Anastasia Zharova on Dear Conchi

Lucia Bernini, Jonas Heller, Florian Reisner, Sofia Gloor on Manifesto for Maintenance Art

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

Jaehee Shin on the Sea of Jun Itami

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, […]

Jaehee Shin on Dictee

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 […]

Jaehee Shin on Space of Sincerity

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 […]

Jaehee Shin on Traditional Artistic Designs of Korea

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 […]

Guilah Naslavsky on El interior de la historia: historiografía arquitectónica para uso de latinoamericanos

In the Portuguese translation: O interior da História: historiografia arquitetônica para uso de Latino-americanos (2013), which was first published in Spanish as El interior de la historia: historiografía arquitectónica para uso de latinoamericanos (1990), the architectural critic and historian Marina Waisman discusses the concept of regionalism as used in international criticism and understood as a positive […]

Guilah Naslavsky on Cidades do Nordeste: do pote à rua

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 […]

Emilie Appercé on the New Woman’s Survival Catalog

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 […]

Maria Conen on A Room of One’s Own

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 […]

Maria Conen on Why have there been no Great Women Artists?

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 […]

Murielle Morger and Eva Schneuwly on Caliban and the Witch

The story of Caliban and the Witch begins in times of upheaval. Society continues to evolve and starts to put the capital in the foreground. It seeks to increase efficiency. We can read this story from different viewpoints, but we decide to read ‘the “transition” from feudalism to capitalism from the viewpoint of women, the […]

Charlotte Malterre-Barthes on Sultana’s Dream

I came to feminism early. I sensed things were biased. But as many others, I thought this was getting fixed, or had already fixed itself. I eye-rolled at my mother when she mumbled while watching political debates on TV— ‘not many women in these meetings.’ I ignored the red flags when going into architecture, I […]

Mariana Siracusa on The Lure of the Local

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 […]

Yeshi Wang on A Pictorial History of World Architecture

Luo Xiaowei (1925–2020) is one of the most important scholars who introduced Western architecture to China. She was the first to offer a course on the history of modern foreign architecture in China and wrote several books on this topic, many of which have become standard textbooks for Chinese architecture students. One of the most […]