of woman, of her womb and of her blood, for through these metaphors and symbol we can access architecture in complexities that are otherwise denied. More complex relationships between sacred and profane, the living and the dead, enclosure and openness, and closing in and opening out are possible, I believe, than are ever dreamt of in the architecture that surrounds us at present.

What happens when the blood of woman is allowed to flow? Any liquid is deadly to foundations: it seeps in causing slip planes ... If we allow fluidity, we unfreeze the moment and may gain insights into conceptions of identity, legitimacy and survival. The accessory that aids and abets can also undermine and redefine. To see something as an accessory, it is necessary to place it and fix it in one point: it is to see bags and label them as useful or decorative. We are nothing without our accessories, they are a powerful tool. But equally, we can choose them.

If we allow the womb life, then it simply cannot be said that the womb is the dark secretive prison of nightmares. The foetus is rarely a secret from the world, and the womb is diaphanous with light filtered through skin and membranes and the sounds of the body and heartbeat; more like the tent of the vernacular tradition than the solid cave, that static enclosure with which it is usually identified. It nourishes and nurtures and then, although it might be difficult to leave, it opens out to the world. But more than anything the womb is about a nearness and touch that survives the physical separation of birth (the psychic separation occurs much later in the infant's life). Connection is possible without physical proximity or physical solidity which argues to a differing conception and/or re-interpretation of built form.

If we acknowledge an idea of nearness, then the narrow separations made by architecture and architectural history become unsustainable: separations that place the work of women like Lilly Reich and countless others in the shadows. An architecture premised on notions of the body of woman could not dissociate the living from the spiritual; nor articulate such separations; nor confine and define those that inhabit. It must open out to the world, yet retain an accommodation of intimacy. The flesh made form requires a fluidity (like of blood) if it is not to congeal into something that limits. It requires too a dynamic and ever-opening relationship with the world. An architecture of relationship, of interaction and dialogue between multiple stands, provides a key to potential futures accommodating the world in infinity and intimacy, rather than alienation and limits.

The pavilion suggested a new kind of spatial experience based on having no spaces closed but each space fluidly linked to adjacent indoor or outdoor areas. Roof, floor and walls, rather than forming a continuous enclosure, became separate ... Their independence was further accentuated by their different materials, whilst spatial continuity was emphasized ... It explored the expressive possibilities of the free plan ... The new spatial experience and the free plan make each other possible.^[58]

The use of words such as fluid, spatial continuity and free plan suggest the idea of an architecture of openness, of free-flowing dynamic space. It sounds like the kind of architecture that a new reading of the body of woman in architecture might engender.

The building is inscrutable to the point of frustration. Surfaces are mirror-like but offer little other than intriguing but ultimately banal reflections. At one level, the pavilion demands silence: of the visitor, of women, of the voicing of doubts. And yet it has generated volumes of noise in the form of written and spoken commentaries and explanations; including my own. In demanding silence, it offers reflection and allows 'opening-in' to occur. Such chances for reflection need be chosen, but they also need to be articulated against the silence, however imprecise the utterances may be. Which is why I speak of metaphors and myths, with words that somersault meanings. We need stories to help us exist in the world, and they also create and recreate it. Stories that place woman at the centre of architecture, re-write and re-interpret history and reveal violence, assist our understanding of how and who we are. They are, however, approximations not truths; but nor are the stories that have come down to us as if engraved on stone. When seen as the truth they can easily blind.

The Barcelona Pavilion was the product of lies and oppressions but it is also formed from a dynamic tension with concepts of truth. If we consider that its flaws tell the truth and its perfection lies, then actually what is open and open-ended about the pavilion is its ability to receive interpretations. Somehow it is able to accommodate the contradictions and the oppositions of all that anyone has ever said, and will say, about it. Maybe 'God' is not in the details but in the surfaces that sheen and reflect allowing multiple stories and possibilities.

The Barcelona Pavilion is not an answer nor the future. It should not be replicated, nor should we be forced into Mies and Lilly's brave new world. We do not need another hero - not the old Mies nor a newly resurrected Lilly - but we do need the lessons critiquing their building offer us. The pavilion has been regarded as an exhibition building exhibiting nothing but itself, with no utilitarian purpose. In effect it is a folly and follies reveal our dreams and nightmares. Its value lies in the multiple stories that can be woven into it. Without critique, it is barren and useless. For me, it stands as an embodiment of the idea that knowledge is meaningless if uninterpreted and unquestioned, and that understanding is a process of endless interpretation.

The pavilion is a hall of mirrors and flashing in the polished surfaces, shining in the reflections and disappearing into the glass can be seen ever-changing glimpses of other worlds, other architectures, other truths. When one route only to the truth (and architecture) is dominant the work, dreams and knowledges of women (and other marginalised peoples) are repressed. Other stories and routes provide us with a place to stand, necessarily temporary, from which we might re-imagine the world and thereby begin to re-construct it.