Annmarie Adams on Nature’s Museums

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

Annmarie Adams on Montreal, City of Water

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

Annmarie Adams on Me and My House

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

Annmarie Adams on A City for Children

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

Anne-Marie Armstrong on Orlando

This novel describes architecture and space very vividly. Architecture here serves as metaphors or to emphasize moments of action in the story, rooms or spaces sometime take on human qualities to reinforce the protagonist’s state of being.

Anne Hultzsch on A Tour in Switzerland

Helen Maria Williams was a contemporary of Mary Wollstonecraft and the two met at the time of the French Revolution in Paris, both British and both women concerned with politics. Williams sided with the moderate faction of the Girondists, was imprisoned for a time under the reign of terror and soon undertook a journey to […]

Annamaria Prandi on Sputiamo su Hegel

Carla Lonzi’s figure is fundamental for understanding Italian feminism in the 1970s, within which Lonzi occupied a radical position that can be understood by reading three books by her: Manifesto di Rivolta Femminile (1970), Sputiamo su Hegel (1978) and La donna clitoridea e quella vaginale (1974). These and other texts were published at the time […]

Annamaria Prandi on King Kong Theorie

King Kong the fictional giant monster resembling a gorilla? King Kong the anti-hero? Not here. Despentes invites us to consider King Kong without sexual attributes, a metaphor of power (he is still King), but of a sexuality that predates the distinction of genders. King Kong beyond the female and beyond the male, indeed, if anything, […]

Annamaria Prandi on I love Dick

Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick is both a novel and an essay on the role of women (and men) in our society, whose story is based on her own life. Chris is a flailing middle-aged indie film-maker married to Sylvere, a famous literary scholar 15 years her senior. The marriage has slipped into a sexless […]

Annamaria Prandi on Gli spazi delle donne

This book brings together a collection of essays reflecting on the spaces women inhabit at the intersection — and the term is especially fitting here — of home, work, and society, which also form the book’s three thematic sections. These are spaces inhabited not only by physical bodies, but also by mental and virtual ones: […]

Annamaria Prandi on Donne e Progetto

The volume explores the role of women in Italian architecture, design and urban planning from the early 1900s to the present day. Through essays selected by a multidisciplinary scientific committee, over one hundred leading figures in the field, active in Italy and abroad, emerge. This collaborative work restores visibility to individual and collective paths that […]

Annamaria Prandi on Being Here

In 2010, the writer Marie Darrieussecq encountered the work of Paula Modersohn-Becker for the first time. It happened by chance: she received an email promoting a psychoanalytic conference on motherhood, illustrated with a painting of a woman breastfeeding a child. What caught her attention was the unusual pose—mother and child lying naked on a bed, […]

Anna Rothstein on The Triumphant Progress of Market Success

I had a lot of fun at the Löwenbräu Reading Circle. The way they opened the imaginary exhibition made me think of all the real vernisages and openings I have been to. What drew my curiosity, was the hierarchy of all the different characters involved. Questions like “Who makes the most money?” or “What degree […]

Anastasia Zharova on Dear Conchi

Anastasia Jaffray on A Feminist Arcadian Landscape

[Joyce], you already are a great woman [architect]. In her reframing of Canadian artist Joyce Wieland’s work, feminist historian, and artist Cynthia Hammond challenges prior biography-based interpretations of Wieland’s oeuvre with analyses of four creative works: three paintings, read as self-portraits, and Beaver Lodge, the artist’s former studio and house at 497 Queen St. East, […]

Amy Perkins on Speaking of Buildings

My interest in alternative sources for constructing architectural historiographies came about through multiple various conversations. Jane Hall spoke about how and why documents are preserved during the Parity Talks V in relation to her own experience with Lina Bo Bardi’s archive. Helen Thomas recommended that I look at Janina Gosseye’s research, which has since led […]

Amy Perkins on Architectural Flirtations

I first came across Brady’s work in 2019 when organising a workshop on ‘crits’ in architectural education. Her use of humour in a space where the overriding emotions in the room are often fear, frustration or relief, was refreshing. Yet beyond the first impressions of silliness at dressing the participants of a crit in costume, […]

Amy Perkins on Architects Who Make a Fuss

Charlotte and Torsten ran the Parity Group on my arrival at the ETH with sharpness, clarity, drive, and an intoxicating quick wit. My first meeting in 2019 was energising – to hear a group of people discuss how to combat the homogeneity of the department in real terms, whilst listening to the concerns of each […]

Amy Perkins on Ahmed for Architecture Students

  This fanzine, created by Brady Burroughs with master’s students attending her seminar in 2019, is part of a parallel series to the Routledge ‘Thinkers for Architects’ which follows the tradition of offering an easily digestible, predominantly male cannon of philosophers for architecture students. This short publication is a collective attempt at a new series […]

Alicia Ayla Yerebakan on The Living Mountain

One uses a word when describing the phenomenon of having experienced something in the past that is happening to the self in the now. It is called déjà vu. I have never been to Scotland nor its mountains, but as I read Nan Shepherd’s book, I strongly believe that I fell into this state of […]

Alexa Sharp on Conflicting Landscape Values

Rina Swentzell utilizes her childhood memories of school to illustrate the importance of place in a person’s development. Born into a Pueblo in Santa Clara, ones’ connection to the cosmos and the earth was considered vital. Her community consisted of a large courtyard building that was constructed of earthen materials by everyone in the Pueblo. […]

Adrienne Enz on Life in Mexico

Adhrita Roy on Seen From The South

The course “Seen from the South” curated by Cathelijne Nuijsink (chair of Professor Avermaete, ETH Zürich) aimed at investigating the relationship of the western world to its Global South counterparts. As Jean Comaroff says – the Global South – the ‘non-West’ has always been seen as the area of raw, unprocessed data so what if […]

Adhrita Roy on Pandemic Is a Portal and Azadi

  “Our town and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens like so much unwanted accrual.” Arundhati Roy, The pandemic is a portal. The pandemic was a lesson for everyone. The enforced lockdown on countries worldwide brought to light a myriad of stories. While some were hopeful, others were tales which were devastatingly sad. In […]

Adhrita Roy on In Forest, Field and Factory

      Emerging from Gauri Bharat’s travel experience and interactions with the Adivasi populations, (focusing more on the Santal community) in the regions of Jharkhand, West Bengal and Bihar over the course of the author’s PhD research, the book weaves a captivating narrative of the daily life, housing nuances and social customs of this […]

Adam Caruso on The Fountainhead

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 […]