Xiaolu Guo is a Chinese-born British novelist and film-maker whose work deals with themes of migration, alienation, feminism, translation and trans-national identities. She spent the first 30 years of her life in China, first in the coastal province of Zhejiang and then in Beijing, where she studied sociology and film making at the Beijing Film […]
In her 2016 book, Where Are the Women Architects? author Despina Stratigakos dedicates a chapter to ‘Unforgetting Women Architects: A Confrontation with History and Wikipedia.’ In this extensive work, Stratigakos, a writer, historian, and professor of architecture at the University at Buffalo, elucidates the challenges faced by women in the architectural profession. She explicitly identifies […]
[Joyce], you already are a great woman [architect]. In her reframing of Canadian artist Joyce Wieland’s work, feminist historian, and artist Cynthia Hammond challenges prior biography-based interpretations of Wieland’s oeuvre with analyses of four creative works: three paintings, read as self-portraits, and Beaver Lodge, the artist’s former studio and house at 497 Queen St. East, […]
“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” (de Beauvoir, 1949) Simone de Beauvoir’s work as a pioneering feminist philosopher and writer is not lost on anyone. In her most famous contribution to feminist theory, “The Second Sex” published in 1949, she challenged traditional conceptions of gender by introducing the notion of “Woman as […]
Swentzell addresses how the conflicting world views of the people of the Santa Clara pueblo and European settlers were reflected through their divergent relationship with landscape. Through lived experience of both spaces, she recalls the powerful connection between pueblo’s architecture and the land as well as the impact the Bureau of Indian Affairs school for […]
Gwendolyn Wright explores the historical challenges women face in the field of architecture. She highlights how architectural practice is influenced by rigid sexual stereotypes and how women tend to have segregated roles in the periphery. She dissects the experiences of women from discriminatory hiring, salary, and advancement opportunities to double standards like discrediting domestic architecture […]
In the book chapter “Female Regulation of the Healthy Home,” Annmarie Adams provides an insightful analysis into the multifaceted role of Victorian women in shaping domestic and public spheres through their contribution to household management and health standards. Adams interweaves the concept of domestic science with the cultural narrative of the era, showcasing women’s strategic […]
‘The vocabulary of ‘collecting’ and of ‘harvesting’ […] suggests the undeniable cynicism: that after the harvest season, the objects will magically grow back again like fields of wheat.’ ‘Even if it is somewhat reinvented, […] The erasure of memory has been so successful that communities have even begun to lose any remaining knowledge of this […]
The term “harvesting” I found very interesting. It generates a cycle for each system you harvest from. It’s very specific. Harvesting from a grapevine works differently than grain. It’s about harvesting the right amount in the right way without destroying the system. It’s about learning about each system and adapting to their needs in time. […]
In a way, this text published by the Rieberg Museum for me really underlines that connecting ideas to an object is what makes them be remembered and cherished but also creates a memory in a larger context. These ideas can be as general as they can be individual. Tied to something as simple as a […]
The discourse at the Rietberg Museum centered on the themes of restitution, ownership, and the significance of artwork as addressed in Bénédicte Savoy and Felwine Sarr’s influential paper, The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics. The paper delves into the historical underpinnings of colonization, stressing the imperative to acknowledge and tackle […]
In the context of the Rietberg Museum in Zurich, one cannot overlook the compelling discourse on cultural heritage articulated by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy in their text The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics. I am particularly intrigued by their argumentation regarding the ethical dimensions of acquiring and exhibiting African […]
A few notes after a discussion at the Rietberg Museum: We discussed the tradition of collectors’ museums in the context of the “harvest” concept. The Rietberg Museum has an incredible collection of 23,000 objects. Culture is not static “European cultures have benefited from the input they have received from these distant objects that were soon […]
The report The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy explores the contentious issue of repatriating African cultural artefacts. The Rietberg Museum, like many other museums, is facing concerns about the provenance of some of its artefacts, with questions about whether they had been acquired in […]
The Kunstmuseum Rietberg exhibits its large collection in a very neutral and non-judgemental way. As a result, visitors are quickly tempted to stroll through the rooms at a certain speed and with a certain indifference. The only thing that changes impressively for the visitor is his surroundings. A park, a villa, a bunker. The experience […]
Once the audio guide was in operation, we entered the Rietberg Museum through the Villa Wesendonck. We began to wander through the various rooms without any planned route, guided solely by our curiosity. Until the voice of the narrator started speaking, we felt a little overwhelmed by the large number of objects on display without […]
From the vast accumulation of thousands of objects of various anonymous identities, carefully locked behind the reflection of perfect glass panels, trapped by their shiny superficiality, I was brought in front of one of them by the British male voice of the audio guide. A sitting Bodhisattva in white porcelain, the étiquette says: “from China”. […]
Reading Circle 01.11.2023 at Museum Rietberg with Studio Caruso The origin of objects has always been characterised by the Latin prefix “Ex”: extraction, exploitation and export were the determining principles that led the things of everyday, spiritual, religious and cultural life from the colonised countries to the colonising countries. The report by Bénédicte Savoy and […]
Dolores Hayden actively points to the sexist imbalance of contemporary housing in the United States (which I would personally extend to all North America and globally). As it is on many occasions, the urban sprawl is the main culprit to blame for the perpetuation of sexist stereotypes in home designs. Conservationism in planning that urban […]
Abigail Van Slyck examines the gendered implications of “the tendency to sacrifice the historic interior” in the name of “emphasizing the integrity of the architectural shell” through the preservation of historic early 20th century American libraries. The text examines how these preservation projects facilitate the erasure of traces of women’s labour in library spaces. Van […]
Playing games of string figures is about giving and receiving patterns, dropping threads and falling but sometimes finding something that works something consequential and maybe even beautiful, that wasn’t there before, of relaying connections that matter, of telling stories in hand upon hand, digit upon digit, attachment site upon attachment site, to craft conditions for […]
Kate Wagner writes an article following the accusations of architect David Adjaye for sexual assault and harassment, in July of this year. She provides a powerful and timely critique of the architectural industry, shedding light on the deeply rooted issues of misogyny, racial discrimination, and abuse of power within the profession of architecture. This passage […]
In Alice Friedman’s essay, People Who Live in Glass Houses, she speaks about issues of gender and sexuality in the 20th century with an emphasis on two iconic buildings: Philip Johnson’s Glass House and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House. While designed and constructed around the same time, the two structures allow for different […]
German women went to Iceland after the Second World War in order to find a new existence or to take a break and escape from the bombed-out cities of northern Germany. This fact is hardly known, because normally only men are perceived as emigrants, in the past as well as today. The German Anna Siegel, […]
“The task for feminism is thus both to uncover forgotten aspects of history and to change structures and patterns that have been repeated for generations.” Fanny Söderbäck, Revolutionary Time, 2019. The book ‘her här her‘, edited by Magdalena Rozenberg, is an eclectic treatment of the Spacegirls‘s work, using texts and interviews from a […]
In Esperdy’s manifesto, Who Needs the Top? An Ungentle Manifesto (2019), she delivers a powerful feminist critique of the architectural profession, focusing on women’s under representation and the prevailing sexism within the field. In this thought-provoking piece, she challenges conventional notions of success and hierarchy in contemporary society and urges readers to reconsider the obsession […]
Katarina Bonnevier believes that the house, E. 1027, by Eileen Gray “hides and reveals simultaneously”. Gray’s first built home blurs spatial programmes, without discarding their remains. The building hides the ongoings inside, with an entrance from above and a private terrace at its depth. Bonnevier explains that while that the layout protects its visitors, it […]
In Denise Scott Brown’s “Room at the Top? Sexism and the Star System in Architecture”, the author recounts her experiences and observations of sexism in the field of architecture. She criticizes the star system for perpetuating the oversight of women’s contributions and positions no matter how significant. Scott Brown’s observations of the vicious circle generated […]
The House on Mango Street, despite its title, is not a book about architecture, but about life… inside a house. A series of short stories or vignettes, written from the perspective of a young Latina girl in Chicago, tell us about migration, struggles, and life in general. Architecture is described as a setting, but also […]
Emerging from Gauri Bharat’s travel experience and interactions with the Adivasi populations, (focusing more on the Santal community) in the regions of Jharkhand, West Bengal and Bihar over the course of the author’s PhD research, the book weaves a captivating narrative of the daily life, housing nuances and social customs of this […]
Even if not directly on architecture, through the stories of these women, this book offers interesting descriptions of the landscape and consolidation of the cultural understanding and inhabitation of late 19th- and early 20th-century US Southwest.
Catherine Colby has done good work researching and writing on a relatively unknown woman architect: Kate Chapman. Chapman work extensively on adobe constructions in Santa Fe, New Mexico during the first decades of the 20th century. She was also part of a vibrant artistic and cultural community that produced one of the most distinctive architecture […]
A Short Introduction to the Haenyeo Collective: A Dive into Eco-Feminism Haenyeo 해녀, is a group of remarkable women divers who fearlessly explore the ocean’s depths without any equipment, relying solely on their expertise to gather seafood for their livelihoods. While diving has historically been associated with male-dominated traditions across cultures, the Haenyeo communities […]
To: Caroline Voet; Eireen Schreurs; Helen Thomas; combined editors of The Hybrid Practitioner Dear Editors, We attended The Hybrid Practitioner book launch at the office of architects Henley Halebrown in London, as part of their Dialogues lecture series in April this year. The launch included talks by Yeoryia Manolopoulou and William Mann, who framed […]
New Lives, New Landscapes provides an enthusiastic account of the English landscape at a time when its suburban-rural countryside was being infiltrated by mechanised farming, mass vehicle ownership and industry during the post-war decades. It balances a precise and broad understanding of the regulatory complexity of land ownership with the very material and human effects […]
“Our town and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens like so much unwanted accrual.” Arundhati Roy, The pandemic is a portal. The pandemic was a lesson for everyone. The enforced lockdown on countries worldwide brought to light a myriad of stories. While some were hopeful, others were tales which were devastatingly sad. In […]
Eva Horn’s “Air as Medium” examines the overlooked role of air in shaping our perception and communication within a technologically mediated society. Through cultural and historical analysis, Horn highlights the significance of air as a medium and calls for a deeper understanding of its influence on our reality. In recent projects working with perfume to […]
Some of the photographs of the interiors designed by Nanda Vigo were familiar to me, but I didn’t know her so well.. Casa Gialla, Casa Blue or Casa Nera, and especially Lo Scarabeo Sotto La Foglia (The Beetle Under the Leaf) were the decors of many gangster and thriller films.. They have fascinated more than […]
Another compendium on women in architecture, that presents not only current but also historical figures–our architectural “pioneers.” A suitable book to catch up with our history.
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see, and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” Joan Didion, Why I Write, New York Times, 1976 When I moved to Europe from South Korea in February 2015, I learned a new language that […]
This annotation was written in 2021 in response to the SAFFA Growing Library’s call for commentary on books in their collection: Choosing Fahrten einer Paria I:Peru by Flora Tristan, by association leads me to one of my favourite books ever, which is American novelist Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, published in 1927. There […]
One of the main interests in the exhibition The Power of Mushrooms lies in the question of how women work together. In this book we can learn to understand what difficulties might appear, and why some groups cannot endure.
Behind Straight Curtains, Towards a Queer Feminist Theory of Architecture presents theatrical queer feminist interpretations of architecture, staged within a series of architectural scenes. Lifting the curtains of heteronormative and sexist assumptions, the book explores examples of architecture that challenge social norms.
Jane Hall attempts the impossible: to create a physical compendium both representative and subjective of architecture by women around the globe. The selection of architects included in the book is based on an online google doc sheet on which she and her community have been compiling names and oeuvres for years.
This annotation was written in 2021 in response to the SAFFA Growing Library’s call for commentary on books in their collection: The last book in the chain is more difficult, but keeping with the Latin American theme, it would perhaps be a book by Ida Prampolini, a Mexican art historian who I admire. She tells […]
This annotation was written in 2021 in response to the SAFFA Growing Library’s call for commentary on books in their collection: I have two reasons for choosing this book – Flora Tristan sounds like an amazing and inspiring woman who I know almost nothing about. I have never read one of her books, and so […]
I spotted a similar pocket DIY book, written nearly 40 years before the Berta Rahm one at the exhibition Here We Are! Frauen im Design 1900 at Vitra Design Museum. A pioneering champion of DIY, Louise Brigham designed simple pieces of furniture built from standard wooden packing crates. Her how-to manual Box Furniture was published […]
This book is a great source of hope for us women of the association ProSaffa1958-Pavillon! It describes how a group of women succeeded in finding a new location and use for a house designed by Lux Guyer for the first Saffa in 1928 in Bern. The house is now re-erected in Stäfa where it is […]
This book is a compilation of seven walks through Zurich put together by a group of historians that set up the organisation “Frauen Stadt Rundgang Zürich”. The thematic tours uncover the almost untraceable marks of women on Zurich’s cityscape, be it in politics, culture or commerce. The title of the book “Chratz und Quer” commemorates […]
Lisbeth Sachs and Berta Rahm were commissioned to do a pre-study of a masterplan for the Saffa 58 together. Although their design was not realised, they both built pavilions for the Saffa 58, albeit very different ones under very different circumstances. What is interesting to me, is that Berta Rahm uses Fural (a facade system […]