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 […]
Logan Amont on The Life and Work of Architect Judith Chafee
‘Fuck you Mr. Smith’, wrote a teenage Judith Chafee (1932–1998) to her principle upon graduating (she had found out the board of her high school had revealed her religious origins to the universities she had applied to, which at that time had a limited quota for Jewish students – she was anyway eventually offered admittance […]
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. […]
Laura Evans and Hiyala Shafeeq on The God of Small Things
The God of Small Things is Roy’s debut novel. Set in Kerala, India, the novel tells the story of a family through the experience of young fraternal twins, Estha and Rahel, and examines their place within caste society and their navigation of post-colonial India. This focus on the life of the family extends to the […]
Laura Evans and Finian Reece-Thomas on Purple Hibiscus
Adichie’s rich and immersive descriptions of interiors, gardens, climate and the changing seasons serve to situate fictional events within a world so tangible that it is hard to leave it behind even when the book is finished. Her domestic settings in particular unfurl to reveal the hidden structures of class, religion and power that underpin […]
Laura Evans and Drucilla Boakye on Jamaica Inn
Du Maurier’s novel explores the malevolent quasi-home of Jamaica Inn, a coaching inn turned smugglers’ den on the Cornish moors between Bodmin and Launceston. Her protagonist, Mary Yellan, is a young woman whose mother has died, necessitating her to move from her childhood home on a farm on the banks of the Helford River in […]
Marta Vives on Écrire
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 […]
Tatjana Blaser on Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution
an other angry book from penny. i like angry people.
Tatjana Blaser on Meat market
an angry book by laurie penny. if you like to read angry things, you might enjoy it. certainly not the most differentiated book but to call a spade a spade it makes total sense.
Tatjana Blaser on The Argonauts
this book is a must! i received it as a gift from my flatmate for my study of gender identity and found it to be the best guide for the birth of my child. no other book could prepare me for the birth as well and, above all, as honestly as this one.
Tatjana Blaser on Orlando
literary high, virginia woof shows without category and zeal, an ever changing gender identity. i highly recommend this text, it taught me a lot.
Tatjana Blaser on Der Fall Franza
for anyone who has nightmares, this book is worse. with every fibre, these page-long sentences (i am not exaggerating at all) draw the reader into a dark, unhappy, very weighted spell. i find bachmann is gifted like no other, using incredible literary skill to bring feelings to life in me whose existences i was not […]
Tatjana Blaser on Die gestundete Zeit
all the prose i’ve read by bachmann is heavy. it’s the same with the poems. it’s worth it. like orpheus, i play death on the strings of life, and in the beauty of this earth and your eyes that manage the sky, i only know how to say dark things.
Tatjana Blaser on Glitch Feminism
short, clear, informative and above all important to have read.
Tatjana Blaser on Ma mère rit
a very touching text. it is about the care work that the author does for her mother, who is at the end of her life.
Tatjana Blaser on Kapitalismus: Ein Gespräch über kritische Theorie
those are the basics! Absolute must.
Tatjana Blaser on Politik der Emotion
those are the basics! Absolute must.
Tatjana Blaser on GRM. Brainfuck.
a book that i read in the 8th month of pregnancy and actually made me even more afraid of the life that was to come for my child. it is different, it is understandable, it is annoying, but only because you actually know what it says, you just don’t actually want to know it. it […]
Tatjana Blaser on Anarchismus und Feminismus
feminism with examination of systems theory flaws.
Tatjana Blaser on The Life of the Mind
exhausting but you can really feel how you get smarter from page to page. i recommend it to everyone who still likes an overview in between.
Tatjana Blaser on Was man von hier aus sehen kann
literary nimble, a touching story, it’s about children and Selma, I cried.
Tatjana Blaser on Storia del nuovo cognome
33.3% good, 33.3% stupid, 100% addictive
Lorena Bassi on Fahrten einer Paria
Escaping her violent husband and her life in France, Flora Tristan embarked on a journey to Peru in 1833 to find her estranged Peruvian family and seek her father’s inheritance to gain financial independence. Tristan returned to France in 1834 and published her travelogue of Peru under the name Pérégrinations d’une Paria 1833– 1834 in […]
Lorena Bassi on Das Bergell
Johanna Garbald-Gredig kam 1840 in Zuoz als Tochter eines Lehrers zur Welt. Mit 21 Jahren heiratete sie den Zolleinnehmer Agostino Garbald und zog mit ihm nach Castasegna im Bergell, wo sich das Paar von Gottfried Semper 1863 eine Villa erbauen liess. Ihre Ehe blieb 16 Jahre kinderlos, wodurch Johanna Zeit hatte sich ihrer Ausbildung und […]
Claudia Mion on La Théorie du diamant
‘La perfection de l’acte créatif requiert de l’amour, et donc de la liberté’. Elisa Valero is an architect and a teacher. Her work, demanding and rigorous, is oriented towards the transmission of an architecture that is thought as much as built. This book, which reads like a manifesto, is a kind of first lesson in architecture. In […]
Jane Hall on Beatrix Potter’s Places
Jane Hall begins her Introduction to Woman Made, Great Woman Designers (2021), with a reflection on Alison Smithson’s analysis of Beatrix Potter: Few contemporary designers would cite children’s book author Beatrix Potter as an obvious source of inspiration for interior design. For mid-century British architect Alison Smithson, however, Potter’s fictional rendering of Peter Rabbit’s home and […]
Eric Crevels on Canteiros da Utopia
Silke Kapp is a professor of Architecture and Urbanism in the Escola de Arquitetura of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, in the city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The book Canteiros da Utopia, whose title can be translated as Construction Sites of Utopia, is the result of her Post-doc research in Urban Sociology from the Bauhaus Universiteit […]
Rosie Gibbs-Stevenson on NW
Although her novels are fictional, Zadie Smith’s artful depictions of the city are profoundly spatial. Her stories are predominantly located in and around Willesden in North West London where she grew up, dealing with intersecting themes of race and class, encountering diasporic communities, economic inequality and gentrification. In her 2012 novel NW, she locates scenes […]
Sonja Flury on Vom möblierten Zimmer bis zur Wohnung
Full of whimsical illustrations and street-smart comments by Swiss architect Berta Rahm, this book on how to furnish apartments is a testament to a time when progressive young women could rent (and appropriate) their own apartment, but naturally were expected to marry, pay a dowry and buy long-lasting furniture with their husbands. It is a […]
Elizabeth Darling on The Routledge Companion to Women in Architecture
This fascinating volume offers an invaluable transnational perspective on the significant and wide-ranging nature of women’s agency in the making of the built environment. From the early modern period to the present day, the case studies it presents interrogate and challenge our understandings of the interaction between gender and architecture. Editor Anna Sokolina writes: The […]
Hochparterre on Frauen in der Architektur
Frauen waren lange nicht sichtbar in der Welt der Architektur. Zeit, dass sich das ändert! Ein prächtiger Bildband feiert nun die Arbeit von zeitgenössischen Architektinnen und wegweisenden Pionierinnen. Die Niederländerin Nathalie de Vries etwa ist mit ihrer an einen Bücherberg erinnernden Bibliothek (Spijkenisse, 2012) vertreten, die Dänin Lene Tranberg wird mit einem visionären Studentenwohnheim (Kopenhagen, […]
Emilie Appercé on Une paysanne entre ferme, marché et associations
Book recommended by Gianna Ledermann during the reading room session organised by Annexe at ZAZ, Zentrum Architektur Zürich. At the death of her husband, Augusta Gillabert-Randin takes over the farm alone. In this particularly touching extract entitled ‘Trente années de ma vie comme fermière (1893-1923)’, she retraces in numbers the last 30 years of the […]
Emilie Appercé on I’m every woman
Book recommended by feminist philosopher Deborah Mühlebach during the reading room session organised by Annexe at ZAZ, Zentrum Architektur Zürich. In her first book, The origin of the world, which traces the cultural history of the vulva, as in I’m every woman, Liv Strömquist points out the absence of women in history in general, the lack […]
Emilie Appercé on The Problem of Speaking For Others
Text recommended to everyone, activists and non-activists alike, by the feminist philosopher Deborah Mühlebach during the reading room session organised by Annexe at ZAZ, Zentrum Architektur Zürich, on the very complex question of the practice of representing for others, a person or a group of people in one’s interest. Everyone does it. The text was originally […]
Emilie Appercé on Maintenance Art
This was recommended by Amy Perkins during the reading room session organised by Annexe at ZAZ, Zentrum Architektur Zürich. Free artist and full-time mother, when her daughter is born, Mierle Ukeles feels literally split in two. On the one hand, she is rediscovering the world through her daughter’s eyes, on the other, she is bored to death. […]
Emilie Appercé on Vom möblierten Zimmer bis zur Wohnung
Book recommended by the Association ProSaffa1958-Pavillon during the reading room session organised by Annexe at ZAZ, Zentrum Architektur Zürich. Berta Rahm wrote this handbook at the beginning of her career, a few years after she started her architectural practice in Zürich, which she eventually closed out in frustration with her profession to found her feminist publishing house […]
Sisterhood and After: An Oral History of the UK Women’s Liberation Movement, 1968–present
Speaking of Buildings: Oral History in Architectural Research
Amy Perkins on Speaking of Buildings
My interest in alternative sources for constructing architectural historiographies came about through multiple various conversations. Jane Hall spoke about how and why documents are preserved during the Parity Talks V in relation to her own experience with Lina Bo Bardi’s archive. Helen Thomas recommended that I look at Janina Gosseye’s research, which has since led […]
Amy Perkins on Ahmed for Architecture Students
This fanzine, created by Brady Burroughs with master’s students attending her seminar in 2019, is part of a parallel series to the Routledge ‘Thinkers for Architects’ which follows the tradition of offering an easily digestible, predominantly male cannon of philosophers for architecture students. This short publication is a collective attempt at a new series […]
Amy Perkins on Architectural Flirtations
I first came across Brady’s work in 2019 when organising a workshop on ‘crits’ in architectural education. Her use of humour in a space where the overriding emotions in the room are often fear, frustration or relief, was refreshing. Yet beyond the first impressions of silliness at dressing the participants of a crit in costume, […]
Amy Perkins on Architects Who Make a Fuss
Charlotte and Torsten ran the Parity Group on my arrival at the ETH with sharpness, clarity, drive, and an intoxicating quick wit. My first meeting in 2019 was energising – to hear a group of people discuss how to combat the homogeneity of the department in real terms, whilst listening to the concerns of each […]
Laura Evans on Purple Hibiscus
Adichie’s rich and immersive descriptions of interiors, gardens, climate and the changing seasons serve to situate fictional events within a world so tangible that it is hard to leave it behind even when the book is finished. Her domestic settings in particular unfurl to reveal the hidden structures of class, religion and power that […]
Jaehee Shin on Building Role Models
Young female architects entering their 30s have conversations with senior female architects in order to broaden the narrative of female architects in Korean history. The authors describe the book as architectural stories requested by women and answered by women. This book is a compilation of the results of the forum ‘Building Role Models: Architecture Spoken […]