page_title: Susana Torre
section_title: Architectural and design practice
hierarchical_section_title: Susana Torre / Architectural and design practice
caption_attribution_description: Photograph of house designed by Susana Torre. w:Susana Torre
context_page_description: Susana Torre is an Argentine-born American architect, critic and educator, based in New York City and in Carboneras, Almeria, Spain. Torre has developed a career that combined “theoretical concerns with the actual practice of building” and architectural and urban design with teaching and writing. Torre was the first woman invited to design a building in Columbus, IN, “a town internationally known for its collection of buildings designed by prominent architects.”
  In 1977 Torre organized and curated the first major exhibition of American women architects, and edited the book Women in American Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective. The exhibition opened at the Brooklyn Museum in 1977 and traveled across the United States and to the Netherlands. The exhibition and book of the same title, which she edited and to which she contributed three essays, pioneered work in this field. Torre was also a co-founder of Heresies, A Feminist Journal on Art and Politics; was a member of the editorial collectives of Heresies 2: Patterns of Communication and Space; and Heresies 11: Making Room: Women in Architecture; and served on the editorial board of Chrysalis between 1976-1978.
context_section_description: Torre's architectural and design practice is “based upon an intense theoretical, ethical, and civic sense of architecture and urban design.” According to architect and author John Loomis, her buildings and theoretical projects “bring together cultural, social and regional themes.” Torre's designs have encompassed a range of scales; from her book cover for Lucy Lippard’s From the Center to her park proposal for Ellis Island, New York Harbor, they have included building renovations, residential design and public buildings. Among her best-known projects are Fire Station Five in Columbus, Indiana; the Ellis Island, New York Harbor, park proposal; the Clark and Garvey Houses in The Hamptons, New York; the Schermerhorn Hall renovation for Columbia University, and the Consulate of the Ivory Coast in New York City. These and other award-winning designs have been published in the US, Latin America, Japan, France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Australia and are included in standard reference sources such as Encyclopedia of 20th Century Architecture, Contemporary Masterworks, Contemporary Architects, and Dictionnaire de l’Architecture du XXᵐᵉ Siècle. She was the first woman to gain one of the highly competitive public commissions in Columbus, IN, where her Fire Station #5 (described below) is listed in the Whitney Guide to 20th Century American Architecture: 200 Key Buildings. In 2008 she completed the residential community of seven seafront houses where she now lives with her husband, writer and sociologist Geoffrey E. Fox, in Carboneras, Spain. The design was based on her 1973 studies on spatial matrixes and indeterminate functions , where “a serial flexibility allows symbol to collaborate with function and marks the allegorical elements in daily life.”
  Torre has devoted much of her professional life to theorizing the relationship of buildings to their physical and cultural contexts; and the way feminist concerns and cultural and regional identity can be expressed in architectural form and function. One of her buildings, “Firehouse #5 (finished in 1987) was the first firehouse designed specifically to integrate women in the firefighting force. The design, which eliminated dorm-style sleeping and promoted bonding in the kitchen rather than the locker room, was adopted nationwide.”  “While leaving the safety assumptions of the type intact, Torre’s building has created a typological invention through her challenge of program assumptions based on gender.” “It is a “rare example of how a feminist perspective can alter both the spatial organization, influenced by social conventions, and the form of the building.”
  
  Torre was one of the architects selected to represent the United States at the International Exhibition of Architecture, La Biennale di Venezia, Italy, in 1980. Her drawings and projects have been exhibited in numerous venues, including the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York City; Fort Worth Arts Center; Institute of Contemporary Arts, Chicago; La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art; Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis; and Yale University Art Gallery. Her drawings are collected in the City of Columbus, IN, Architectural Archives; Columbia University Avery Library Dept. of Drawings & Archives, Avery Library centennial drawing archive; the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Wellesley MA; and The International Archive of Women in Architecture, Virginia Tech Libraries, Special Collections, Blacksburg, VA, which also houses a collection of her papers from 1977 to 1988.
caption: Garvey House, Amagansett, NY
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