The Cairngorm mountains in the heart of Scotland inhabit my dreams, a constant provocation. This is perhaps because I have never been in the area long enough, or with enough energy perhaps, to make the long preparatory journey that a walker must make before arriving. Instead, Nan Shepherd’s account of her observations made during many […]
Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick is both a novel and an essay on the role of women (and men) in our society, whose story is based on her own life. Chris is a flailing middle-aged indie film-maker married to Sylvere, a famous literary scholar 15 years her senior. The marriage has slipped into a sexless […]
I chose this magazine, Rimon (in Hebrew/Milgroim in Yiddish the word for pomegranate), a large format, trail blazing, glossy magazine for the arts and letters with a focus on Jewish art of the past and the present, because it was co-founded by Rachel Bernstein Wischnitzer, who acted as its art editor. The vision and ambition […]
One uses a word when describing the phenomenon of having experienced something in the past that is happening to the self in the now. It is called déjà vu. I have never been to Scotland nor its mountains, but as I read Nan Shepherd’s book, I strongly believe that I fell into this state of […]
Helen Maria Williams was a contemporary of Mary Wollstonecraft and the two met at the time of the French Revolution in Paris, both British and both women concerned with politics. Williams sided with the moderate faction of the Girondists, was imprisoned for a time under the reign of terror and soon undertook a journey to […]
Besides contributing to art criticism and historiography, Maria Graham (1785-1842, née Dundas and later Lady Callcott) was most successful at publishing the diaries of her travels. In these, she drew on a range of registers, from aesthetic and scientific to economic and political, besides that of gender. It is this range of approaches to understanding […]
Before having the chance to see Ulmann’s film, I came across this printed matter accompanying its release. Very interested in her new work after a few years of pause since her infamous on self-exposure and foreseeing the increasing dominance of social media – Ulmann a “jeune-fille”, an amateur “avant la lettre”. The booklet invitation as well Natasha Stagg, […]
Julia Kristeva analyses Giovanni Bellini’s work as a representation of successive stages in his processing of the absence of a mother figure in his childhood. By linking the evolution of Bellini’s art to the theme of motherhood, she provides a different perspective on the establishment of the Venetian Renaissance. At a time where a prevailing […]
It was in another city. A sunny day with a colleague. We have heard different kind of music at various place. We sit on a bench beside the window of a coffee shop on the street by the lake, enjoying the sunshine like lazy cats, hearing the most exciting music form the local band in […]
This book takes you literally by the guts. You are captivated but also disgusted. However, you have to face a truth, you are not scared of a space, you are scared of a specific specimen, men. Why are we scared at night, walking, biking or driving home alone ? What is the problem of today’s […]
“I’ll tell you what to do. Tear down that bitch of a bearing wall and put a window where it ought to be!” Joan Crawford bellows with eccentric energy on the construction site of her home under renovation, played by Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest, 1981. I use this film to contextualize the words of […]
‘Fuck you Mr. Smith’, wrote a teenage Judith Chafee (1932–1998) to her principle upon graduating (she had found out the board of her high school had revealed her religious origins to the universities she had applied to, which at that time had a limited quota for Jewish students – she was anyway eventually offered admittance […]
The first time I met Baek Hee-na’s stories was an interview on a show. Originally, she majored in education technology and studied character animation. After few years of working as an animator, she became an author of picture book for children. In that interview movie, there was a moment that shows her way to make […]
The author of this book, Ayano Hayashi, is a curator and art writer. She wrote many publications and columns about art and painters. Among her publications, there are special series that explains the historical background and food culture through famous painters paintings, such as Monet and Van Gogh. The book that I introduce here ‘Dining […]
The architecture of bias in artificial intelligence “Seeing men as the human default is fundamental to the structure of human society”. This is the premise under Caroline Criado’s book. The text depicts how female perspective and needs have often been envisioned as a deviation of men’s and thus have been misrepresented in all aspects of […]
Dusapin’s first novel explores Sokcho, a seaside resort city close to the freighted border between North and South Korea, through the eyes of the narrator – an anonymous young woman who works as a live-in receptionist and cook at Old Park’s guesthouse – and one of its guests, a French graphic novelist called Yan Kerrand. […]
The God of Small Things is Roy’s debut novel. Set in Kerala, India, the novel tells the story of a family through the experience of young fraternal twins, Estha and Rahel, and examines their place within caste society and their navigation of post-colonial India. This focus on the life of the family extends to the […]
Adichie’s rich and immersive descriptions of interiors, gardens, climate and the changing seasons serve to situate fictional events within a world so tangible that it is hard to leave it behind even when the book is finished. Her domestic settings in particular unfurl to reveal the hidden structures of class, religion and power that underpin […]
Du Maurier’s novel explores the malevolent quasi-home of Jamaica Inn, a coaching inn turned smugglers’ den on the Cornish moors between Bodmin and Launceston. Her protagonist, Mary Yellan, is a young woman whose mother has died, necessitating her to move from her childhood home on a farm on the banks of the Helford River in […]
Writing itself is a privileged house. A communication within walls which you can either share or keep private. A whole structure of expression and meditation that its revelation is as active as the writer’s intention. The bricks and the feathers of writing are accurately clear and blurry at the same time. Whereas most of the […]
an other angry book from penny. i like angry people.
an angry book by laurie penny. if you like to read angry things, you might enjoy it. certainly not the most differentiated book but to call a spade a spade it makes total sense.
this book is a must! i received it as a gift from my flatmate for my study of gender identity and found it to be the best guide for the birth of my child. no other book could prepare me for the birth as well and, above all, as honestly as this one.
literary high, virginia woof shows without category and zeal, an ever changing gender identity. i highly recommend this text, it taught me a lot.
for anyone who has nightmares, this book is worse. with every fibre, these page-long sentences (i am not exaggerating at all) draw the reader into a dark, unhappy, very weighted spell. i find bachmann is gifted like no other, using incredible literary skill to bring feelings to life in me whose existences i was not […]
all the prose i’ve read by bachmann is heavy. it’s the same with the poems. it’s worth it. like orpheus, i play death on the strings of life, and in the beauty of this earth and your eyes that manage the sky, i only know how to say dark things.
short, clear, informative and above all important to have read.
a very touching text. it is about the care work that the author does for her mother, who is at the end of her life.
those are the basics! Absolute must.
those are the basics! Absolute must.
a book that i read in the 8th month of pregnancy and actually made me even more afraid of the life that was to come for my child. it is different, it is understandable, it is annoying, but only because you actually know what it says, you just don’t actually want to know it. it […]
feminism with examination of systems theory flaws.
exhausting but you can really feel how you get smarter from page to page. i recommend it to everyone who still likes an overview in between.
literary nimble, a touching story, it’s about children and Selma, I cried.
33.3% good, 33.3% stupid, 100% addictive
Escaping her violent husband and her life in France, Flora Tristan embarked on a journey to Peru in 1833 to find her estranged Peruvian family and seek her father’s inheritance to gain financial independence. Tristan returned to France in 1834 and published her travelogue of Peru under the name Pérégrinations d’une Paria 1833– 1834 in […]
Johanna Garbald-Gredig kam 1840 in Zuoz als Tochter eines Lehrers zur Welt. Mit 21 Jahren heiratete sie den Zolleinnehmer Agostino Garbald und zog mit ihm nach Castasegna im Bergell, wo sich das Paar von Gottfried Semper 1863 eine Villa erbauen liess. Ihre Ehe blieb 16 Jahre kinderlos, wodurch Johanna Zeit hatte sich ihrer Ausbildung und […]
‘La perfection de l’acte créatif requiert de l’amour, et donc de la liberté’. Elisa Valero is an architect and a teacher. Her work, demanding and rigorous, is oriented towards the transmission of an architecture that is thought as much as built. This book, which reads like a manifesto, is a kind of first lesson in architecture. In […]
Jane Hall begins her Introduction to Woman Made, Great Woman Designers (2021), with a reflection on Alison Smithson’s analysis of Beatrix Potter: Few contemporary designers would cite children’s book author Beatrix Potter as an obvious source of inspiration for interior design. For mid-century British architect Alison Smithson, however, Potter’s fictional rendering of Peter Rabbit’s home and […]
Silke Kapp is a professor of Architecture and Urbanism in the Escola de Arquitetura of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, in the city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The book Canteiros da Utopia, whose title can be translated as Construction Sites of Utopia, is the result of her Post-doc research in Urban Sociology from the Bauhaus Universiteit […]
Na Hye-Seok was born during the Japanese colonial period and worked as the first Western painter in Korea, she is also is the first feminist in the modern sense.
Although her novels are fictional, Zadie Smith’s artful depictions of the city are profoundly spatial. Her stories are predominantly located in and around Willesden in North West London where she grew up, dealing with intersecting themes of race and class, encountering diasporic communities, economic inequality and gentrification. In her 2012 novel NW, she locates scenes […]
Full of whimsical illustrations and street-smart comments by Swiss architect Berta Rahm, this book on how to furnish apartments is a testament to a time when progressive young women could rent (and appropriate) their own apartment, but naturally were expected to marry, pay a dowry and buy long-lasting furniture with their husbands. It is a […]
This fascinating volume offers an invaluable transnational perspective on the significant and wide-ranging nature of women’s agency in the making of the built environment. From the early modern period to the present day, the case studies it presents interrogate and challenge our understandings of the interaction between gender and architecture. Editor Anna Sokolina writes: The […]
Frauen waren lange nicht sichtbar in der Welt der Architektur. Zeit, dass sich das ändert! Ein prächtiger Bildband feiert nun die Arbeit von zeitgenössischen Architektinnen und wegweisenden Pionierinnen. Die Niederländerin Nathalie de Vries etwa ist mit ihrer an einen Bücherberg erinnernden Bibliothek (Spijkenisse, 2012) vertreten, die Dänin Lene Tranberg wird mit einem visionären Studentenwohnheim (Kopenhagen, […]
Book recommended by Gianna Ledermann during the reading room session organised by Annexe at ZAZ, Zentrum Architektur Zürich. At the death of her husband, Augusta Gillabert-Randin takes over the farm alone. In this particularly touching extract entitled ‘Trente années de ma vie comme fermière (1893-1923)’, she retraces in numbers the last 30 years of the […]
Book recommended by feminist philosopher Deborah Mühlebach during the reading room session organised by Annexe at ZAZ, Zentrum Architektur Zürich. In her first book, The origin of the world, which traces the cultural history of the vulva, as in I’m every woman, Liv Strömquist points out the absence of women in history in general, the lack […]
Text recommended to everyone, activists and non-activists alike, by the feminist philosopher Deborah Mühlebach during the reading room session organised by Annexe at ZAZ, Zentrum Architektur Zürich, on the very complex question of the practice of representing for others, a person or a group of people in one’s interest. Everyone does it. The text was originally […]
This was recommended by Amy Perkins during the reading room session organised by Annexe at ZAZ, Zentrum Architektur Zürich. Free artist and full-time mother, when her daughter is born, Mierle Ukeles feels literally split in two. On the one hand, she is rediscovering the world through her daughter’s eyes, on the other, she is bored to death. […]
Book recommended by the Association ProSaffa1958-Pavillon during the reading room session organised by Annexe at ZAZ, Zentrum Architektur Zürich. Berta Rahm wrote this handbook at the beginning of her career, a few years after she started her architectural practice in Zürich, which she eventually closed out in frustration with her profession to found her feminist publishing house […]
My interest in alternative sources for constructing architectural historiographies came about through multiple various conversations. Jane Hall spoke about how and why documents are preserved during the Parity Talks V in relation to her own experience with Lina Bo Bardi’s archive. Helen Thomas recommended that I look at Janina Gosseye’s research, which has since led […]
This fanzine, created by Brady Burroughs with master’s students attending her seminar in 2019, is part of a parallel series to the Routledge ‘Thinkers for Architects’ which follows the tradition of offering an easily digestible, predominantly male cannon of philosophers for architecture students. This short publication is a collective attempt at a new series […]
I first came across Brady’s work in 2019 when organising a workshop on ‘crits’ in architectural education. Her use of humour in a space where the overriding emotions in the room are often fear, frustration or relief, was refreshing. Yet beyond the first impressions of silliness at dressing the participants of a crit in costume, […]
Charlotte and Torsten ran the Parity Group on my arrival at the ETH with sharpness, clarity, drive, and an intoxicating quick wit. My first meeting in 2019 was energising – to hear a group of people discuss how to combat the homogeneity of the department in real terms, whilst listening to the concerns of each […]
Adichie’s rich and immersive descriptions of interiors, gardens, climate and the changing seasons serve to situate fictional events within a world so tangible that it is hard to leave it behind even when the book is finished. Her domestic settings in particular unfurl to reveal the hidden structures of class, religion and power that […]
Young female architects entering their 30s have conversations with senior female architects in order to broaden the narrative of female architects in Korean history. The authors describe the book as architectural stories requested by women and answered by women This book is a compilation of the results of the forum ‘Building Role Models: Architecture […]
Yoo Dong Ryong 유동룡 ( Jun Itami 이타미준 ) (1937-2011) is a Korean architect born and raised in Japan. The Sea of Jun Itami is a documentary about the life and philosophy of Itami Jun, a world-famous architect who worked in Japan while maintaining Korean nationality for his life. When we talk about his life, […]
This is the first text that came to my mind when I saw this project. If we talk about Korean feminism, I think it is one of the most important texts. Since the text is in English, you can probably read it and understand the discourse a little bit in-depth. It is quite complicated […]
I would like to mention the architect 김현진 Kim Hyunjin. A few years ago, she published an architectural essay called The Space of Sincerity 진심의 공간, which is written in Korean. As an architect, she works on a small number of works, and as a writer, she made her name by publishing texts on her […]
This is the second book compiled by Cheon Byung-ok to record Korean architectural domestic heritage.
This architectural catalogue was compiled and written by architect Cheon Byung-ok 천병옥 one of the first generation of female architects in Korea after Ji Soon. In this book, she cataloged Korean palace interiors, furnishings, and traditional patterns for posterity. It has been translated into English and Japanese.
In the Portuguese translation: O interior da História: historiografia arquitetônica para uso de Latino-americanos (2013), which was first published in Spanish as El interior de la historia: historiografía arquitectónica para uso de latinoamericanos (1990), the architectural critic and historian Marina Waisman discusses the concept of regionalism as used in international criticism and understood as a positive […]
Cities in the Northeast: From the Pot to the Street: Traditional Construction Methods (2017) – was organized by the architect and teacher Ana Rita Sá Carneiro, coordinator of the landscape laboratory at UFPE. This unprecedented study on Traditional Construction Methods from the Northeast was realized in 1978 by the architects Liana Mesquita and Neide Mota […]
This publication was organized by the architects Guilah Naslavsky and Andréa Gáti, it is a collection of articles that resulted from research on architecture and gender in Northeastern Brazil. The objective is to give visibility to the trajectories of some female architects who worked in the region and were forgotten by the Brazilian hegemonic architectural […]
I was very glad to discover this book on the contemporary history of Swiss architecture (1980-2000) a few years ago, which examines thoroughly the works that I’m familiar with and digs deeply into their historical and theoretical background. In the context of Women Writing Architecture, it is probably worth mentioning that the architectural scene at […]
I ordered my edition of the New Woman’s Survival Catalog after watching a lecture by Mindy Seu, a designer and researcher whose work I discovered while scouring the colophon of a friend’s homepage as I was trying to build my own. The NWSC inspired her iconic cyberfeminism index—an online ever growing index which gathers techno-critical works starting from 1990 (when […]
I was reminded of “Having Words”, a collection of essays by Denise Scott-Brown, when reading a foreword Berta Rahm wrote for the book “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” by Mary Wollstonecraft, which she published through her own publishing house ala Verlag in 1975. Rahm tells the story of how, during the 1960s, she […]
Virginia Woolf asks in her text why women publish so little. One of her answers is that they usually do not have their own room. In this context, ‘one’s own room’ stands symbolically both in real spatial terms as a place of demarcation, but also in a figurative sense as a space for thoughts and […]
This essay talks about the notion of ‘Greatness’ in the art context. How ‘great’ artists and art is constructed in our society and what this means for female artists. Linda Nochlin shows the patterns according to which art institutions have always been organized and influenced the art scene. These descriptions and observations can probably be […]
The story of Caliban and the Witch begins in times of upheaval. Society continues to evolve and starts to put the capital in the foreground. It seeks to increase efficiency. We can read this story from different viewpoints, but we decide to read ‘the “transition” from feudalism to capitalism from the viewpoint of women, the […]
In the text Caliban and the Witch, it is posited that history can be read in different ways. Based on the episode Bandersnatch from the Black Mirror series, in collaboration with Lucia Giacobbi and Cristina Urzola (two students from ETH Zürich) we carried out a performance. A group of students and assistants from ETH Zürich […]
Up close and personal: This is how Marguerite Duras in ‘Écrire’, Lucy Luppard in ‘The Lure of the Local’, and Rosalind Krauss in ‘Passages in Modern Sculpture’ describe the ‘spaces’ and ‘places’ they write about. The stories they tell are always about personal experience, even private in Duras’ case, and this allows readers to picture […]
I came to feminism early. I sensed things were biased. But as many others, I thought this was getting fixed, or had already fixed itself. I eye-rolled at my mother when she mumbled while watching political debates on TV— ‘not many women in these meetings.’ I ignored the red flags when going into architecture, I […]
