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 […]
To: Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, agent provocateur and Assistant Professor of Architectural and Urban Design, School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, EPFL
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
On the perception of beauty in Maria Graham’s Residence in Chile It is such accidents as these which the poetical Greeks delighted to adorn with the rich fabulous imagery which spreads a charm over all they deigned to sing of. In Residence in Chile (1824) Graham reflects on beauty and the importance of its transmission […]
Arriving in front of the Kunsthaus the rain trickles on my head. There is no shelter, not even at the tram next to me. Why wouldn’t they make the entrance more comfortable? I’m sorted into a small group of 6 people, and I suspect some went to the wrong one. Our group is then led […]
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 […]
This annotation has been constructed by WWA from ‘A Conversation with Kenneth Frampton: Kenneth Frampton, Stan Allen and Hal Foster’ published in the journal October (vol. 106 (Autumn, 2003), pp. 35-58, this reference p.42 and 43): Frampton: … Somehow we’ve reached this point in our conversation without mentioning Hannah Arendt, who was also a key […]
Kenneth Andrew Mroczek suggested Juliaan Lampens, edited by Angelique Campens, to women writing architecture. He sent us a link with the following review by jw468 on Goodreads: September 13, 2014 Originally posted 04/09/2014 I put off ordering a copy of this book and now it’s become expensive; however, the graphic designer has made the entire […]
In summer 1939, Swiss pioneering architect Berta Rahm (1910–1998) undertook a long-desired trip to Scandinavia with the small prize money from an architectural competition she had won. Young, impecunious, and eager, she took detailed notes and sketches, commenting on the whole range of Scandinavian everyday culture and observing the progressive professional situation of women there. […]
Christine de Pizan, a successful writer and one of the first women living from her profession, aims with this allegorical text, to rehabilitate the position of the woman in society and in theory. She narrates a utopian project of a female community performing the conception, planning, and building of the city. This city is carried […]
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 […]
Although the title suggests that this book is about writing a dissertation, the content goes well beyond that. It is about going through and hopefully finishing a project, when several other projects and obligations run in parallel. It is about female life in contemporary western societies, where women but also people are expected to fulfill […]
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 […]
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 […]
Aotearoa New Zealand has long been recognised as a place that advances the standing of women in society. It was, after all, the first country in the world to grant women the vote, in 1893. But, to date, there has been no comprehensive account of women in architecture in Aotearoa New Zealand aimed at a […]
The Reading Circle at the Kunsthaus Zürich guided us through the highly contested art institution, a “box with only backsides” as it was described in the closing discussion. These “backsides” became even more apparent in our tour, led by (students impersonating) the cleaning team, an invisible workforce, operating out of hidden “backrooms” and closed doors, […]
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 […]
Together with illustrator Mariana Rio, Portuguese architect Joana Couceiro co-created the children’s book collection Casas com nome (houses with names), published by Circo de Ideias. These books are based on Ana Luísa Rodrigues’s doctoral thesis, Habitabilidade do espaço domoméstico : o cliente, o arquitecto, o habitante e a casa (The habitability of domestic space: the […]
Abandoned land, vacant lots emerge from human neglect, yet the urban wilds that form in these spaces challenge our perception of nature. For humans, nature has long been a target of conquest, a source of endless resources. After industrialization, it became a romanticized refuge—a pristine wilderness offering escape from artificial environments. In both cases, nature […]
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 […]
Everything we release comes back to us in some form, like an endless stream of looped rivers. And it flows everywhere, whether it is clumped or unclumped. It is in this sense that there is no nature untouched by humans. The entire system changes when some artificial action occurs. At first, people believed that changes […]
A study of the technological, theoretical, and cultural significance of the transparency of the glass structures of François Mitterand’s Grands Projects in Paris.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Sara Hendren provides a series of vivid stories drawn from the lived experience of disability and the ideologies and innovations that have emerged from it. ‘What Can a Body Do?’ is a phrase initially coined by philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler in conversation with Sunaura Taylor in The Examined Life, a documentary which has […]
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 […]
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 […]
This performance was conducted within the context of Studio A. Caruso ‘Making Plans for Living Together’ at ETH Zurich in the spring semester of 2021.
노을 위의 은빛 창문에서 구만리 희미한 세상을 내려다보고, 바닷가 문에서 삼천 년 상전벽해를 웃으며 보고 싶다. 손으로 하늘의 해와 별을 돌리고 몸소 구천의 바람과 이슬 속을 노닐고 싶다. From a silver window overlooking the sunset, I look ten thousand miles to the dim world below. On the seaside door, I want to contemplate the three-thousand-year-old […]
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see, and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” Joan Didion, Why I Write, New York Times, 1976 When I moved to Europe from South Korea in February 2015, I learned a new language that […]
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 […]
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, […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
As I approached one of the most fascinating residential complexes I’ve had the chance to visit in Brazil, a new storefront caught my eye. It’s been over a decade since I began viewing that part of the city through an architectural lens, and COPAN—the iconic housing project by Oscar Niemeyer in São Paulo—is no stranger […]
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 […]
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 […]
