Masha Etkind and the limits we learn to see

Several years ago, I encountered an interview with Masha Etkind, the late professor of Architectural Science at Toronto Metropolitan University.

I can no longer locate the recording, so I cannot reproduce her words with certainty apart from the one quote that I wrote down. What stayed with me was the idea at the centre of her account.

As I remember the interview, Etkind contrasted her architectural education in the Soviet Union with the professional and academic environment she later entered in Canada. In her earlier environment, the presence and competence of women in architecture had felt ordinary. In Canada, she encountered a field in which women were far less visible.

Yet she did not initially experience herself as someone attempting to cross a gendered boundary. The Soviet environment had already established her participation as normal. She suggested that a certain naivety had helped her: because she had not learned to anticipate the limitation, she did not organise her behaviour around it.

She simply proceeded as though she belonged.

The reality we carry with us

What interested me about Etkind’s story was not the idea of an unconditioned mind. It was the durability of an earlier conditioning.

Her formative environment had established women’s professional competence as ordinary. This was not an affirmation she needed to repeat to herself, but a reality she had already experienced. When she entered a different environment, she inevitably perceived it through that earlier lens.

The new setting may have treated her presence as unusual, but she had no internal reason to interpret herself that way. She was not consciously resisting a limiting belief or attempting to prove that women belonged. Her previous reality had already established that they did.

She therefore entered the room carrying an assumption that felt self-evident: this is how things work.

The restrictive environment could still place material obstacles before her. What it could not immediately do was convince her that those obstacles revealed something true about her rightful place.

The external and internal ceiling

This distinction does not make structural barriers imaginary.

Confidence cannot force an institution to act fairly. A person may disregard a ceiling internally and still encounter exclusion, prejudice or unequal access externally.

But a barrier acquires additional power when we begin enforcing it upon ourselves.

Once we learn that a room is not intended for us, we may stop approaching its door. We lower our voice before anyone interrupts us. We postpone applying until we are excessively qualified. We interpret ambition as arrogance and caution as realism.

The environment no longer needs to reject us every time. We begin anticipating the rejection and adjusting our behaviour in advance.

Etkind’s remembered reflection fascinated me because she appeared to have escaped that anticipatory stage. She may have encountered the external barrier, but she had not yet accepted responsibility for maintaining it.

She did not begin by asking whether she was permitted to belong.

The protection of another experience

An earlier experience of genuine belonging can become a form of psychological evidence.

If we have known fair standards, credible mentorship or an environment in which our competence was treated as ordinary, we carry proof that another arrangement is possible. When we later encounter a restrictive structure, we are less likely to mistake its limitations for natural law.

We may still be affected by it. But we retain a point of comparison.

This is why environments matter so profoundly. They do not merely distribute opportunities in the present. They shape the expectations people carry into the future.

A healthy environment does more than help someone succeed while they remain inside it. It gives them an internal reference point strong enough to recognise dysfunction elsewhere.

The limits we learn — and unlearn

Masha Etkind went on to teach Architectural Science for more than 33 years. Toronto Metropolitan University remembers her as an influential educator, mentor and advocate for good design, architectural history and heritage conservation.

What remains with me, however, is that earlier image: a woman entering a room without first accepting that the room might consider her presence unusual.

Her story does not prove that confidence defeats structural inequality. It suggests something more precise. We are shaped not only by the barriers we encounter, but also by the realities we experienced before encountering them.

Sometimes freedom begins through deliberate resistance. Sometimes it begins when we discover that a limit is artificial. And sometimes it survives because another environment taught us, early enough, that the limit was never ours to carry.

The architecture around us influences what we learn to see. But if we have once lived beneath a higher ceiling, we may recognise when another has been built too low.

Verified biographical reference: https://www.torontomu.ca/architectural-science/stories-events/2023/02/remembering-masha-etkind/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

"When you are not aware of a limitation, and you are totally confident, you don't pay attention to it. I was, to some extent, very naive. And therefore successful."

— Masha Etkind (1946–2023)