Most people don’t consider how architecture is important to relationships. Good architecture helps you meet and get to know people. But what few people realize is that the stores, office buildings, and houses they live in are often designed to stop this from happening.

Why would architects want to design unhappy buildings? To push an agenda. The preachers of social justice have realized architecture’s significance and used it to subtly change our behavior, our values, and beliefs. They want to change how we interact, and that includes isolating people and destroying their relationships.

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Ancient languages were infused with gender. Early people saw gender differences in everything around them. Gender became weaker and less important over time, until progressives erased gender completely. Today’s gender-neutral language inculcates a false belief that male and female are equal.

Sexes were distinct in architecture as well. The Greek Doric order, with its robust and austere proportions represented the man. The slim and decorative Ionic order represented the female. Designers emulated the inherent human roles they saw in the natural world.

But modern progressives decided that a person’s sex is just a construct of conditioning. They decided women are less useful to the economy as stay-at-home mothers and more productive in the workforce and as prodigious consumers. To change human roles they changed environmental expectations.

Just as modernists erased gender from language, they removed it from our buildings and made purely functional structure that did not speak to the sexes. Distinction is rarely made that correlates to the sexes: sturdy vs. slim, bare vs. adorned, dominant vs. subservient, geometric vs. whimsical.

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Today’s architecture pushes unnatural expectations. The Women’s Restroom Bill of 1987 mandated that men’s and women’s bathrooms be exactly the same, except what is necessary for biological differences. Before this, men’s bathrooms were communal and accommodated more people. Women’s restrooms placed toilets behind a lockable doors and had extra spaces for childcare, grooming, and resting.

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Sex roles ought to be the norm, and exceptions can be accommodated in a separate space. Early European settlers in Australia wiped out the aboriginal jilmi which accommodated a single woman’s special needs. They thought it was “prison-like” to isolate single women away from everyone else. But it turned out this was important for social cohesion. Similarly, the Law of Moses set certain standards for women in the community. The community in those days did not bow down to their needs, but rather made a separate space to accommodate them.

Ancient Egyptian, Roman, and Oriental houses had separate areas for women and men. Englishman Robert Kerr outlined gender-specific organizations and functions for each room of a house. Emphasis was placed on the man as the leader of the household. The radial paths of garden paths at the Duke of Beaufort’s residence all converged on his dining chair. (see Gender Studies in Architecture—, Dorte Routledge, p. 135) Architecture reinforced healthy expectations of human interactions.

Today’s house assigns no hierarchy of gender to its rooms, which means women take over the entire house. By designing from a female frame, less emphasis is made on the diversity of the household, its hierarchy, or of the diversity and hierarchy of the community. If the man is lucky, he can have the garage for his “man-cave.” But along with the house, public and work spaces are overtaken and forced to serve the woman’s needs.

Early Irish natives were nomadic tribes who repeatedly dismantled and rebuilt their dwellings. Over time, construction of their tents became a ritual that symbolized the marriage of the owners. Then, as today, the dwellings were constructed by men and the interior furnished by women. This distinction made the tent ritualistically “a site of creation, separation, autonomy and mobility.” (Vernacuular Architecture in the 21st Century, Lindsay Asquith, p. 80) Both men and women had a role in architecture, but in proper and distinguished ways. Today, how many men are in control of the house they live in?

Such consideration must be made in today’s architecture. The public needs to recognize the gender manipulation and oppressive expectations pushed on them by their environment. Today’s push against traditional gendered architecture isolates men. Public spaces do not help men and women meet each other, because they suit the woman’s need to “feel safe.” Private spaces do not foster a harmonious family relationship because they manipulate the natural family hierarchy.

The presence of gender in architecture helps couples meet each other in public places and live happily in domestic places. Its removal and manipulation is pushing men and women apart.