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Maria Conen on A Room of One’s Own
29 June, 2021
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 the possibility for personal development, whereby the mental demarcation, for example, from family and other flatmates plays an important role. The possible demarcation, the withdrawal from the ‘public’ spaces of a flat is elementary to be able to produce something of one’s own. Now, this statement is very significant for me as an architect. We are always building and thinking about living spaces, such as flats or houses, where we should allow this kind of retreat and this type of work. We create possibilities of ways of living with our designs. The proportions of rooms and the design of their basic elements such as wall, floor, ceiling, column, and the openings in them, which can be closed with doors and windows, are important in everyday life as well as in the creation of living spaces. A room gets a specific atmosphere through the architectural elements and also gets a political and social dimension through Woolf’s book ‘A Room of One’s Own’. This is precisely where my interest in architecture and fascination with this text lies.