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 […]
In a time when urbanism was mostly viewed from a technical and legal perspective, French art and architecture critic Françoise Choay offered a reflection on the modern city through the lens of theoretical discourse. Organising heterogenous ideas from various disciplines in ideological currents, such as progressism, culturalism, anti-urbanism, and naturalism, she pointed to the necessity […]
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 […]
When I decided to organise the first conference of Women Architects, which was named Women in Architecture 2000 Plus I created it on the foundation that it be a celebration of women’s work. I did not want to focus on the negativity that we all have experienced in some way or another in our careers, […]
In early ’90s I read The Clan of the Cave Bear and its sequel, the Valley of Horses, by Jean M. Auel. In these, I experienced the power of storytelling that can make history tangible. The author’s stance on women as carriers of knowledge and instrumental in change has left an indelible impression. But it’s […]
As a second year architecture student in 1986, I have this picture memory of me reclining in my dorm, flipping through an architecture magazine, (‘Architect and Builder’ or ‘Architecture + Design’), when I literally sat up. I was looking at the portraits of two saree-clad women! The facing pages featured projects by two architect sisters, […]
In recent years, the dialogues on gender politics and cultural conditioning as mentioned by author Deepa Narayan in her book titled Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women. This book highlighted the importance of recognising a schism that has expanded my own world view, as well as the level of engagement with society too. I do […]
The ‘Women in Architecture in South Asia’ conference in the year 2000 by HECAR Foundation in Mumbai is a touchstone in my memory. The most striking moment that stands out distinctly from the three days of uplifting proceedings was the release of the book The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect by Minnette […]
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 […]
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 […]
Full disclosure I was involved in planning this monograph, contributed an essay, and moderated one of its dialogues between Somaya and others. Still I am immodest enough to include it because this publication is an important departure from the typical architect’s monograph. It is really an archive between two covers, documenting a multifaceted practice of […]
In Janet Wolff’s article on the gendering of modern urban spaces, she argues that the flâneuse was not only invisible but really non-existent. Instead it was the flâneur, the male stroller and wanderer allowed to gaze and reflect on chance, fleeting, and impersonal encounters, that first Charles Baudelaire, Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, and then Richard […]
Published in 1971, Linda Nochlin’s essay was truly a clarion call. Written amidst the Second Wave of feminism, it has had many afterlives in books, journals, conferences, and course syllabi. It helped to create entire fields like women’s and queer studies. And it has resonated in disciplines and professions far beyond the arts and architecture. […]
Although there has been a Jane Drew Prize honouring innovation, diversity, and inclusiveness in architecture since 1998, writings about the award’s namesake are rather few in number: a tribute written by friends and colleagues on the occasion of her 75th birthday in 1986: a monograph on Drew and her partner and husband Maxwell Fry’s practice […]
A controversial book that should have an equivalent in architecture. Alice Coffin writes that she no longer wants to read male authors, in order to feed her imagination with other stories. ‘Men’s productions are the extension of a system of domination’, she explains. ‘They are the system. Art is an extension of the male imagination. […]
The hardest part of the book is when we realise that we are not too far from this situation and that the book was based on historical material. To be read again, while drawing the spaces of the protagonist’s life, where the story takes place.
This is a book that should be read by anyone working in the field of architecture, town planning, or housing. It operates on two levels. The first is related to historiographical methods. Hayden mobilises and encounters archives that were unknown. She inscribes them in a socio-historical context that reflects feminist thought and its political practices. […]
A Room of One’s Own is an extended essay published first in 1929, based on the lectures Woolf delivered at two women’s colleges at Cambridge University. Woolf’s writing is about the women’s struggle for independence and creative opportunity and is a landmark in feminist writing. At the commencement of the essay Woolf narrates how she […]
Currently, we enjoy opportunities to teach together. Teaching poses many challenges of an intellectual nature. The first and fundamental one is the objective: what content do you want to convey? What ideals or values are important to you and would you like to pass on? We are inspired by Hermann Czech’s words and works, and […]
‘Elizabeth, as they drove along, watched for the first appearance of Pemberley Woods with some perturbation; and when at length they turned in at the lodge, her spirits were in a high flutter.’ … So begins Volume 3 of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. I am not a great reader of early nineteenth century fiction, […]
I first read The Fountainhead as a teenager before I had plans to be an architect. It is a long time since I read the book but I remember how Ayn Rand’s seductive prose almost conceals her extreme vision of society. The book’s relentless tale of the righteous battle with the unworthy rhymed a bit […]
My cousin Perla gave me Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, I think after a not so easy trip we took together to a freezing Rome over New Year’s. We also visited Hadrian’s Villa, which is one of her favourite places. Although I have been to the villa a couple of times, I remember it as […]
‘It’s time to write women architects back into history’ is the first message Despina Stratigakos conveys as a subtitle of her article ‘Unforgetting Women Architects: From the Pritzker to Wikipedia’. This sentence indeed expresses the urgency of the matter. The Flanders Architecture Institute is commencing this writing back into history’ on a Belgian scale with […]
A non-fiction narrative description of the journey from conception to construction of the Parisian monument La Grande Arche de la Défense. Through a series of interviews and extensive research, the author recounts and condenses the complexity of all aspects of state-funded, large-scale architectural projects – a fragile balance between beauty, technique, politics, and finance. Cossé […]
In 1950, following her fourth year studying at the AA and prior to her final year of her degree, Jean Symons decided to consolidate the theory she had been taught during her education by engaging in practical ‘on site’ work. This took the form of a technical assistant position in the site office of 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Charlotte Perriand lived through almost the entire twentieth century – she was 96 years old when she died in 1999 and produced work for 70 years in a row. Though not usually attracted to autobiographies, I was very curious to read her story in her own words. As first-hand life stories tend to be, there […]
It was 1993 when I first picked up this book and tried to read it. My mother had read and put it on the pile of other books on her bedside table; she was 41 and I was 15 years old. The cover of the first translation into Turkish was very appealing, with the handsome […]
Who is ‘l’architettrice’ – the woman architect in the title of this novel? She is Plautilla Bricci, or Briccia, (1616-1705), the first architect of modern history. Until recently she was ignored, and now is very much in the spotlight. The author gives us the portrait of an extraordinary woman in the seventeenth century, who was […]
‘I was used to changing spaces as if they were clothes and moving walls as if they were lego blocks’, said Laura Gallucci, describing her childish fascination for the love of her life: architecture. A passionate architect, as committed to craft as she was to high tech. She was naturally minimalist, avoided any concession to […]
Women writing about women writing about architecture. At the 2008 conference held at the FU Berlin to commemorate the 100th birthday of Simone de Beauvoir, many speakers called for new frameworks to understand her prodigious and diverse oeuvre, which included philosophy, literature, biography, letters, and gender studies. Intrigued by this suggestion, over the years I […]
Women writing about women writing about architecture. At the 2008 conference held at the FU Berlin to commemorate the 100th birthday of Simone de Beauvoir, many speakers called for new frameworks to understand her prodigious and diverse oeuvre, which included philosophy, literature, biography, letters, and gender studies. Intrigued by this suggestion, over the years I […]
At the 2008 conference held at the FU Berlin to commemorate the 100th birthday of Simone de Beauvoir, many speakers called for new frameworks to understand her prodigious and diverse oeuvre, which included philosophy, literature, biography, letters, and gender studies. Intrigued by this suggestion, over the years I have been reading de Beauvoir, and discovering […]
This seventeenth century poem was first published in 1692, but the date of its writing is unknown. It is one of the most important poems written by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, who was born out of wedlock as Juana Ramírez de Asbaje in or around 1651. She chose to become a nun in […]
Within the heart of this book lies a mysterious, and although sinister, still compelling institution where women can enjoy the fruits of age, from growing a beard to discovering that women can be men in disguise and vice versa. The curious social and psychological character of the place is reflected in its architectural forms, which […]
Yasmeen Lari wrote this book about the vernacular architecture of Thatta, an ancient city in the province of Sindh, about two hours drive from her home town of Karachi. On the outskirts of the city is an archeological site very important to Lari, where she has carried out various conservation works and located her Zero […]
In my student years I often thought this book was horribly designed and produced and didn’t do justice to Minnette’s work or historicity. I now see it as a treasure trove of information and a really ingenious way in which someone can record their practice (through it’s scrapbook like composition) and create an archive in […]
Wright’s book and earlier dissertation was a huge motivation for my own work, especially Architecture in the Family Way (1996), which was also my dissertation. I set out, in fact, to ‘do’ a book like Wright’s but looking at architecture outside the United States. Her book is thus a model about models.
Although the book itself was inspirational, a real epiphany occurred for me when I heard Elizabeth Collins lecture on the content at UC Berkeley in the late 1980s. The eye opener for me was that she could project a plan on the screen and walk the audience through it, from the perspective of a New […]
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 […]
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 […]
This annotation is an extract from: Annmarie Adams (2020) review of: ‘Me and My House: James Baldwin’s Last Decade in France’, Winterthur Portfolio, 54:1 2020, 112-113