The presentation of the NAM tool (Navigating Architectures for Women) will take place on Monday, November 28 at 12:30 p.m. in the auditorium of the Higher Polytechnic School IV of the University of Alicante
The application for mobile devices is part of the knowledge transfer section of this research project funded by the Generalitat Valenciana and is accessible and free for anyone interested.
The project “Situated Perspectives: Women’s Architecture in Spain from Peripheral Perspectives, 1978-2008” of the University of Alicante will publicly present the mobile application NAM (Navigating Women’s Architectures), a tool with which it is intended to open to the public the results of This research funded by the Generalitat Valenciana.
NAM (Navigating Women’s Architectures) is a mobile application that collects and locates the works of women’s architectures studied in the “Situated Views” project and is presented as an open and easily accessible resource.
The presentation ceremony will take place next Monday, November 28, at 12:30 p.m., in the auditorium of the Escuela Politécnica Superior IV on the university campus and will be attended by the vice-rector for Transfer, Innovation and Scientific Dissemination of the UA, María Jesús Pastor Llorca, the general director of Ecological Innovation in Construction of the Generalitat Valenciana, Nuria Matarredona Desantes, and Elia Gutiérrez Mozo, architect, professor at the UA and main researcher of the project.
As Gutiérrez Mozo explains, “we wanted to launch the application to the public when we have added the first 100 works, of which 78 are in the Valencian Community and the other 22 in the rest of Spain. This is so because the project starts from the territory where it has been granted and produced towards the rest of the country, in that condition of peripheral perspectives and situated views that is inherent to it”.
In the same sense, Gutiérrez Mozo comments that “the project ends in December 2023, so we aspire to have, on that date, ten times more content than the current one. These works that will be added can be seen in the application in real time as we have them analyzed and we publish them. To date, there are more than 50 names of architects of all geographical origins and all ages that the tool houses.
This application, which can be downloaded for free on Google Play and the App Store, offers continuous content updates. On the one hand, through its interaction with Google utilities, it geolocates the works throughout the territory. This allows you to select points of interest and, with them, generate and save personalized routes based on different search parameters such as authorship, type, use, scale or proximity of the works you wish to visit, among others.
On the other hand, each work also includes a file accessible from the device that contains basic information (author, year of the project and completion, surface, etc.), photographs, graphic documentation, bibliography and other links and explanatory texts that give account of the research performed for each entry.
The audience for this application is extensive and ranges from architecture professionals to non-experts, such as tourists who are interested in acquiring knowledge on urban and rural routes and cultural circuits. In addition, the educational community is also included, which allows teachers from schools and institutes to show their students the references of women’s architecture.
“Situated Looks”
The research project “Situated Views: Women’s Architecture in Spain from Peripheral Perspectives, 1978-2008”, based at the University Institute for Gender Studies Research (IUIEG) of the University of Alicante, began in 2021 and has a duration of three years. Its main researcher is Elia Gutiérrez Mozo, professor of Architectural Composition in the Department of Graphic Expression, Composition and Projects at the University of Alicante, and completes the IUIEG team with Ana Gilsanz Díaz and José Parra Martínez, both also professors of Architecture at the University of Alicante, and the participation of researchers from the universities of Malaga, Oviedo, Zaragoza, Seville, the polytechnics of Madrid and Barcelona and the private university CESUGA in Coruña.
The main objective of the research project is to qualitatively address the scope and idiosyncrasy of the architectural production carried out by female architects in Spain between the Transition years and the context of the 2008 economic crisis which, due to its impact on construction, has given rise to a new professional paradigm in architecture.
