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, the Danish […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
Another compendium on women in architecture, that presents not only current but also historical figures–our architectural “pioneers.” A suitable book to catch up with our history.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
In Victoria Rosner’s text, “Fear in a Handful of Dust,” she discusses how the germ theory led to a paradigm shift in how people started to view spaces, specifically the cleanliness of them. Rosner explains how senses used to be the main assessment of hygiene, meaning that people would rely on vision and smell to […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
Gwendolyn Wright explores the historical challenges women face in the field of architecture. She highlights how architectural practice is influenced by rigid sexual stereotypes and how women tend to have segregated roles in the periphery. She dissects the experiences of women from discriminatory hiring, salary, and advancement opportunities to double standards like discrediting domestic architecture […]
‘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 […]
In the context of the Rietberg Museum in Zurich, one cannot overlook the compelling discourse on cultural heritage articulated by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy in their text The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics. I am particularly intrigued by their argumentation regarding the ethical dimensions of acquiring and exhibiting African […]
The Reading Circle started off with a separation of the attendees into groups. Every group would receive a certain perspective into the world of the Kunsthaus, all of which were then discussed collectively. The visit confirmed many opinions I had already had of highly institutionalized museums, like the atmosphere of tension or the high threshold […]
A WHITE SANCTUARY E-1027, a house born from a collaboration between Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici, was conceived and designed with emotions. It reflects their shared ideals and their individual perspectives while also embodying their relationship. Gray brought an acute understanding of how people live, creating spaces that respond to both practical needs and emotional […]
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 […]
Reading Circle 01.11.2023 at Museum Rietberg with Studio Caruso The origin of objects has always been characterised by the Latin prefix “Ex”: extraction, exploitation and export were the determining principles that led the things of everyday, spiritual, religious and cultural life from the colonised countries to the colonising countries. The report by Bénédicte Savoy and […]
In her book Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit unravels walking throughout time as a bodily experience interwoven with culture, politics, and society. Whatever the story or background, walking is always put in relation to the space that is walked in or at. From the perspective of this physical dimension, Solnit lets people bodily enter a story. Walking […]
In the midst of the Portuguese dictatorial regime (1933-1974), Maria Lamas (1893–1983) wrote in 1948 a book titled As Mulheres do Meu País (The Women of My Country). Intended to portray and highlight the experiences of women as well as to report the policies imposed on them during the regime, this book, in my view, […]
Nos encontramos ante un apasionante escrito donde Josenia Hervás registra la historia de la Escuela de la Bauhaus desde una perspectiva singular y novedosa, la de género, que permitirá comprender, de forma más amplia y objetiva, lo que aconteció dentro de los muros de tan innovadora escuela. Entre los consabidos relatos e imágenes de esta […]
In the summer of 2024, Carla Capaul, director of the Hotel Alpina Lumbrein in Val Lumnezia, Graubünden, and Jaehee Shin, editor at Women Writing Architecture, met in the gardens of zum Alten Löwen in Zurich to talk about Annelise Leu, Switzerland’s first female hotelier, and her granddaughter Nina Zumthor, who has written a book about […]
A discussion with a fellow student made me think that everything in this day and age is dependent on money. People set a price for all objects. Market players are given a decisive role in determining artistic value, thus linking the art world with the market world. The Reading Circle group represented this connection between […]
