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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
an other angry book from penny. i like angry people.
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.
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.
literary high, virginia woof shows without category and zeal, an ever changing gender identity. i highly recommend this text, it taught me a lot.
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 […]
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.
short, clear, informative and above all important to have read.
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.
those are the basics! Absolute must.
those are the basics! Absolute must.
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 […]
feminism with examination of systems theory flaws.
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.
literary nimble, a touching story, it’s about children and Selma, I cried.
33.3% good, 33.3% stupid, 100% addictive
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 […]
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 […]
‘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 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Yoo Dong Ryong 유동룡 ( Jun Itami 이타미준 ) (1937-2011) is a Korean architect born and raised in Japan. The Sea of Jun Itami is a documentary about the life and philosophy of Itami Jun, a world-famous architect who worked in Japan while maintaining Korean nationality for his life. When we talk about his life, […]
This is the first text that came to my mind related to the project Women Writing Architecture. I think it is one of the most important texts if we talk about feminist insight from Korean origin. Around 2018, I suddenly got many calls from some of my friends doing artwork in Germany. They asked me […]
A few years ago, 김현진 Kim Hyunjin published an architectural essay called The Space of Sincerity 진심의 공간, which is written in Korean. As an architect, she works on a small number of works, and as a writer, she made her name by publishing texts on her Facebook page. On completion of a the holiday […]
This architectural catalogue was compiled and written by architect Chun Byung-ok 천병옥 one of the first generation of female architects in Korea after Ji Soon. In this book, she cataloged Korean palace interiors, furnishings, and traditional patterns for posterity. It has been translated into English and Japanese. There’s a prize named after her, the Chun […]
Cities in the Northeast: From the Pot to the Street: Traditional Construction Methods (2017) – was organized by the architect and teacher Ana Rita Sá Carneiro, coordinator of the landscape laboratory at UFPE. This unprecedented study on Traditional Construction Methods from the Northeast was realized in 1978 by the architects Liana Mesquita and Neide Mota […]
This publication was organized by the architects Guilah Naslavsky and Andréa Gáti, it is a collection of articles that resulted from research on architecture and gender in Northeastern Brazil. The objective is to give visibility to the trajectories of some female architects who worked in the region and were forgotten by the Brazilian hegemonic architectural […]
I was very glad to discover this book on the contemporary history of Swiss architecture (1980-2000) a few years ago, which examines thoroughly the works that I’m familiar with and digs deeply into their historical and theoretical background. In the context of Women Writing Architecture, it is probably worth mentioning that the architectural scene at […]
I ordered my edition of the New Woman’s Survival Catalog after watching a lecture by Mindy Seu, a designer and researcher whose work I discovered while scouring the colophon of a friend’s homepage as I was trying to build my own. The NWSC inspired her iconic cyberfeminism index—an online ever growing index which gathers techno-critical works starting from 1990 (when […]
