Overview

The School of Architecture and Planning at the University at Buffalo (UB) is hosting a public lecture by María Novas Ferradás as part of the Stratigakos Fellow Lecture series. The event takes place in Buffalo, New York, and belongs to the fields of architectural history, theory, and gender studies in the built environment.

Focus

The lecture, titled Hidden Histories. Hearing Silences., examines the omissions, gaps, and overlooked narratives in architectural history and theory. It critically interrogates how architectural knowledge is produced, who gets included in the historical record, and what the consequences of neglected histories are for the built environment today. Ferradás also explores ficto-critical approaches as a method for rethinking and reshaping architectural histories.

This connects directly to a wider conversation about who shapes architectural history and whose contributions get documented. ArchUp’s coverage of women in architecture and the fight for inclusivity in the profession provides a useful frame for understanding the structural conditions that produce the historical silences Ferradás is working to address.

Program

The event is a single public lecture. Ferradás will draw on her research into the contribution of women’s organisations and some of the first women architecture graduates in the Netherlands to postwar housing design, examining how their work was recorded, attributed, or erased in the archive. Her case studies include the work of non-graduated architect Guus Schreuder-Gratama, whose plans were preserved in municipal archives under a male engineer’s signature.

The lecture raises methodological questions about how historians access and interpret evidence when the record itself has been shaped by exclusion. For those interested in how gender has shaped architectural practice and education over time, ArchUp’s analysis of gender dynamics in architectural practice offers a parallel lens on the profession’s ongoing struggle with representation and equity.

“Architectural history is not a neutral record. It is a set of choices about what to preserve, what to name, and whose work counts.”

The lecture is approved for 1.5 AIA Learning Units. Those following the broader question of how feminist movements have shaped urban design will find additional grounding in ArchUp’s documentation of female-led architectural practices redefining the field, which maps how women architects have built parallel histories outside the dominant canon.

Audience

The lecture is open to the public and relevant to architects, architectural historians, researchers, educators, and students engaged with questions of history, theory, representation, and gender in the built environment. It qualifies for AIA continuing education credit.

Event Details

✦ ArchUp Editorial Insight

Ferradás’s research performs the very act it theorises: recovering evidence of architectural contribution that was systematically obscured by professional gatekeeping and gendered archival practices. The case of Schreuder-Gratama, whose work was filed under a male engineer’s name, is not an isolated anomaly but a structural condition of how professional recognition operated in mid-twentieth century architecture. What makes this lecture particularly relevant to current practice is its methodological dimension: if the archive itself is unreliable, then so is any historical account built on it, including the canons that architecture schools continue to teach. Ficto-critical approaches, which Ferradás draws on, offer one way of working with incomplete evidence, though their legitimacy within a discipline still largely oriented toward empirical documentation remains a contested space. The lecture’s placement within a Stratigakos fellowship, dedicated precisely to uncovering hidden histories, signals institutional recognition of this gap, even if the mainstream curriculum has yet to fully absorb it.

Closing Note

The lecture addresses a structural problem in how architectural knowledge is produced and preserved. Its relevance extends to any practitioner or educator working with historical material as the basis for understanding the present state of the field.