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
This annotation is an extract from Annmarie Adams (2000) review ‘Nature’s Museums: Victorian Science and the Architecture of Display’, CAA Reviews, Nov. 7 2000
This annotation is an extract from: Annmarie Adams (1991) article ‘Rooms with a View: Domestic Architecture and Anglo-American’ that reviews Building Domestic Liberty: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Architectural Feminism and Living Space in Fact and Fiction, Design Book Review, No.20 1991, 61-62
This annotation is an extract from: Annmarie Adams (2018) review ‘Freedom and the Cage: Modern Architecture and Psychiatry in Central Europe, 1890–1914’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, March 2018, 97-98
This annotation is an extract from Annmarie Adams (2001) review ‘The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life’, Historical Geography, Vol. 27, 2001, 106-108
This annotation is an extract from: Annmarie Adams (2016) review ‘Hitler at Home’, Buildings and Landscapes, Fall 2016, 130-132
This annotation is an extract from Annmarie Adams (1997) review ‘ All the Modern Conveniences: American Household Plumbing, 1840-1890’, Material Culture Review, No.46 1997, 85-87
This annotation is an extract from Annmarie Adams (1992) review ‘The Queen Anne Revival Style in Canadian Architecture’, Material Culture Review, No.35 1992, 72-73
This annotation is an extract from Annmarie Adams (1994) review ‘The Edwardian House: The Middle-class Home in Britain 1880-1914’, Journal of Historical Geography, Apr.1 1994, 211-212
This annotation is an extract from Annmarie Adams (2013) review of ‘Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities’, Canadian Architect, No. 4 2013, 38
This annotation is an extract from Annmarie Adams (2001) review ‘The Architect: Reconstructing her Practice’, Design Book Review, No. 44/45 2001, 71-73
This annotation is an extract from Annmarie Adams (2016) review ‘North Oxford’, Design Book Review, No. 31 1994
This annotation is an extract from Annmarie Adams (2016) review ‘A City for Children: Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland, 1850–1950’, Planning Perspectives, December 2015, 138-140
This annotation is an extract from Annmarie Adams (1991) review ‘Ernest Cormier and the Universite de Montréal’, Design Book Review, No. 22, 1991, 30-32
This annotation is an extract from Annmarie Adams (2007) review ‘The Parlour and the Suburb: Domestic identities, class, femininity, and modernity’, Gender, Place & Culture, a Journal of Feminist Geography, 24 July 2007 (from a collection of reviews 499-511)
This annotation is an extract from Annmarie Adams (1998) review ‘Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, December 1998, 474-476
This annotation is an extract from Annmarie Adams (1992) review ‘New Households New Housing’, Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, Spring 1992, 64
This annotation is an extract from Annmarie Adams (1994) review ‘American Home Life, 1880-1930: A Social History of Spaces and Services’, Material History Review, Spring 1994, 87-89
This annotation is an extract from Annmarie Adams (2019) review ‘Montreal, City of Water: An Environmental History’, Canadian Journal of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, Vol. 41 No. 1, 2019, 73-74
This annotation is an extract from Annmarie Adams (2015) review ‘The Spaces of the Hospital: Spatiality and Urban Change in London 1680–1820’, Journal of Architectural Education, 69:1, 130-131
This annotation is an extract from Annmarie Adams (2000) review ‘House Life: Space, Place and Family in Europe’, Journal of Family History, October 2000, 557-559
This annotation is an extract from Annmarie Adams (2013) review ‘Contested Spaces: Abortion Clinics, Women’s Shelters and Hospitals’, Times Higher Education, August 1 2013, 46
This annotation is an extract from Annmarie Adams (1996) review ‘The Scottish Home’, Material History Review, Spring 1998, 93-95
This annotation is an extract from Annmarie Adams (2006) review ‘Demons of Domesticity: Women and the English Gas Industry 1889-1939’, American Historical Review, December 2006, 1602-1603
Liza Fior was one of the first people to contribute an annotation to Women Writing Architecture, and here she is being interrupted and joined by Helen Thomas as she talks about the idea of annotating texts during discussion about A Little Princess, with references to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series of […]