The Ornamental Design of the Chosun Dynasty House written by Chun Byung-Ok, shows a wide array of elements of the Hanok, the traditional Korean house, using photographs, drawings, and text. Covering everything from floor plans to individual pieces of furniture, the book reveals diverse aspects of traditional Korean architecture that are often overshadowed by […]
‘The beauty of the house is immeasurable, its kindness infinite.’ I felt very close to this book, although fantastic fiction is not my favorite genre. I absolutely loved the precise descriptions of the house in its grandeur, with all its many halls and sculptures, and its enormous ‘benevolence’ towards its inhabitant. I visualise it like […]
This emotional essay by Katia Zapata – the voice of Covachita architecture office in Monterrey, Mexico – comes the closest to my ideal of a Cartha article: it takes you by the hand through an unknown path while offering you the needed references to understand the ‘new’ you come in contact with. Her voice is […]
I came across this book whilst researching utopia and its built manifestations. While De Pizan’s book is not an architectural text, it does speak of the process of building a city, from foundations to detailing and populating. It proposes this new city in its materials, forms, and functions as a spatial manifestation of a message […]
Annebella is not an architect, she is a photography historian, researcher, and lecturer. This helps to give background to my surprise at how sharp and precise her takes on the typological analysis of photobooth are in this text. Without neglecting the sharing of the information specific to her background, Annebella expands on the formal, material, […]
Before reading the AG4, I saw Sandra presenting its content at a small symposium at the Arkdes, in Stockholm, back in 2017. Besides a deep knowledge of the site’s past and present, Sandra shared with us a fantastic enthusiasm for both the Tiergarten and for the detailed, emotional analysis of it she had undertaken. While […]
Julia Kristeva analyses Giovanni Bellini’s work as a representation of successive stages in his processing of the absence of a mother figure in his childhood. By linking the evolution of Bellini’s art to the theme of motherhood, she provides a different perspective on the establishment of the Venetian Renaissance. At a time where a prevailing […]
The rain was pouring while we were standing at the entry in front of the Kunsthaus. A well-needed canopy in our own hands, thanks to the colleagues who were prepared and brought an umbrella. We waited for the church bells to ring at 9 am and then ran inside, together with the other “kaffee schabracken” […]
Margaret Hicks, does this name sound familiar? To me, it was unheard of before reading Despina Stratigakos’s book ‘Where are the Women Architects?’. Somehow, sadly, Margaret was the first US woman to obtain a degree in architecture, more than that, she was the first ever woman to have her work published in an architectural journal, […]
The text below contains my contribution to the printed book, ‘Lives of the Most Excellent Architects’, edited and curated by Thomas Weaver and Cecilia Da Pozzo (2024). This work stems from a course taught during the spring semester of 2024 in Mendrisio. In this piece, I present an intimate conversation with Lilly Reich, which serves as […]
Abigail Van Slyck’s exploration of the library interior is a compelling description of the importance of women and women’s labour on the architectural interior and the structural barriers that continue to keep women’s narratives out of history. In On the Inside: Preserving Women’s History in American Libraries, Van Slyck advocates for preserving the interior 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 […]
Yasmeen Lari: Architecture for the Future is a comprehensive look at the work and impact of the visionary Pakistani architect Yasmeen Lari, tracing her evolution from a pioneering modernist to a leader in zero-carbon, humanitarian architecture. The book highlights her development of an approach that combines ecological sustainability with social justice, particularly in disaster relief […]
Angela Davis’s Women, Race, & Class critically examines U.S. history through the interconnected lenses of gender, race, and class, showing how these systems of oppression shaped social movements from slavery and abolition to women’s suffrage and the 1960s feminist movement. She argues that mainstream feminist movements were dominated by White, middle-class concerns and often excluded […]
In When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chödrön presents teachings that are inclusive and accessible, drawing on Buddhist wisdom while speaking to universal human experiences of uncertainty, pain, and fear. Rather than requiring religious belief, she invites readers from all backgrounds to meet difficult emotions with curiosity, compassion, and presence. The book emphasises shared vulnerability, self-kindness, […]
This is an autobiographical work that records the career of modernist architect Minnette De Silva, a designer who is worth knowing and remembering. This document integrates a diary, an archive, an exhibition, and a monograph into a single volume. It is important to me personally because it memorialises the aesthetic richness of the twentieth century […]
Originally penned in 1975 and held from publication for fear of a ‘hostile reception’, this article is an honest and important record of architect Denise Scott Brown’s encounters with misogyny as a professional. Even today, despite the progress made by multiple waves of feminism and the more recent #MeToo movement, women still have a distance […]
Arundhati Roy was trained as an architect and matured to become a writer and one of India’s leading public intellectuals. This prophetic piece was written in the midst of the climate crisis and in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when many nations in the Global South went into lockdown with little regard for […]
There is an urgent need for perspectives in architecture that come from the ground up and this book demonstrates the invaluable and deep insights that authors who share a cultural context with their subjects can offer architectural discourse. Within these pages Shanti Jayewardene does the intellectual work of unpacking the inimitable Geoffrey Bawa’s legacy in […]
Writing in her late-twenties, Angela Davis’ autobiography documents her childhood, education, activism, resulting imprisonment, and trial. Using her lived experience, Davis makes a case for the abolition of prisons, offering a critical perspective on the larger systems surrounding this architectural typology and provides insight on how we as individuals can become engaged to minimize oppression […]
While great writing about architecture has been dominated by men, although this has shifted in the last 20-30 years, I feel that the discipline of art history has, in contrast, long championed great women writers and historians. When I think of great writing by women on architecture, I find that I more frequently turn to […]
Another book about architecture and memory, a very recent one, this time examining its preservation through cast copies. This book is very close to my own research interests, and deals with the topic of ornament and its reproduction in a very novel way. Lending is really concerned with cast fragments not as isolated educational or […]
Cammy Brothers is a prolific Italian Renaissance scholar. She is closer to an art historian, but I also appreciate that her work is not concerned with the boundaries between art and architecture, which in fact reflects a very Renaissance stance. For Brothers to focus on Michelangelo’s drawings and what they reveal about his turn to […]
I have always admired Joan Didion because she is a rock star – as much as any writer can be. She is cool, which is rare, and not something you can learn. She is not strictly an architecture writer, but she writes about the intersection of place and memory in an entirely different yet complementary […]
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 […]
At its core, The Living Mountain conveys that true understanding and connection with nature arise not from dominance but through a quiet harmony and reflective stillness. This insight resonates deeply with the work I’m pursuing this semester in Studio Caruso, where we are exploring the themes of remoteness and identity in the Swiss Alps. Though […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
In this article, Sarah Williams Goldhagen offers those in search of a different way of thinking about modernism – and, indeed, architecture more generally – a really significant steer. She moves away from relying on stylistic definitions and towards a positing of architecture as discourse: a set of debates about (in this instance) its relationship […]
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 […]
Published in 1938, Europe Rehoused became one of the most influential housing texts of the post-war era, and is still widely cited today (including my Master’s degree reading list). Written by the housing consultant Elizabeth Denby (1894–1965) it offers a survey of the nearly two decades of social housing built in six European countries since […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
In Alice Friedman’s essay, People Who Live in Glass Houses, she speaks about issues of gender and sexuality in the 20th century with an emphasis on two iconic buildings: Philip Johnson’s Glass House and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House. While designed and constructed around the same time, the two structures allow for different […]
In the nineteenth century, urban criticism was often formulated by the pen of travelling women, such as the Peruvian-French publicist and walker Flora Tristan (1803-1844), who processed her experiences as a single, working woman in her socio-politically committed writings. Five years before the publication of Friedrich Engels’ Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England, Tristan […]
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 […]
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 […]