The Architecture of Motherhood. Retrieving and Creating our Spaces

Abstract

Birth as a creative and complex act is, even today, undervalued, somehow hidden and subject to efficiency or performance criteria. Maternity wards are still being designed based on the same obsolete guidelines and therefore not focused on the needs of the individuals they should be created for: women mothers and babies. Our aim is that neither feminist theories nor gender issues get excluded at maternity wards. We would like them to pass the entrance doors in order to stick out and provide. Our work analyzes the way attention is given during birth to both mother and baby, as well as how pregnant and birthing women behave and relate to physical spaces. Birth rooms at maternity wards are still too often conceived as a reflection of our society: submissive spaces in a patriarchal system.