Biographies often cast individual figures as exceptional geniuses who lead, create, and transform a field. Yet, the everyday life in architectural offices, classrooms, and construction sites reveals a more complex ground reality. Building on recent efforts to write women into architectural history, this project employs biography to reconstruct the perspective of one of its unsung figures: Christine Benglia-Bevington (1937–2020). Building Worlds: A Feminist Biography of Postwar Architecture pursues the stories that emerge from Benglia-Bevington’s life and work. During the Covid-19 pandemic, in her final months, Benglia-Bevington intimately collaborated with architectural historian Olga Touloumi to document, archive, and share her experiences in the field and at home. Having traversed three continents as a student, scholar, and designer, Benglia-Bevington offers a unique opportunity to disrupt conventional narratives and reconsider the role of international women of color in architecture. The project reveals how women navigated the profession, reinvented what a practice looked like, and ultimately made and held space for feminist work on the built environment.

Olga Touloumi is an educator and architectural historian, teaching at Bard College. Her research concerns spatial politics, media, and gender in modern architecture. She is the cofounder of the Feminist Art and Architecture Collaborative. She has published Assembly by Design (University of Minnesota Press, 2024); and coedited Sound Modernities (2018), a special issue of the Journal of Architecture and Computer Architectures (Routledge, 2020). Her writing has appeared in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Architectural Theory Review, Journal of Architecture, Journal of Architectural Education, and Harvard Design Magazine. Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Touloumi received her PhD from Harvard University and holds degrees in architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.