We, all feminist architects and researchers - Amelia Vilaplana, the architectural studio Equal Saree, María Novas and Serafina Amoroso - met during the seminars held in Lisbon in 2015 on the theme Matrices, organized by Patricia Santos Pedrosa. This congress aimed to continue the symposium ArquitectAs. Redefining the Profession, which took place in Seville in 2014 and was organized by Nuria Álvarez Lombardero. Based on what we learned from these two events, it seemed important to us to continue the congress in order to both reinforce the work developed in previous editions and attempt to open the debate in a transdisciplinary manner, inviting contributions that could enrich the discussion from fields outside academia. This also included highlighting participatory practices and urban experiences carried out by or in collaboration with public administrations, among others.@en

Recent global events have highlighted a special emphasis on an awareness for women’s rights situation worldwide. A renewed critical reflection claims a place in all fields of knowledge regarding fundamental human rights, and so in architecture and related disciplines. There are different approaches to the understandingof both the social dimension of art or design practice and the figure of the architect itself. This is a scope full of tensions and contradictions, uncertainties, possibilities and discussions. Architecture operates at the intersections of various elements depending on contingencies, on contexts at a particular place and time. This field deals with a wide sets of power and production relations and has to face a complex set of cultural, political,
economic factors as well as systems of representation, objects, forms and meanings. Following thesepremises, the first three International Conferences on
Gender and Architecture (ICGA), opened in Spain in 2014, have created a pioneer space to meeting and debate about this need of questioning hegemonic positions
to be able to meet unattended challenges. A debate that has arrive to stay.@en