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Rebecca Billi on The Poetics of Urban Inscription

Beyond the content, narratives and storytelling; writing is intrinsically spatial – leaning on the possibilities of movement. In her text, Laura Ruggeri reminds the reader of how alike space and language actually are. She reflects on the spatial power of writing and on the representational choices inscribed within text. The way we write about – […]

25 May, 2026

Jabili Sirineni reading bell hooks as an architect

Those familiar with hooks’ work often read it as an intersectional study of race, class and gender. My reading of hooks was a deliberate expedition to locate the margins where this intersection takes place and to understand them as places of care and uncare. hooks urges those of us who want to produce counter-hegemonic narratives […]

8 May, 2026

Annamaria Prandi on Being Here

In 2010, the writer Marie Darrieussecq encountered the work of Paula Modersohn-Becker for the first time. It happened by chance: she received an email promoting a psychoanalytic conference on motherhood, illustrated with a painting of a woman breastfeeding a child. What caught her attention was the unusual pose—mother and child lying naked on a bed, […]

18 April, 2026

Kihyun Ahn on Conversation with Kazuyo Sejima

  The idea of content today is mainly hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism. Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation”. Of course, regardless of specifics, I always insist that the final form must be beautiful. Kazuyo Sejima, “Conversation with Kazuyo Sejima”.   Against Interpretation Explanations come afterwards. This interview instead concerns the design […]

23 March, 2026

Ruben Muth and Jana Cronauer on An die Proletarier aller Länder

These student projects respond to Rosa Luxemburg as a figure to inspire liberatory constructions.The starting point for their research was her 1918 speech “A Call to the Workers of the World.” The projects are from the Masters of Architecture Theory Seminar Oppressed Fantasies, Liberatory Constructions led by Anna Kostreva. It took place at TU-Darmstadt in […]

10 March, 2026

Xiangyue Lu on Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth

This student project responds to Innana as a figure to inspire liberatory constructions. The starting point for the research was story of “Inanna and the God of Wisdom” as wall as “The Descent of Inanna” from the 1983 book Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth by Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer. The projects are […]

16 February, 2026

moe rist and Nour Hadaya on Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion

These  student projects respond to Pandora as a figure to inspire liberatory constructions. The starting point for their research was the chapter “The Making of a Godess”in the 1908 book Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion by Jane Ellen Harrison. The projects are from the Masters of Architecture Theory Seminar Oppressed Fantasies, Liberatory Constructions […]

16 February, 2026

Beatriz Geovanini, Jessica Joia and Paulo Victor França on Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman

These student projects respond to Harriet Tubman as a figure to inspire liberatory constructions. The starting point for their research was the 1869 book Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman by Sarah H. Bradford. The projects are from the Masters of Architecture Theory Seminar Oppressed Fantasies, Liberatory Constructions led by Anna Kostreva. It took […]

16 February, 2026

Rebecca Billi on The Anthropologists

The Anthropologists is Ayşegül Savaş’s third novel. It traces the lives of Asya and Manu, a young married couple, through their everyday activities, encounters, and rituals. They are seldom joined by some friends or acquaintances, but the anchor of the novel is the relationship between the two, as it also anchors their lives. Tropes of marriage, […]

10 February, 2026

Amelie Czarnetzki, Vanessa Diehl and others on Sister Outsider

These student projects respond to Audre Lorde as a figure to inspire liberatory constructions. The starting point for their research was the 1977 essay “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” in the book Sister Outsider. The projects are from the Masters of Architecture Theory Seminar Oppressed Fantasies, Liberatory Constructions led by Anna Kostreva. […]

27 January, 2026

Van Anh Kasem and Ranim Arznajini on This has shown the True Colours of the World

These student projects respond to Greta Thunberg as a figure to inspire liberatory constructions. The starting point for their research was the 2024 inter view with Greta Thunberg: “This Has Shown the True Colours of the World.” The projects are from the Masters of Architecture Theory Seminar Oppressed Fantasies, Liberatory Constructions led by Anna Kostreva. […]

27 January, 2026

Rebecca Billi on L’isola di Arturo

L’isola di Arturo (Arturo’s Island) by Italian writer Elsa Morante is what the Germans call a bildungsroman: more than a coming-of-age story, its narrative unfolds the layers of those intricate experiences involved in the passage from childhood to adulthood. In Morante’s book, architecture and context become metaphors of a journey that is everyone’s. The island […]

9 January, 2026

Annamaria Prandi on Donne e Progetto

The volume explores the role of women in Italian architecture, design and urban planning from the early 1900s to the present day. Through essays selected by a multidisciplinary scientific committee, over one hundred leading figures in the field, active in Italy and abroad, emerge. This collaborative work restores visibility to individual and collective paths that […]

28 December, 2025

Erandi de Silva on When Things Fall Apart

In When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chödrön presents teachings that are inclusive and accessible, drawing on Buddhist wisdom while speaking to universal human experiences of uncertainty, pain, and fear. Rather than requiring religious belief, she invites readers from all backgrounds to meet difficult emotions with curiosity, compassion, and presence. The book emphasises shared vulnerability, self-kindness, […]

22 December, 2025

Erandi de Silva on Yasmeen Lari

Yasmeen Lari: Architecture for the Future is a comprehensive look at the work and impact of the visionary Pakistani architect Yasmeen Lari, tracing her evolution from a pioneering modernist to a leader in zero-carbon, humanitarian architecture. The book highlights her development of an approach that combines ecological sustainability with social justice, particularly in disaster relief […]

22 December, 2025

Erandi de Silva on Women, Race and Class

Angela Davis’s Women, Race, & Class critically examines U.S. history through the interconnected lenses of gender, race, and class, showing how these systems of oppression shaped social movements from slavery and abolition to women’s suffrage and the 1960s feminist movement. She argues that mainstream feminist movements were dominated by White, middle-class concerns and often excluded […]

22 December, 2025

Women Writing Architecture on @builtbyusuk

Each welcoming frame in the @builtbyusuk Instagram account encourages engagement with this fascinating organisation led by Danna Walker, an award-winning electrician, former architect, advocate for mentoring, founder and pioneering Black leader. Offering support and training, mentoring and deep active listening, the team at London-based Built By Us fosters “A world built for all, by all. […]

10 December, 2025

Women Writing Architecture on @Accra_Archive

The social media face of the Accra Architecture Archive, this Instagram account gives insight into the live engagement with archival materials – recordings of interviews, behind the scenes work – as well as highlighting some of the texts on the website (and featured on womenwritingarchitecture.org in the Architecture of Accra collection) and artefacts in the […]

10 December, 2025

Adam Caruso on ARCHITEKTJI

Intended to reveal a history of women architects in Warsaw, the exhibition ARCHITEKTJI at ZODIAK Warszawski Pawilon Architektury (18.7.25 – 19.10.25) deploys an elegant curatorial structure to reveal the breadth of this history in parallel with five more intimate thematic and biographical stories. The exhibition is arranged in two parts. Within the loggia-like ground floor […]

7 December, 2025

Adam Caruso on Abundance not Capital, the exhibition

This is a major monographic exhibition about the philosophy, work and material culture of leading architect and educator, Anupama Kundoo. The large temporary exhibition gallery of the Architektur Zentrum Wien is remade to evoke the atmospheres and material techniques of Kundoo’s Wall House of 2000 built in Auroville where the architect lived until 2002 and […]

10 November, 2025

Nele Rickmann on Reframing Value. Japanese Women Architects

What has value as architecture? The answer varies from one historical moment to another, and is deeply linked to the cultural and geographic circumstances. But this fundamental question is also linked to the identity of the creator. A journey through the histories of Japanese women architects involves unravelling the meaning of these intersecting words. This […]

28 July, 2025

Nele Rickmann on A Dwelling Manifesto for Rebuilding Japan

Miho Hamaguchi (1915–1988) was a pioneer in the modernization of Japanese residential architecture. Despite being the first woman in Japan to be licensed as an architect, developing a theory of the emancipated dwelling, writing, consulting, teaching, and designing over a thousand projects, her life and work have been little explored by canonical historiography. Hamaguchi’s goal […]

28 July, 2025

Clara Maria Puglisi on An Interrupted Life

Etty Hillesum (1914–1943) was a Dutch Jewish writer whose diaries, written during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, offer an intimate and profound reflection on life, memory, and personal resilience. She was a woman of extraordinary intellectual independence, defying traditional gender roles with her deeply introspective and philosophical approach to existence. Unlike many of her […]

7 July, 2025

Joana Ribeiro on Casas com nome

Together with illustrator Mariana Rio, Portuguese architect Joana Couceiro co-created the children’s book collection Casas com nome (houses with names), published by Circo de Ideias. These books are based on Ana Luísa Rodrigues’s doctoral thesis, Habitabilidade do espaço domoméstico : o cliente, o arquitecto, o habitante e a casa (The habitability of domestic space: the […]

15 June, 2025

Cristina Fusco on The Mushroom at the End of the World

  Anna Tsing unravels stories of hidden ecologies emerging around the matsutake mushroom on different continents, unveiling the mushroom as an emotional anchor, a commodity, and a sign of resurgence in disturbance-based ecosystems. These disobedient ecologies, arising from deteriorated grounds, fascinate me as an alternative way of thinking about the relationship between non-human beings, architecture […]

20 May, 2025

Meg Marumoto on Little Spaces : Kumiko Inui +

Little spaces or Little places? Or Little sceneries. Kumiko Inui (1969-), a Japanese female architect, describes a situation she encountered during her visit to a nursery who was the client for her first project. The office of the nursery was overwhelmed with documents and other objects and in this midst of things, she found a […]

4 May, 2025

Oliver Canins, Kim Gubbini, Victoria Jabbour on Cold Enough for Snow

As students in the NEW ORDER studio at the Academy of Architecture, Mendrisio, led by Clancy Moore, Oliver Canins, Kim Gubbini and Victoria Jabbour used the novel Cold Enough for Snow as a starting point and guide for the developments of their design projects. This is a selection of the memory drawings and and fragment […]

22 April, 2025

Lulu Crouzet on Give me a Gun

Context The essay discusses representation and architectural theory through the lens of Actor-Network Theory (ANT), a framework developed by Bruno Latour, and others. ANT emphasizes that meaning and definition come from relationships and that those are forever shifting. Therefore, the dynamic and interconnected nature of social and material worlds challenges the sometimes static or isolated […]

15 April, 2025

Rebecca Siefert on The Dignity of Resistance

I have not always been an architectural historian; in fact, I kind of stumbled into the world of architectural history after a chance discovery of the work of Lauretta Vinciarelli during my Ph.D. Over the course of my graduate studies, my relationship to architecture evolved from a purely formalist one, coming from a studio arts […]

2 April, 2025

Silvia Groaz on L’immagine storiografica dell’architettura contemporanea

As for a book that has acted as a companion text for me, one to which I keep returning, it is an Italian one: Maria Luisa Scalvini, L’immagine storiografica dell’architettura contemporanea, da Platz a Giedion, Officina Edizioni, Rome, 1984. It was the first book that made me truly understand what a historiographic construction is, revealing the subjectivity […]

31 March, 2025

Selmar Binder and Jaehee Shin on Dry Stone Walls

As the saying goes, people tend to gather with their own kind, and over the past few years I, Jaehee, have been introduced to this book Trockenmauern : Grundlagen, Bauleitung, Bedeutung by three very close people in my life. Ji Min An, Ramun Capaul and Selmar Binder. Although I have had this thick red book in […]

27 March, 2025

Lulu Crouzet on Throwing Like a Girl

Context “Throwing Like a Girl” was first presented in 1977, at a time when feminist theory was engaged with phenomenology and existentialism. Feminist theorists resisted the idea that men and women were the same and pushed for institutional and societal reform because of inherent patriarchal systems. The essay examines how norms shape the feminine movement […]

16 March, 2025

Elisabeth Gellein on Dirty Theory : Troubling Architecture

A conversation with Hélène—of sorts Sugar and spice and all things nice. That’s what little girls are made of. No doubt, the theory of the girl needs some reclaiming, for girls can be dirty, and not very nice — and why should they be deprived of these dubious traits? You dirty slut. In May 2024, […]

5 March, 2025

Jiyeon Moon on Notions of Nature and a Model for Managed Urban Wilds

Abandoned land, vacant lots emerge from human neglect, yet the urban wilds that form in these spaces challenge our perception of nature. For humans, nature has long been a target of conquest, a source of endless resources. After industrialization, it became a romanticized refuge—a pristine wilderness offering escape from artificial environments. In both cases, nature […]

4 March, 2025

Lucia Rocchelli on Feuerlilie

Two sisters, one officially mad, and a male refugee, escaped from hell and are still fighting the nightmare back. Their somewhat distorted perception of the built environment proves yet to be an acute one: doors are tricky thresholds to frightening memories, every tiny detail matters. This tale explores our intuitive relationship with architectural elements and […]

17 February, 2025

Naomi Caruso on The Dictionary of Lost Words

In this novel, Australian writer Pip Williams combines historical facts with fiction. The facts are based on the long and arduous process it took to compile and publish the venerable Oxford English Dictionary which took place from 1857-1928. The fiction describes the life of Esme, the book’s main character, who is the daughter of one […]

13 February, 2025

Huriye Nur Aksoy on Sinan Ottoman Architect

Jale Nejdet Erzen’s Mimar Sinan: An Aesthetic Analysis transcends a simple exploration of Sinan’s life and works. Erzen contends that reducing his architecture to formal or technical terms alone would be an incomplete view. She argues that Sinan’s creations are deeply influenced by the societal, cultural, and technical contexts of his time, creating profound relationships […]

5 February, 2025

Elisabeth Gellein on Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture

We love shacks, because they pose impossible questions. How can we change what we need? How can we fearlessly acknowledge weakness as an animate and constructive content of collectivity? Lisa Robertson, Occasional Works:185 Lisa Robertson‘s Office for Soft Architecture (OSA) is a conceptual and poetic project that explores the intersections of architecture, urbanism, language, and […]

25 January, 2025