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 […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
Virginia Woolf asks in her text about the reason, 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Luo Xiaowei (1925–2020) is one of the most important scholars who introduced Western architecture to China. She was the first to offer a course on the history of modern foreign architecture in China and wrote several books on this topic, many of which have become standard textbooks for Chinese architecture students. One of the most […]
Humans see themselves as the centre of their environment, as the highest of the pyramid, the natural environment being there to sustain their race. Each time Western Europe discovers new aspects about living creatures, it directly infantilises them. With agriculture, humans started to fulfill their need for control over their environment to obtain more stability […]
‘Unsere Bauten waren unsere Kinder (Our buildings were our children),’ Maria Schwarz once said to Annette Krapp, the author of this book. Maria Schwarz’s wish of having a child was not realized. She dedicated instead all her love and passion to the common works of her and her husband Rudolf Schwarz. From concept to details, […]
The fifth chapter of Scenes of Subjection, ‘Fashioning obligation: Indebted Servitude and the Fetters of Slavery’, offers reading to understanding the afterlife of slavery, not as legacy but through the mechanisms that operate today. As contemporary anti-racist feminist movements in colonized territories employ subversive interruptions to coloniality and work through decolonial praxis, it becomes imperative […]
A fundamental text to understand ‘identity politics’ that focuses on the black women’s oppression because ‘most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out’ from the black women’s identity, something that in the case of black women is a ‘particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at […]
For Adrienne Marie Brown Emergent Strategy is ‘how we can intentionally get into the right relationship with the planet and with each other.’ Inspired by Octavia Butler’s ‘all that you touch, you change and all that you touch, changes you back’, Emergent Strategy has been central to the imaginaries of many working for change, including […]
Ana Lydia Vega narrates through fictional short stories a post-colonial imagination of racialized, oppressed, and mythological subjectivity in the Caribbean. The importance of Encancaranublado to the architectural imaginary lies, among many things, in the capacity to render real and fictional phenomena to address the complex ideological, political, and cultural forces shaping life in the Caribbean, and thus, […]
C. Riley Snorton borrows the title from Yasiin Bey’s eponymous album to explore the central role that the racialization of the black subject plays in transness and transness plays in the construction of blackness. Rather than reading race as a secondary order of difference, which would presume that race is principally a biologized form (and […]
Through historical and anecdotical accounts bell hooks outlines the possibility of ending racism, and understanding education as a tool for questioning and challenging interpersonal relationships, power dynamics, and ideology.
bell hooks writes about what does it mean to have truly inclusive learning spaces, experiences, and interactions that go beyond what has been institutionally accepted through racial binaries and monocultural expectations.
Angela Davis joined the online series Abolition for the People with an argument to dismantle the industrial carceral, and police system. Against the conservative stance of ‘reform’, Davis states that ‘racism is essentially systemic and structural rather than individual and attitudinal’ as repeatedly asserted by health care advocates and anti-police and anti-prison activists over many decades, […]
Decolonization is not a Metaphor questions decolonization discourses without action, settler-moves to innocence, and problematizes how the ‘decolonial desires of white, non-white, immigrant, postcolonial, and oppressed people’, can be entangled in ‘resettlement, reoccupation, and re-inhabitation that further settler colonialism.’ As decolonization can only start by relinquishing the occupied land, the authors argue that the metaphorization […]
Angela Davis provides with Women, Race & Class a deep, intersectional critique of feminism, tracing black women’s struggle from slavery to birth control and reproductive rights, to their relationship to suffrage and emancipation movements. Davis’s take is fundamental to articulate a holistic reading of feminism outside of wealthy and white women’s voices, and it sets […]
A collection of Hito Steyerl’s text, The Wretched of the Screen mixes humour and rigorous research critical takes on media, art, politics, cultural capital, and the infrastructures and relationships that build and maintain them.
Exploring the process of indigenization of the tribal-African in the Americas, Sylvia Wynter provides a reading of the many ways that Yoruba, Ga, Ashanti, lbo, etc. were converted into a ‘homogenous commodity, into a unit of labour power collectively labelled’ and bound to the creation of the ‘plantation system.’ Wynter argues that it is in […]
By creating a Potential History, Azoulay questions the imperialist construction of time, space, and politics through objects and experiences of struggles around the world, from the original peoples in the Americas to the Congo under King Leopold II. Leopold Lambert loudread Potential History on the seventh session of Loudreaders.
Ilze Wolff surveys the biopolitics and white supremacist infrastructures and superstructures of a textile factory building during the years of apartheid in Cape Town. In the form of decolonial radiography, the book dissects and scrutinizes everything, from racist factory legislation to architectural features of racial and gender segregation, to machines that reinvented time through cyclical […]
Using the indigenous groups of the Andes region as the focal point, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui proposes that indigenous ‘were and are, above all, contemporary beings and peers’ with their own commitment to modernity. Against what she calls the ‘cultural postmodernism, imposed by the elites and reproduced by the state in a fragmented and subordinate way’, […]
Salas Rivera reexamines in this bilingual book theories of value in Marxist economics and suggests that just as labour is usually the ‘third thing that gives value’, there are also other tertiaries between ‘colonialism and Puerto Rico, queer and transness, the binary of colony and empire.’ Salas Rivera introduces The Tertiary
In opposition to article four of the French law of 2005 that states that colonialism in the North of Africa has a ‘positive role’ Samia Henni ‘dissects the effects of’ counterrevolutionary architecture in the ‘transforming of Algerian territory’ and exposes its intrinsic relationship with ‘military manoeuvres, political ideologies, and colonial doctrines.’ Leopold Lambert loudreads Architecture […]
Through biographical anecdotes and historical connections, Leah Penniman takes us through an imaginary tour of land reclamation, reparations that go from the settler-colonial occupation of the land, through models of feminist resistance like Combahee River Colony, to today’s strategies to relate to the land as black people. The editors of Deem Journal introduce Farming While Black […]
Loudreader Luisa Capetillo writes about politics, anarchism, solidarity, mutual aid, free love, philosophy, poverty, class, and emancipation in this bilingual compendium.
An integral part of the workshops offered in Loudreaders Trade School consists of the elaboration of Post-Colonial postcards that consist on the subversion of the violent landscapes of the Hudson River School of painting and their alliance to Manifest Destiny and settler-occupation of indigenous land.
In Learning to Become an Extremophile, Ailo Ribas borrows a term coined by NASA to propose a form of existence based on the adaptation to extreme environments. In the face of constant and extreme threats, the (trans) extremophile redefines survival, learns to move across and between spaces, environments, and relationships.
Silvia Federici’s 1975 text Wages Against Housework places care and domestic labour within the framework of capitalism, sexism, and servitude.
Presented in a writing workshop for the production of a Post-Colonial publication, Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild explores a world post-earth where humans are domesticated and controlled by other species in order to carry their reproductive labor. Although Butler claimed that the story is about ‘love’, it impossible to overlook its parallels with colonization, white supremacy, and […]
Butler renders despair, selfishness, and decay in a world of exacerbated inequalities and asymmetrical accumulation of wealth. It is difficult to tell if this is climate apocalypse is somewhere in the future, or something many people have to live through now. Traumnovelle loudreads Parable of the Sower on the first session of Loudreaders, as the COVID […]
One of Puerto Rico’s leading feminist collectives examines how racial states operate, focusing on the colony of Puerto Rico. In this six-point manifesto la colectiva reaffirms, together with the Black feminists who have gone before them – ‘that the liberation of Black women will be the end of all oppression, the end of the racial […]
Part of the reading lists of Loudreader and fiction author Luis Othoniel Rosa, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed presents an interplanetary political fiction about class struggle, anarchism, labour, and power.
In the third session of Loudreaers Trade School, Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller presented their research on the urban simulations of military fronts on the border between the US and Mexico. Fronts: Military Urbanism & the Developing World dissects the potemkinesque simulation of racialized spaces and subjects while setting a dangerous blueprint for architectures of imperialist warfare, […]
Madrid-based collective VenidaDevenida introduces Paul B. Preciado’s text on subversive urban cartographies, the post-porn work of Annie Sprinke, and the need to distance from hegemonic and institutional readings of gayness through the eyes of white men in the seventh session of Loudreaders. Building on Preciado’s text, VenidaDevenia proposes architectural interventions that subvert heteronormative readings and […]
In El Lector, Araceli Tinajero traces the Cuban beginnings and describes the evolution of the loudreaders and the role of iconic figures like the Puerto Rican feminist and anarcho-syndicalist Luisa Capetillo in the tobacco factories across the Caribbean and US as they were able to establish networks of subversive solidarity that promoted emancipatory practices. Among the […]
A post-hurricane manifesto, Salas Rivera’s While They Sleep: Under the Bed is Another Country constructs a critique of necropolitics, necrocapitalism, coloniality, oppression, and other imaginaries. The main text in English addresses the US empire and its necropolitical implications on its colonial subjects, while the footnotes, in Spanish, propose answers as coming from its colony in Puerto Rico.
Federici explores the relationship between primitive accumulation, gender, and race by drawing from the myths that created and hunted witches in Europe and through the Shakespearean character of Caliban. Federici intersects Marx through the evolution of early capitalism in relation to the exploitation of the body of women and workers.
Sayak Valencia reads the border between Mexico and the US in Tijuana as a case study of the relationship between hyperviolence and law, militarization and the commodification of death, geopolitical borders, and the ‘post colonies,’ norm and exception, the state of war and states of security and freedom. Gore Capitalism is a critical gospel for […]
For Silvia Federici and Paul B. Preciado, the body is the centre around which capitalism, class, exploitation, and politics turn. Federici rethinks the origins and development of capitalism and a long history of models of resistance from a feminist viewpoint, while Preciado proposes to look at links between community and immunity, health and class, and […]
From texts on free love to utopias where workers rob banks and live happily ever after in the countryside, Love and Anarchy is a compendium of texts by Luisa Capetillo, the Puerto Rican anarcho-syndicalist, feminist, and utopian author. Capetillo joined the practice of loudreading in the tobacco factories and added her utopian and feminist imaginaries […]
In the last chapter of her book, Donna Haraway tells the fabulated story of the ‘communities of compost’ and tracks their evolution over five generations. In these communities, the ‘children of compost’ recrafted the conditions of living and dying to enable flourishing in the present and in times to come. Their work is international kin […]
Traumnovelle co-founder Léone Drapeaud questions patriarchal assumptions about utopias and the city via means of science fiction and feminist utopias that ‘redefine both women’s relationship to motherhood and their relationship to work, hence redefining the city.’
This performance was conducted within the context of Studio A. Caruso ‘Making Plans for Living Together’ at ETH Zurich in the spring semester of 2021.
This provocative article written for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, a serious high-quality Swiss newspaper for which Stahl was features section editor at the time, is a critical response to the exhibition ‘Frau Architekt’ held at the German Architecture Museum, Frankfurt. Stahl’s response won her the Michael Althen Prize for Criticism a year later, and provides an […]
Two novels, very much intertwined, where architecture and landscape are central to the thematic content and are used to develop the character of each protagonist.
Dolores Hayden was my professor in graduate school, this book was read in one of her seminars that centered on gender in architectural and urban design. Her work provided me with a new and deeper understanding of the history of modern housing in America and the central role women played in its development.
This novel describes architecture and space very vividly. Architecture here serves as metaphors or to emphasize moments of action in the story, rooms or spaces sometime take on human qualities to reinforce the protagonist’s state of being.
Hito’s writing is so enjoyable and this has become a seminal text for how to consider images for many, including myself.
These two texts outline some of the most important aspects of my thinking as an architect; on the interconnectivity of elements of design and the information embedded in them, and the role of media (as in the plural of mediums) in affecting change. Keller was my teacher in Architecture School and I found this way […]