One of the reasons I have got interested in the issue as to how the work of women architects is documented is while going through the copy-edited text of my book on post-war museums (due out next year).

One of the museums which is indisputably important – important in a totally different way to the Centre Pompidou – is the Musée d’Orsay: important as a conversion of a historic building, adopting a more historicist method of display. Yet, in finding out about the work of Gae Aulenti, both in Paris and internationally (she designed the Museum of Asian Art in San Francisco), her work seemed oddly disregarded, not much written about, even though she died quite recently in 2012. If you look at her work and that of Denise Scott Brown and Eldred Evans, there does seem to be a common thread of a tough and intelligent approach to the design of interiors as well as exteriors, which was not valued at the time and has led to them being marginalised in the secondary literature. Or maybe this is just gender stereotyping.