This strange interloper

The rapid expansion of the building products industry in the UK between the wars placed the architect in a central position between consumer and manufacturer. For almost the first time, the architect was selecting one product over another for specification in the legally binding contractual documents. With reference to the architect’s job file for East Wall (Gerrards Cross, 1936), a modernist house designed for her paint executive client by a woman architect Elizabeth Benjamin, this chapter investigates The Building Centre, a vast products emporium at the heart of London’s West End shopping district that helped facilitate the architect’s new role. Tracing the gendered reportage of the Centre’s activities – I argue that its employment of women and the ‘artistic’ languages of its displays contributed to the transformation of a hitherto masculine technical realm, where architects were suddenly ‘shoppers’ in a newly feminized design environment, and women architects were welcome.