Raindrops falling onto the pavement and bouncing off umbrellas. Sounds flood my ears; cars honking, the siren of an ambulance, the flickering of traffic lights and the voices of strangers as they pass us. My thoughts get muffled by the chaos of the crossing. As we stand in the rain, the concrete structure that is […]
Where is the place for protest? On the tour of the Kunsthaus Zürich, the guides presented us with quotes criticising the Kunsthaus. Criticism does not leave the Kunsthaus unscathed. It does not refuse to engage in discourse but tends to play a defensive and conservative role. The ground floor of the Moserbau currently houses an […]
Where is the space for protest? With this question in mind, we went on a journey through the Kunsthaus Zürich. From the small entrance area, through the gigantic foyer, up the steep staircase until we reached the Emil Bührle collection on the top floor. Walking through the exhibition gave me pause for thought. A businessman […]
A discussion with a fellow student made me think that everything in this day and age is dependent on money. People set a price for all objects. Market players are given a decisive role in determining artistic value, thus linking the art world with the market world. The Reading Circle group represented this connection between […]
How are artists trained today? What service do they provide? How much is an artwork worth? What is the market price? What is value? Why is ZHdK (Zurich University of the Arts) no longer decentrally spread over the city of Zürich? Is Toni-Areal really the place where contemporary artists are educated? Why in an impermeable […]
for the Reading Circle RaMPE Grand Opening, on the 8th of November 2023, at Löwenbräukunst, Limmatstrasse 268 & 270, 8005 Zürich Andrea Fraser or the irony as a tool for “institutional critique” „There is indeed much to suggest that in recent years, whether or not an artwork was considered artistically relevant depended to […]
What is the main focus of consumption at a vernissage? Is it about the art or is it about the drinks, the exchange, seeing and being seen? Does the artwork lose more and more value and does the character of the artist and his performance gain in importance? I can’t remember the art, but I […]
I had a lot of fun at the Löwenbräu Reading Circle. The way they opened the imaginary exhibition made me think of all the real vernisages and openings I have been to. What drew my curiosity, was the hierarchy of all the different characters involved. Questions like “Who makes the most money?” or “What degree […]
This group chat is the result of a reading circle performance within the context of Studio Caruso at ETH Zurich during the spring semester of 2022. By drafting an overly exciting email, a chat about why we are „being so nice“ started. During the discussion, the exact same medium which was criticized by Rosler, was […]
Eight women: Helen, Emilie, Melinda, Natalia, Reem, Solange, Yagmür and myself, Jaehee, took part in the Erntezeit Workshop : Being a Stranger in Ennenda, Glarus in September 2023, at the headquarters of Tisch Zwei Verein. Some of the discussions held during the workshop were very intense and we focused a long time on the feelings […]
Almost 25 years after publishing her first book, L’architetto fuori di sé (1982), and more than 35 years since her first questions around self-awareness, Marta Lonzi uses a key word in the feminist lexicon, Authenticity, as a litmus test to reread the history of architecture in search of ethical connotations. Her book, Autenticità e progetto, […]
In the early months of 1982, at the height of Postmodernism, a very atypical book was published in Italy, which was L’architetto fuori di sé, by Marta Lonzi. This is a book on architecture, but published by a feminist publisher; it is a critique on the practice of architectural design at the time, but written […]
Jane Rendell’s introductory writing to part two of the book Gender Space Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction provides a feminist discourse on the intricate relations between gender and space. A series of multidisciplinary gender analyses are drawn upon to challenge the existing paradigm of classifying spaces according to the biological sex of its users (e.g. public […]
In Victoria Rosner’s text, “Fear in a Handful of Dust,” she discusses how the germ theory led to a paradigm shift in how people started to view spaces, specifically the cleanliness of them. Rosner explains how senses used to be the main assessment of hygiene, meaning that people would rely on vision and smell to […]
Desai’s introduction to “Women Architects in India” encapsulates perfectly how similar the discourse of feminism in architecture is across the world. It is not particularly limited to the western world (although many of the regions that reveal a similar fight have in the past been colonized by a western entity). With certain contextual nuances in […]
In Cynthia Hammond’s text titled “Suffrage City: spatial knowledge and Suffrage Work in Bath, 1909-1913” written in 2013, she answers “how early twentieth-century feminists used the larger space of the city for their cause” (Hammond 133) in response to “the special nature of suffrage activism in Bath” (Hammond 134). Her goal was to understand how […]
Lillian Chee’s chapter, “Domesticity, Gender, and Architecture” provides a rich analysis of the complex interplay between domesticity, gender, and architecture. The text engages with a variety of disciplines, historical examples, and contemporary perspectives to offer a nuanced understanding of the implications of domestic spaces in shaping and reflecting societal norms. One key aspect of Chee’s […]
Rina Swentzell utilizes her childhood memories of school to illustrate the importance of place in a person’s development. Born into a Pueblo in Santa Clara, ones’ connection to the cosmos and the earth was considered vital. Her community consisted of a large courtyard building that was constructed of earthen materials by everyone in the Pueblo. […]
Abigail Van Slyck’s exploration of the library interior is a compelling description of the importance of women and women’s labour on the architectural interior and the structural barriers that continue to keep women’s narratives out of history. In On the Inside: Preserving Women’s History in American Libraries, Van Slyck advocates for preserving the interior and […]
In a feminist review by Juliet Kinchen, “Interiors: nineteenth-century essays on the ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ room” unpacks the constraining gender normalities that existed in the Western world for users of the home. The author initially states that the home represents the “antithesis of public space” (Kinchen, 13), an environment in which women, the assigned decorators […]
Beatriz Colomina discusses the vandalism rendered by Le Corbusier on E. 1027, a house designed, built, and inhabited by the architect Eileen Gray. The author presents the degrees of Le Corbusier’s invasion on Gray’s architecture and identity and compares it to the traces of violence of the bullet marks left all over the walls of […]
Throughout architectural history, women were always in the background, many shadowed by their male coworkers or husbands. Just like Denise Scott Brown with Robert Venturi, incredibly talented female architects had major roles in contributing to great designs, but never received the recognition they deserved. In this text, Scott Brown advocates for the importance of accurately […]
Olivia Katarina Sudjic (born 1988) is a young British fiction writer Sudjic was born in London, England. Her father is Dejan Sudjic who grew up in Acton, London; his parents, who were immigrants from Yugoslavia, spoke Serbo-Croatian at home. Sudjic’s third novel Asylum Road was published in 2021. Therein, the narrator Anya is from Sarajevo. […]
Nilanjana Sudeshna or ‘Jhumpa’ Lahiri is a Bengali American author of novels, short stories and essays. She writes in English and, more recently, in Italian. Lahiri was born in London to Indian immigrant parents and moved to the United States with her family when she was three years old. Her work is largely autobiographical and […]
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 […]