Masculine and Feminine in Architecture: A Hidden Language or a Cultural Projection?

Architecture has no biological gender, the book begins, yet people have long read strength into verticality and embrace into curvature, and it sets out to separate form from the interpretation of form. It moves through the dome, too rich in history to be reduced to a womb, the tower that pierces where the dome contains, the window as a negotiation between inside and outside, the door as a decision, and the Damascene courtyard with its small sky, water and jasmine hidden behind a modest exterior. Le Corbusier's chapel at Ronchamp shows concrete curving, Zaha Hadid's fluid lines command the city without timidity, and in Tadao Ando's Church of the Light a plain opening turns a strong wall into prayer, while the mosque joins the rising minaret to the embracing dome. Damascus, with its fortress and jasmine, noisy souq and silent courtyard, refuses to be assigned a gender, and the book turns to women as architects, Zaha Hadid and Kazuyo Sejima among them, who designed while history went on speaking of woman as a symbol. It concludes that great architecture escapes the dictionary, and that when an architect unites mass and void, light and shadow, fear and shelter, the building becomes something rarer: human.