Emma Letizia Jones on Giorgione and Crossing Cultures

Most people do not know this, but the Australian academic and writer Jaynie Anderson received an Italian knighthood in 2015 from the Italian President, and is to date the only art historian ever to have been awarded the Order of the Star of Italy. In 1970 she was the first female Rhodes Fellow at Hugh’s […]

Emily Priest on New Lives, New Landscapes

New Lives, New Landscapes provides an enthusiastic account of the English landscape at a time when its suburban-rural countryside was being infiltrated by mechanised farming, mass vehicle ownership and industry during the post-war decades. It balances a precise and broad understanding of the regulatory complexity of land ownership with the very material and human effects […]

Emily Priest and Dylan Radcliffe Brown on The Hybrid Practitioner

To: Caroline Voet; Eireen Schreurs; Helen Thomas; combined editors of The Hybrid Practitioner   Dear Editors, We attended The Hybrid Practitioner book launch at the office of architects Henley Halebrown in London, as part of their Dialogues lecture series in April this year. The launch included talks by Yeoryia Manolopoulou and William Mann, who framed […]

Emilie Appercé on The Power of Place

The Power of Place, published in 1997, is relevant to anyone involved in the process of spatial and cultural production, or to young architects in search of alternative practices. It is for those who acknowledge the real way architects work, as a collective enterprise, which is not often the way architects talk about their work. […]

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 […]

Emilie Appercé on Nanda Vigo

Some of the photographs of the interiors designed by Nanda Vigo were familiar to me, but I didn’t know her so well.. Casa Gialla, Casa Blue or Casa Nera, and especially Lo Scarabeo Sotto La Foglia (The Beetle Under the Leaf) were the decors of many gangster and thriller films.. They have fascinated more than […]

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 Box Furniture

I spotted a similar pocket DIY book, written nearly 40 years before the Berta Rahm one at the exhibition Here We Are! Frauen im Design 1900 at Vitra Design Museum. A pioneering champion of DIY, Louise Brigham designed simple pieces of furniture built from standard wooden packing crates. Her how-to manual Box Furniture was published […]

Ellis Woodman on Baggage

While renowned for her subsequent career as a broadcaster and newspaper editor, Janet Street-Porter spent two years as a student at the Architectural Association from 1965-67. The first volume of her autobiography Baggage: My Childhood (2004) offers a richly evocative description of the AA at a time of dramatic social and artistic upheaval. Her experiences […]

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 […]

Elizabeth Darling on Making Space: Women and the Manmade Environment

I read this while studying for my Master’s in Architectural History in 1990-91. It was key for me in seeing how one might challenge the unthinkingness in the discipline (still regrettably present) about who is thought to be worthy of study. I loved all the chapters but especially that by Barbara McFarlane, on the women’s […]

Elizabeth Darling on Architecture and Social Reform in late-Victorian London

This is a great book, chosen because of the type of architectural historical writing it exemplifies. It offers a careful and detailed historical analysis of the new building types that emerged out of social and urban initiatives such as Settlements, in the later 19th century. I love the way the spaces and forms of buildings […]

Elisabeth Gellein on Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture

We love shacks, because they pose impossible questions. How can we change what we need? How can we fearlessly acknowledge weakness as an animate and constructive content of collectivity? Lisa Robertson, Occasional Works:185 Lisa Robertson‘s Office for Soft Architecture (OSA) is a conceptual and poetic project that explores the intersections of architecture, urbanism, language, and […]

Elisabeth Gellein on Dirty Theory : Troubling Architecture

A conversation with Hélène—of sorts Sugar and spice and all things nice. That’s what little girls are made of. No doubt, the theory of the girl needs some reclaiming, for girls can be dirty, and not very nice — and why should they be deprived of these dubious traits? You dirty slut. In May 2024, […]

Eliana Perotti on Metropolis

The screenplay for Fritz Lang’s legendary film Metropolis, which shaped the classic, albeit dystopian, image of the modern city, goes back to an often-unnamed author, Thea von Harbou, who was well known during her time as the writer of screenplays for the film. The script was preceded by a novel in which the disturbing and […]

Eliana Perotti on L’architettrice

In the historical novel by the Roman writer Melania Mazzucco, the long life and work of the painter and architect Plautilla Bricci (1616-1705) are part of a precise but entertaining narration, which develops against the background of Baroque Rome. As a protagonist of the culture of her time, Plautilla appears alongside figures such as Gian […]

Eireen Schreurs on Organicism in Nineteenth Century Architecture

I have read parts of this book by the Leiden art historian Caroline van Eck for my PhD research on material culture in architecture, and I kept picking it up because is so insightful, but also because it is written so elegantly. Each chapter is systematically set up but also refreshingly compact, and every paragraph formulates ideas you […]

Efua Boakye on Black Vernacular

I sometimes indulge in imagining my ‘dwelling of dreams’, even though I am pessimistic about ever being in a position to actualise my perfect space. hooks’s essay poignantly touches on the power of the imagination, the politics of space, who gets to access architecture and cultural differences in approaches to building and placemaking.

Efua Boakye on Bad Behaviour

Bad Behaviour consists of multiple short stories. Set in 80s New York, Gaitskill’s narratives capture the essence of the city through the way the characters interact with one another. Not only are the stories in the book about interpersonal relationships and how people treat each other, but the descriptions of the spaces that the characters […]

Dimitri Bleichenbacher on The Triumphant Progress of Market Success

How are artists trained today? What service do they provide? How much is an artwork worth? What is the market price? What is value? Why is ZHdK (Zurich University of the Arts) no longer decentrally spread over the city of Zürich? Is Toni-Areal really the place where contemporary artists are educated? Why in an impermeable […]

Diane Elliott Gayer on Amélie Essesse

The written and film work of Amélie Essesse is about the historic construction methods of mud construction by women in western Africa. Her work encompasses many layers and spans from workshops in New Mexico to Paris, as well as community implementation in western African historic preservation.

Despina Stratigakos on Das Haus der Alleinstehenden Frauen

As a graduate student, I came across a bizarre novel about a woman architect that negatively inspired me, if that is the correct term. Johanna Böhm, a Swiss writer, published Das Haus der alleinstehenden Frauen (The House of Single Women) in 1932, at a time of increasingly reactionary views of women, sexuality, and domesticity. The […]

Despina Stratigakos on Architecture in the Family Way

In Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1870-1900, Annmarie Adams explores the middle-class home in nineteenth century England as a battleground among health reform minded women, doctors, and architects. Middle-class women positioned themselves as the healers of houses, which Victorians considered toxic and disease-ridden, and thus a potential mortal danger to their […]

Cristina Fusco on The Mushroom at the End of the World

Anna Tsing unravels stories of hidden ecologies emerging around the matsutake mushroom on different continents, unveiling the mushroom as an emotional anchor, a commodity, and a sign of resurgence in disturbance-based ecosystems. These disobedient ecologies, arising from deteriorated grounds, fascinate me as an alternative way of thinking about the relationship between non-human beings, architecture and […]

Cristina Dreifuss-Serrano on The House on Mango Street

The House on Mango Street, despite its title, is not a book about architecture, but about life… inside a house. A series of short stories or vignettes, written from the perspective of a young Latina girl in Chicago, tell us about migration, struggles, and life in general. Architecture is described as a setting, but also […]

Cristina Dreifuss-Serrano on Ladies of the Canyons

Even if not directly on architecture, through the stories of these women, this book offers interesting descriptions of the landscape and consolidation of the cultural understanding and inhabitation of late 19th- and early 20th-century US Southwest.

Cristina Dreifuss-Serrano on Kate Chapman

Catherine Colby has done good work researching and writing on a relatively unknown woman architect: Kate Chapman. Chapman work extensively on adobe constructions in Santa Fe, New Mexico during the first decades of the 20th century. She was also part of a vibrant artistic and cultural community that produced one of the most distinctive architecture […]

Corinne Räz on An Historical and Moral View

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 […]

Clara Maria Puglisi on An Interrupted Life

Etty Hillesum (1914–1943) was a Dutch Jewish writer whose diaries, written during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, offer an intimate and profound reflection on life, memory, and personal resilience. She was a woman of extraordinary intellectual independence, defying traditional gender roles with her deeply introspective and philosophical approach to existence. Unlike many of her […]