In Janet Wolff’s article on the gendering of modern urban spaces, she argues that the flâneuse was not only invisible but really non-existent. Instead it was the flâneur, the male stroller and wanderer allowed to gaze and reflect on chance, fleeting, and impersonal encounters, that first Charles Baudelaire, Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, and then Richard […]
Although there has been a Jane Drew Prize honouring innovation, diversity, and inclusiveness in architecture since 1998, writings about the award’s namesake are rather few in number: a tribute written by friends and colleagues on the occasion of her 75th birthday in 1986: a monograph on Drew and her partner and husband Maxwell Fry’s practice […]
Full disclosure I was involved in planning this monograph, contributed an essay, and moderated one of its dialogues between Somaya and others. Still I am immodest enough to include it because this publication is an important departure from the typical architect’s monograph. It is really an archive between two covers, documenting a multifaceted practice of […]
This one is not precisely about architecture but on biopolitics, or coming from there and the body somehow in society, which seems in a way spatial to me.
Beatriz Preciado, as you might know, did this self-experiment with her body turning into a male human being. After that process she continued her writing with a male name. This I am gonna read.
This book was important when I was much younger and introduced me to the notion of gentrification, which I was not aware of at all beforehand.
Writing itself is a privileged house. A communication within walls which you can either share or keep private. A whole structure of expression and meditation that its revelation is as active as the writer’s intention. The bricks and the feathers of writing are accurately clear and blurry at the same time. Whereas most of the […]
‘I was used to changing spaces as if they were clothes and moving walls as if they were lego blocks’, said Laura Gallucci, describing her childish fascination for the love of her life: architecture. A passionate architect, as committed to craft as she was to high tech. She was naturally minimalist, avoided any concession to […]
Who is ‘l’architettrice’ – the woman architect in the title of this novel? She is Plautilla Bricci, or Briccia, (1616-1705), the first architect of modern history. Until recently she was ignored, and now is very much in the spotlight. The author gives us the portrait of an extraordinary woman in the seventeenth century, who was […]
A book I read at the beginning of the 1970s, about the time I was finishing my studies. This book doesn’t directly talk about architecture but it does explore the status of women in society and their fight for equal rights. It has supported and stimulated me to realise my ambition as a woman and […]
By travelling to Italy throughout the 1970s, my interest in Italian literature grew. The description of the landscape and the walk up to the house have opened up my way of looking and experiencing architecture placed within the landscape.
I read this book in German to document my graduation thesis (1974) at the architecture school. It is a reference book on gardens starting from the Egyptian era up until the early twentieth century.
Up close and personal: This is how Marguerite Duras in ‘Écrire’, Lucy Luppard in ‘The Lure of the Local’, and Rosalind Krauss in ‘Passages in Modern Sculpture’ describe the ‘spaces’ and ‘places’ they write about. The stories they tell are always about personal experience, even private in Duras’ case, and this allows readers to picture […]
Up close and personal: This is how Marguerite Duras in ‘Écrire’, Lucy Luppard in ‘The Lure of the Local’, and Rosalind Krauss in ‘Passages in Modern Sculpture’ describe the ‘spaces’ and ‘places’ they write about. The stories they tell are always about personal experience, even private in Duras’ case, and this allows readers to picture […]
Up close and personal: This is how Marguerite Duras in ‘Écrire’, Lucy Luppard in ‘The Lure of the Local’, and Rosalind Krauss in ‘Passages in Modern Sculpture’ describe the ‘spaces’ and ‘places’ they write about. The stories they tell are always about personal experience, even private in Duras’ case, and this allows readers to picture […]
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 […]
This essay talks about the notion of ‘Greatness’ in the art context. How ‘great’ artists and art is constructed in our society and what this means for female artists. Linda Nochlin shows the patterns according to which art institutions have always been organized and influenced the art scene. These descriptions and observations can probably be […]
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 […]
After Lucia Moholy’s partner Theodor Neubauer was arrested in her absence in their shared flat in Berlin in 1933, she fled to Paris via Prague and Vienna without any of her belongings. There she tried in vain to use press pressure to get Neubauer out of prison. In March 1934, she continued her escape – with […]
Regarding the published art text, I agree with the opinion that there is a standard writing phrase in the contemporary art scene, as the artist Seth Price stated. I believe this perspective also explains a lot of art texts that wander into this specialized field. However, the author, Wonhwa Yoon, uses her unique phrases and […]
Somehow it is familiar to hear those studying art history talk about Feminism, since it is a part of the academic programme, but it rarely happens that feminism is examined in art projects in Korea.This project book is a microscope for looking at how feminist Korean art is progressing. The young critic Jinshil Lee, who […]
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 […]
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 […]
From accepted and unaccepted donations Opposite the Kunsthaus on Heimplatz is the Schauspielhaus Zurich: Pfauen. During the National Socialist era, it was the only free theatre stage in the German-speaking world. This made it a centre for German and Austrian actors who emigrated from their home countries, and thus it was also a centre of […]
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 […]
I’m particularly interested in this poem by Violet Jacob, who was a posh woman from a big house, the House of Dun in Montrose. She was encouraged in her writing by journalist, writer and editor Hugh MacDiarmid, who lived nearby. When her only son died in the First World War, it influenced her poetry. I […]
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 […]
A post-hurricane manifesto, Salas Rivera’s While They Sleep: Under the Bed is Another Country constructs a critique of necropolitics, necrocapitalism, coloniality, oppression, and other imaginaries. The main text in English addresses the US empire and its necropolitical implications on its colonial subjects, while the footnotes, in Spanish, propose answers as coming from its colony in Puerto Rico.
Silvia Federici’s 1975 text Wages Against Housework places care and domestic labour within the framework of capitalism, sexism, and servitude.
Ilze Wolff surveys the biopolitics and white supremacist infrastructures and superstructures of a textile factory building during the years of apartheid in Cape Town. In the form of decolonial radiography, the book dissects and scrutinizes everything, from racist factory legislation to architectural features of racial and gender segregation, to machines that reinvented time through cyclical […]
Salas Rivera reexamines in this bilingual book theories of value in Marxist economics and suggests that just as labour is usually the ‘third thing that gives value’, there are also other tertiaries between ‘colonialism and Puerto Rico, queer and transness, the binary of colony and empire.’ Salas Rivera introduces The Tertiary
Part of the reading lists of Loudreader and fiction author Luis Othoniel Rosa, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed presents an interplanetary political fiction about class struggle, anarchism, labour, and power.
The fifth chapter of Scenes of Subjection, ‘Fashioning obligation: Indebted Servitude and the Fetters of Slavery’, offers reading to understanding the afterlife of slavery, not as legacy but through the mechanisms that operate today. As contemporary anti-racist feminist movements in colonized territories employ subversive interruptions to coloniality and work through decolonial praxis, it becomes imperative […]
Madrid-based collective VenidaDevenida introduces Paul B. Preciado’s text on subversive urban cartographies, the post-porn work of Annie Sprinke, and the need to distance from hegemonic and institutional readings of gayness through the eyes of white men in the seventh session of Loudreaders. Building on Preciado’s text, VenidaDevenia proposes architectural interventions that subvert heteronormative readings and […]
By creating a Potential History, Azoulay questions the imperialist construction of time, space, and politics through objects and experiences of struggles around the world, from the original peoples in the Americas to the Congo under King Leopold II. Leopold Lambert loudread Potential History on the seventh session of Loudreaders.
Butler renders despair, selfishness, and decay in a world of exacerbated inequalities and asymmetrical accumulation of wealth. It is difficult to tell if this is climate apocalypse is somewhere in the future, or something many people have to live through now. Traumnovelle loudreads Parable of the Sower on the first session of Loudreaders, as the COVID […]
An integral part of the workshops offered in Loudreaders Trade School consists of the elaboration of Post-Colonial postcards that consist on the subversion of the violent landscapes of the Hudson River School of painting and their alliance to Manifest Destiny and settler-occupation of indigenous land.
In Learning to Become an Extremophile, Ailo Ribas borrows a term coined by NASA to propose a form of existence based on the adaptation to extreme environments. In the face of constant and extreme threats, the (trans) extremophile redefines survival, learns to move across and between spaces, environments, and relationships.
For Silvia Federici and Paul B. Preciado, the body is the centre around which capitalism, class, exploitation, and politics turn. Federici rethinks the origins and development of capitalism and a long history of models of resistance from a feminist viewpoint, while Preciado proposes to look at links between community and immunity, health and class, and […]
Sayak Valencia reads the border between Mexico and the US in Tijuana as a case study of the relationship between hyperviolence and law, militarization and the commodification of death, geopolitical borders, and the ‘post colonies,’ norm and exception, the state of war and states of security and freedom. Gore Capitalism is a critical gospel for […]
In the third session of Loudreaers Trade School, Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller presented their research on the urban simulations of military fronts on the border between the US and Mexico. Fronts: Military Urbanism & the Developing World dissects the potemkinesque simulation of racialized spaces and subjects while setting a dangerous blueprint for architectures of imperialist warfare, […]
Traumnovelle co-founder Léone Drapeaud questions patriarchal assumptions about utopias and the city via means of science fiction and feminist utopias that ‘redefine both women’s relationship to motherhood and their relationship to work, hence redefining the city.’
Through biographical anecdotes and historical connections, Leah Penniman takes us through an imaginary tour of land reclamation, reparations that go from the settler-colonial occupation of the land, through models of feminist resistance like Combahee River Colony, to today’s strategies to relate to the land as black people. The editors of Deem Journal introduce Farming While Black […]
For Adrienne Marie Brown Emergent Strategy is ‘how we can intentionally get into the right relationship with the planet and with each other.’ Inspired by Octavia Butler’s ‘all that you touch, you change and all that you touch, changes you back’, Emergent Strategy has been central to the imaginaries of many working for change, including […]
In El Lector, Araceli Tinajero traces the Cuban beginnings and describes the evolution of the loudreaders and the role of iconic figures like the Puerto Rican feminist and anarcho-syndicalist Luisa Capetillo in the tobacco factories across the Caribbean and US as they were able to establish networks of subversive solidarity that promoted emancipatory practices. Among the […]
Using the indigenous groups of the Andes region as the focal point, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui proposes that indigenous ‘were and are, above all, contemporary beings and peers’ with their own commitment to modernity. Against what she calls the ‘cultural postmodernism, imposed by the elites and reproduced by the state in a fragmented and subordinate way’, […]
Federici explores the relationship between primitive accumulation, gender, and race by drawing from the myths that created and hunted witches in Europe and through the Shakespearean character of Caliban. Federici intersects Marx through the evolution of early capitalism in relation to the exploitation of the body of women and workers.
