Corinne Räz on An Historical and Moral View

Valmira Haziri on Life in Mexico

Monika Grabski on Life in Mexico

Adrienne Enz on Life in Mexico

Liang Cheng Chung on Anna Viebrock

The office I worked with gave me the book Anna Viebrock: Das Vorgefundene erfinden as a gift. I didn’t know the famous stage designer at the time and as a rare book out of print, it arrived in a bit of a weary state. I have to admit I was a bit disappointed having seen […]

Valerie Keller on A Room of One’s Own

  Exactly 90 years ago, in A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf delineated the necessary conditions for the creation of pure poetry. The foundation of her argument was the so-called room of one’s own, meant both as a weighty symbol and as a very concrete place of retreat, where one can think of things […]

Monica Ciobotar on Louise Lawler’s Rude Museum

    In this essay, Louise Lawler talks about the deconstruction of the conventions in cultural institutions defined throughout history by by men. In the church as in the museum, the pervading power of men made women feel uncomfortable and powerless in the religious sphere. This process begins with illustrations of the 14 apostles, none […]

Huiyao Fu on Eva Hesse: Lost for Words and Louise Bourgeois: Conversation with Frances Morris

Embracing the mess and absurdity, commonplace objects and materials are stacked and elevated, and monstrous structure appears. The process and composition of Phyllida Barlow’s sculpture completely alter the perception of the individual objects and the space it occupies. The enormous scale, which in common practice implies a sense of monumentality, is conversely the result of […]

Gerard Carty on The Shelbourne Hotel

The Shelbourne Hotel is a book about the history of the Dublin Elizabeth Bowen describes in her autobiographical Seven Winters (1942), well-known but no longer available, grand dame touches on the Georgian restraint necessary to hold the rational character of the humanist city. Formerly a terrace of three Georgian houses, the owners of the hotel […]

Gerard Carty on Seven Winters

In Seven Winters (1942), the city of Dublin, where Elizabeth Bowen spent her early years, appears as a reflection, a translation of the felt experience of a seven year old, now in mature years, piecing together the characters of the city, its form and colour where the tense distances that one only slowly demolished gave […]

Gerard Carty on Bowen’s Court

One of Elizabeth Bowen’s most well-known non-fiction works is her history of the great house, Bowen’s Court in County Cork, which she eventually inhabited. She allows the reader an intimate knowledge and understanding of the structure and arrangement of the rooms, its relationship to the land, its deep cultural and social history. One is constantly […]

Gritli Faulhaber on Schizogenesis: The Art of Rosemarie Trockel

  There are many things I love about the book Schizogenesis : The Art of Rosemarie Trockel by Katherine Guinness. Katherine Guinness is an Australian art historian currently working at the University of Visual Arts at Colorado. First of all, it’s the first real theory book about Rosemarie Trockel, a German conceptual artist, which is […]

Ji Min An on The Architect as Worker

This book was recommended to me by a friend when I somewhat stumbled into starting my own practice, and was searching for guidance on how to do just that. How do I connect our studio’s ideological, creative and intellectual pursuit in architecture to a fair economical compensation and entrepreneurial value? More than once I have heard complaints […]

Jiawei Wu on Manual of Recycling

As an experienced architect and professor of building construction, Annette Hillebrandt co-founded IRBau (Initiative for Resource-Conserving Building) and the Urban Mining Student Award in 2016 and established www.urban-mining-design.de in 2017. The Recycling Manual is a comprehensive and detailed guide to environmentally sustainable construction with intelligent use of decommissioned materials. It provides quantified comparison between conventional […]

Jiawei Wu on Light Revealing Architecture

Light Revealing Architecture is an inspiring book I got during my research on the translucent effect created not by the opacity of glass but by the reflection on its surface. It coincides with Marietta’s observation that the luminous effect of all light sources depends upon the source, the geometry, the surfaces that receive and modify […]

Jiawei Wu on The Glass State

A study of the technological, theoretical, and cultural significance of the transparency of the glass structures of François Mitterand’s Grands Projects in Paris.  

Annamaria Prandi on I love Dick

Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick is both a novel and an essay on the role of women (and men) in our society, whose story is based on her own life. Chris is a flailing middle-aged indie film-maker married to Sylvere, a famous literary scholar 15 years her senior. The marriage has slipped into a sexless […]

Alicia Ayla Yerebakan on The Living Mountain

One uses a word when describing the phenomenon of having experienced something in the past that is happening to the self in the now. It is called déjà vu. I have never been to Scotland nor its mountains, but as I read Nan Shepherd’s book, I strongly believe that I fell into this state of […]

Helen Thomas on The Living Mountain

The Cairngorm mountains in the heart of Scotland inhabit my dreams, a constant provocation. This is perhaps because I have never been in the area long enough, or with enough energy perhaps, to make the long preparatory journey that a walker must make before arriving. Instead, Nan Shepherd’s account of her observations made during many […]

Anne Hultzsch on A Tour in Switzerland

Helen Maria Williams was a contemporary of Mary Wollstonecraft and the two met at the time of the French Revolution in Paris, both British and both women concerned with politics. Williams sided with the moderate faction of the Girondists, was imprisoned for a time under the reign of terror and soon undertook a journey to […]

Niels Olsen on El Planeta Film Companion

Before having the chance to see Ulmann’s film, I came across this printed matter accompanying its release. Very interested in her new work after a few years of pause since her infamous on self-exposure and foreseeing the increasing dominance of social media – Ulmann a “jeune-fille”, an amateur “avant la lettre”. The booklet invitation as well Natasha Stagg, […]

Fiona Hatz on Motherhood according to Giovanni Bellini

Julia Kristeva analyses Giovanni Bellini’s work as a representation of successive stages in his processing of the absence of a mother figure in his childhood. By linking the evolution of Bellini’s art to the theme of motherhood, she provides a different perspective on the establishment of the Venetian Renaissance. At a time where a prevailing […]

Simona Mele, Julius Schwartz, Luca Bronca on The Tale of Genji

It was in another city. A sunny day with a colleague. We have heard different kind of music at various place. We sit on a bench beside the window of a coffee shop on the street by the lake, enjoying the sunshine like lazy cats, hearing the most exciting music form the local band in […]

Julie Bovier, Lea Muttoni, Donata De Leso on Herland

Linda Sjøqvist on Les Orageuses

This book takes you by the guts. You are captivated but also disgusted. However, you have to face a truth, you are not scared of a space, you are scared of a specific specimen, men. Why are we scared at night, walking, biking or driving home alone ? What is the problem with today’s public […]

Paul Grieguszies Schäfer on Notes on “Camp”

“I’ll tell you what to do. Tear down that bitch of a bearing wall and put a window where it ought to be!” Joan Crawford bellows with eccentric energy on the construction site of her home under renovation, played by Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest, 1981. I use this film to contextualize the words of […]

Hyeri Lee on Cloud Bread, Moon Sherbet, Magic Candies, etc.

The first time I heard Baek Hee-na’s stories was in an interview on a tv show. Originally, she majored in education technology and studied character animation. After few years of working as an animator, she became an author of picture book for children. In that interview, there was a moment in which Hee-na shows how […]

Hyeri Lee on Dining Tables and Edo Food Culture in Ukiyo-e

The author of this book, Ayano Hayashi, is a curator and art writer. Among her publications, there is a series that explains the historical background through food culture of famous painters’ paintings, such as Monet and Van Gogh. The book that I introduce here Dining Tables and Edo Food Culture in Ukiyo-e is one of […]

Blanca Vives on Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

The architecture of bias in artificial intelligence “Seeing men as the human default is fundamental to the structure of human society”. This is the premise of Caroline Criado’s book. The text depicts how female perspective and needs have often been envisioned as a deviation of men’s and thus have been misrepresented in all aspects of […]

Laura Evans and Catarina de Abreu on Winter in Sokcho

Dusapin’s first novel explores Sokcho, a seaside resort city close to the freighted border between North and South Korea, through the eyes of the narrator – an anonymous young woman who works as a live-in receptionist and cook at Old Park’s guesthouse – and one of its guests, a French graphic novelist called Yan Kerrand. […]