Visiting Scholar Katie Lloyd Thomas presents her research:

In the United Kingdom, the naming and selection of building products—or ‘shopping’ on behalf of the client—only became part of the architect’s role during the vast expansion of mass manufacturing in the 1930s. These radical transformations, largely overlooked today, were enthusiastically embraced and debated by the profession at the time, and by modernist architects in particular. Drawing from the CCA trade catalogue collection, this talk will explore striking differences between how products were championed and brokered in North America and the UK: on the one hand, by forthright male sales representatives and dazzling exhibitions; and on the other, by emancipatory discourse and the ‘feminisation’ of technical products, displays, and work.

Katie Lloyd Thomas is Professor of Theory and History of Architecture and co-director of the Architecture Research Collaborative at Newcastle University. She co-founded the feminist collective taking place, co-edited Industries of Architecture (Routledge Critiques, 2015) with Nick Beech and Tilo Amhoff, and has published widely on materiality and technology, and their intersections with architectural concepts, practice, and gender. A version of ‘The Architect as Shopper’ will be published in Architecture and Feminisms: Ecologies, Economies,Technologies (2017).

Katie Lloyd Thomas was a Visiting Scholar at the CCA in 2017.