Susana Torre is an Argentine-born architect who has worked primarily in the United States, where she studied at Columbia University and later chose to settle. Her relocation coincided with the onset of Argentina’s Dirty War, a period of state terrorism during which the military dictatorship carried out a systematic campaign of repression against those it identified as political opponents.
Her practice spans a wide range of scales and formats, including built work, from interiors to urban plans, as well as theoretical writing, exhibitions, and a sustained career as a lecturer and educator. Throughout her work, she has consistently engaged with feminist culture and practice, examining how a progressive role of women in society can be expressed and encouraged through architecture.
Her 1970–1972 project, House of Meanings, is a theoretical proposal that was later partially translated into two specific projects. A central concern throughout Torre’s practice is “the tension between the ‘completeness’ of objects and the ‘incompleteness’ of design as a process”, the built form and the indeterminate and open-ended process of dwelling and constructing a community which evolves over time. This dialectic is clearly articulated in the House of Meanings, conceived as an open-ended matrix of parallel walls that can be incrementally completed at multiple levels through the addition of modules, a three-dimensional square grid presented as three to four metres but which could take different dimensions once applied to a specific context. The project proposes a form of inhabitation that accommodates change, allowing for mutable states of dwelling over time. The open matrix resists rigid distinctions between oppositional conditions such as open and closed, or public and private. Instead, it enables the emergence of interconnected systems of shared spaces alongside more enclosed, intimate modules, allowing for a crossing of the house in multiple directions. In doing so, through the presence of mobile partitions and the possibility of adding modules over time, it allows for the growth, evolution, and transformation of living environments in response to the shifting patterns of individual and collective life over time.
Torre’s project acts as a designed critique, through what she calls the principle of space as matrix, of several housing models starting from functionalist domestic layouts, in which the size, position, and designation of rooms often encode implicit hierarchies among inhabitants. At the same time, she critiques the modern open plan, noting that, in her words, “power and submission often become the means to resolve priorities in competing uses.” Furtherly, she questions the Beecher’s house prototype which furthered the idea that women should take care of the house and act in isolation, while providing for the family more efficiently.
The House of Meanings thus operates as a system that sustains spatial continuity while still allowing for differentiated degrees of privacy and hierarchy. It further challenges the assumptions of strict functionalism, where to each room is assigned a single, fixed use, by proposing instead inherently multifunctional spaces. In this sense, the project also critiques suburban zoning regulations, which rigidly separate functions and, in doing so, contribute to forms of social isolation by treating housing as a segregating device rather than a connective one. Denying the presence of distribution areas such as corridors or entrances—which historically emerged to accommodate multiple circulation paths within the house due to the presence of servants—it also erases the hierarchy between spaces for movement and spaces for dwelling within the home.
Two projects for private clients, most of them women (a writer who is often visited for extended periods by friends and her two adult children, and an extended family consisting of a couple and the wife’s mother and sister), allowed Torre to move from the theoretical project to a realistic, though as yet unbuilt, house and to a built one: the first located in Puerto Rico and the second in Santo Domingo. These two projects were intended to move beyond the model of the single-family house, becoming instead an expanded system capable of accommodating extended family, friends, and even an additional household at times, thus merging the private dwelling with an evolving structure able to progressively host a small community.
Further Reading:
Susana Torre, “Space As Matrix,” Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art & Politics, Vol. 3, No. 3, Issue 11, 1981.
Karen A. Franck, “A Feminist Approach to Architecture,” in Ellen Perry Berkeley, ed. Architecture, A Place for Women, Washington and London: Smithsonian Institute Press 1989.
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