The City of Ladies

In The Book of the City of Ladies, 15th century medieval author and first-person narrator Christine de Pizan describes constructing an imaginary city, a utopia built and inhabited completely by women, and an allegory for female agency. She creates three anthropomorphised Virtues, each representing their name: Reason, Rectitude, and Justice. These female virtues guide the protagonist, Christine, through the design and construction of the allegorical city.

The Virtues bring Christine one gift each: a mirror, a ruler, and a vessel. These gifts are symbolic literary devices representing each respective virtue through allegory, while simultaneously representing three measuring devices to construct the city and build an architectural archive of women’s achievements throughout history.

This design-led research investigation interrogates how an allegorical architectural project can provide a framework for the design of an urban master plan that spatialises Christine’s literary allegory as an architectural representation. The project’s program is a memorial archive of women’s contributions to the arts, which conveys the allegory of female agency within an allegorical architectural design outcome. It proposes to reinterpret the architectural and urban elements depicted in the book’s overlapping metaphors as an architectural outcome. The methodology for this investigation interweaves contemporary architectural research propositions from three female theorists, who take on the role of the three Virtues in this thesis: British critical theory specialist Penelope Haralambidou, New Zealand architectural theorist Marian Macken, and British spatial theorist Laura Hourston Hanks.

Penelope Haralambidou’s essay “The Allegorical Architectural Project as a Critical Method” argues that the allegorical architectural project can be used as a critical method for design research. This thesis tests Haralambidou’s proposition by examining the literary themes and devices of The Book of the City of Ladies and reinterpreting them as architectural outcomes.

Marian Macken’s book Binding Space: The Book as Spatial Practice proposes “thinking through the book as a form of spatial practice” (1). This thesis tests Macken’s proposition by examining the essential qualities and characteristics of The Book of the City of Ladies literary framework, reinterpreting its principal literary devices as an allegorical architectural project sited within a codex.

Laura Hourston Hanks’s book chapter “Writing Spatial Stories: Textual Narratives in the Museum” proposes storytelling as a method for curation by “exploring manifold relationships between text and museum space” (21). This thesis examines how a narrative approach to curatorial methods can enable essential narratives to be experienced and understood as an architectural outcome. Haralambidou, Macken, and Hanks’s propositions underpin the framework of the thesis by providing unexpected new design tools for architectural representation. The thesis’s design framework proposes to reposition The Book of the City of Ladies as an allegorical provocateur for the design of a three-dimensional architectural representation that re-imagines a contemporary take on a city constructed and inhabited solely by women.