Martina Bischof on Pornotopia

Beatriz Preciado, as you might know, did this self-experiment with her body turning into a male human being. After that process she continued her writing with a male name. This I am gonna read.

Elizabeth Darling on Something to Talk about: Modernism, Discourse, Style

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 […]

Elizabeth Darling on Europe Rehoused

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 […]

Petra Gehrmann on A City Inside

Francisco Moura Veiga on AG 4 – Tiergarten

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 […]

Francisco Moura Veiga on Interview with Annebella Pollen on the Typology of the Photobooth

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, […]

Natália Peťková on Theory and Philosophy of Architecture

This is the text of the opening speech from a lecture series entitled ‘The Problem of Space in Architectural Criticism’ that Lina Bo Bardi gave at the Escola de Belas Artes da Universidade Federal da Bahia in the Spring of 1958. I came across it in the Architecture Words series by AA Publications on my […]

Natália Peťková on Friedrich Weinwurm

This monograph on the life and work of Friedrich Weinwurm (1885–1942), one of the protagonists of the New Objectivity movement in Slovakia, does a few things. It is a handsome object that allures with carefully restored original documents and photographs of Weinwurm’s buildings today by Olja Triaška Stefanovič. By situating the work of Weinwurm in […]

Natália Peťková on Carolotopia

I met Carla Frick-Cloupet, a young architect and PhD candidate at the l’Université Jean-Monet and the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Saint-Etienne, at a seminar, themed the ‘Norm and its Contrary’, at the architectural school in Rennes in early 2020. She delivered her rigorous yet playful reading of contemporary architectural production in France and Belgium […]

Roz Barr on Agnes Martin

Roz Barr on Sexuality and Space

I can remember the anticipation of waiting for my copy of this to arrive. I was finishing my dissertation when I had read reviews of this book and ordered a copy. It was during a time in the 1990s when gender and architecture were a growing theme. This collection of essays made me react with […]

Meredith Clausen on three books by Ada Louise Huxtable

Of the numerous books and scores of articles – in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Review of Books, and elsewhere – all are important, but these three (Kicked a Building Lately?; Goodbye History, Hello Hamburger; and The Unreal America) come to mind as perhaps the most emblematic of her work. They […]

Friederike von Rauch on Piranesi

‘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 […]

Eliana Perotti on Promenades dans Londres

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 […]

Poonam Verma Mascarenahs on The Clan of the Cave Bear

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 […]

Poonam Verma Mascarenahs on Chup

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 […]

Poonam Verma Mascarenahs on The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect

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 […]

Emma Letizia Jones on The Printed and the Built

Emma Letizia Jones on Plaster Monuments

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 […]

Emma Letizia Jones on Michelangelo, Drawing, and the Invention of Architecture

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 […]

Mary Norman Woods on The Invisible Flâneuse

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 […]

Mary Norman Woods on Jane Drew Memoirs

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 […]

Stéphanie Dadour on Le génie Lesbien

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. […]

Stéphanie Dadour on The Handmaid’s Tale

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.

Hirante Welandawe on A Room of One’s Own

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 […]

Reem Almannai on Herman Czech

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 […]

Adam Caruso on Pride and Prejudice

‘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, […]