Marriage and the school of architecture in the 1940s: The case of B. (Lisbon, 1926-)

Abstract

This paper is about the oldest woman architect alive in Portugal (Lisbon, 1926-); B., the initial of the petit nom she was given as a child, entered the architecture course at the former Lisbon School of Fine Arts (EBAL) in 1944 and finished it in 1950. This was not common at the time. In Portugal, in the 1940s, a woman's role was generally that of housewife and caretaker. Having a degree beyond 17 was an exception attributed to upper-class and cultivated families. However, B. faced two significant opposite influences in her journey with architecture. First, her father, the painter Jaime Martins Barata, used pressure on her to study architecture. Second, her marriage to another student from the same school led her to step away from actively practising architecture and prevented her from completing the final examination (CODA) required for taking on actual responsibility over projects. This peculiar discrepancy between her married life and her father's wish takes us to question Portuguese's society generation gap of the 1940s. Today, B. is recognised for her lifelong talent in craftwork and, above all, as an illustrator. What influence did her marriage have on the vocational direction of her life? Was architecture school just an occupation?