The complex of relations among hands, architecture, institutions, and figuration literally "handed" from parent to child seems as old as time, a small and perhaps insignificant vestige of an oral tradition in what we call Western culture. It is an example of knowledge so commonplace, so everyday, we forget we have been taught it until it is time to pass it on. A similarly ubiquitous but nearly invisible complex comprising the same elements resides in this issue of Architronic.

Each of the four essays that make up Gender Propositions and Urban Stratagems is a remarkable construction pointing the reader toward particular locations in the tapestral web that lies within the flesh of the world-as-it-is-thought-and-lived, the complex of attitudes that map the a-mazing space of women in the socio-cultural and philosophical imagination: Woman as nature, as nation, as erotic object, as victim, as goodness, as badness, as artist, as architect, as mother, as capital, as capitalist, as storyteller, as inventor well-nurtured by good Mother Necessity, as the hand that rocks.

Each of the essays can be marked with a specific tag of classification: the architecture historian and artist collaborating to rescue moments of women's involvement with placemaking (Barbara Lynn Allen and Lynda Frese); the architecture theorist looking at the virtual architectures that surround the shelter from domestic violence (Elizabeth Cahn); the architect presenting a critical project that privileges materiality over form, revising the Aristotelian formula of male/form over female/matter (Linda Pollak); and the architecture historian reading conventional subject matter from a psychoanalytic and feminist theoretical perspective (Paulette Singley).

One might read them as a bright collection of fairly disparate pieces held together by the broad umbrella of woman/construction and by the gender of the authors. Some might note - some with dismay, some with delight - how the pieces are examples of what convention might tell us are incommensurable theories and approaches, feminist and otherwise. But what is most interesting to me is to read among the essays and between their lines to perceive the strangely persistent architectures that constitute their most compelling subject. Among them, one understands with clarity the systematic ties between the cultural forces that valorize and romanticize mutilated women (or use Woman as an allegorical figure for Nature, whether full of maiden promise or despoiled, or for victory, or machines, or the Nation) and the multitudinous small scale realities of discrimination and domestic abuse. Invisible to many, much like the networks of telephones and predesignated places of meeting and exchange that make up the formless architecture of entrance points surrounding the domestic abuse shelter, such constructions nevertheless mark powerful enclosures in the lives of women and men.

And like those "doors," the essays collectively demarcate and provide access to spaces beyond their factual and speculative offerings, to little handfuls of knowledge so commonplace we almost forget we have been taught them.

Material appearing in Architronic may be distributed freely by electronic or any other means, providing that any such distribution is without charge (unless for purposes of cost recovery by interlibrary loan services) and that Architronic is acknowledged as the source. However, no article may be reprinted in any publication without the explicit written permission of the author(s). This statement must accompany all distributions of Architronic, whether complete or partial.