“The history of feminism is, in a sense, the history of autotheory.” Lauren Fournier, Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing and Criticism, 2021. Thinking & Writing Place – Writing as Feminist Spatial Practice was a seminar curated by Lilian Robl at the Technische Universität München in spring 2023. The production of multilayered […]
During the summer of 2022, the chair of Jan de Vylder at ETH Zurich began a 3-year experiment at the Furka Pass in Switzerland (in:dépendance), 2429 m above sea level and only accessible 4 months a year. Responding to their invitation for proposals for short residences, Women Writing Architecture was represented by Helen Thomas, born […]
Since 2013, CENTRALA (Gosia Kuciewicz and Simone De Iacobis) has been the custodian of the architecture of a living monument—Oskar and Zofia Hansen’s house in Szumin near Warsaw. The summerhouse that belonged to these important Polish architects was a spatial manifesto of their theory of Open Form. During CENTRALA’s custodianship, deep research and reflection on […]
Wera Meyer-Waldeck (WM-W) (Dresden 1906 – Bonn 1964) estudió desde 1927 hasta 1932 con los tres directores de la Bauhaus y de todos se llevó enseñanzas que más tarde aplicaría en su vida profesional. Sus trabajos fin de carrera consistieron en proyectar una escuela infantil y un colegio de ocho aulas, insertos dentro de la […]
Located on the ground floor of the iconic Copan building in downtown São Paulo, Livraria Megafauna opened its doors in November 2020. Managed by a team of professionals from the publishing and literary worlds, the bookstore aims to redefine what a bookstore can be. Positioned as a hub for reflection, curation, and creative engagement, Megafauna […]
ISBN+ is a contemporary art centre and specialised bookshop with the aim of making contemporary visual culture more accessible and comprehensible. ISBN+ serves not only as a hosting venue but also as a genuine meeting point where creators, artworks, and independent art publications converge. Independent Publications ISBN+ is dedicated to exploring, collecting, exhibiting, and distributing […]
ENCOUNTERS is a collaborative bookwork about Umbrella House, Kazuo Shinohara’s smallest residential building. Built in Tokyo in 1961, Umbrella House was recently saved from demolition and reconstructed at the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany. It represents a pivotal moment in Shinohara’s career as he began moving away from decorative concerns towards his search […]
Matéria Prima is an independent store based in Porto, Portugal, offering a curated selection of records, books, magazines, zines, and organizing music events. Our focus is broad and inclusive, encompassing diverse and experimental perspectives, with a strong commitment to making cultural materials accessible to a wide audience. We support innovative artists, musicians, independent labels, and […]
As part of the Parity Talks : Get Your Act Together! Studio Adam Caruso and Women Writing Architecture hosted a workshop on 8th March 2023 at the ONA DiD Lab at ETH Zurich. The workshop began with the crucial question: “Can writing be activism?” Our starting point is that no, it cannot, unless it is […]
The history of architecture is intimately intertwined with how humans perceive and interact with nature. Much in the way that houses are built to protect us from a wild nature and windows are designed to bring elements of nature indoors, architecture has evolved in response to our relation to the natural world. However, nature is […]
Comprising women from all architectural backgrounds, from students to architects with 20 years experience, researchers, interior designers and landscape architects, SOFA has 30-40 members each season and runs small groups and SOFA salons. Topics are chosen by the group leaders, here is the text list for Book Club : Architectural Theory & Gender Studies, one […]
The issue of gender and sexuality in architecture are still themes that are questioned as being relevant, a situation that Jessica Ellen Sewell challenges in her seminar course at the University of Virginia: When I tell people that I work on gender and architecture, I often get one of two responses: “you mean like phallic […]
Frauenkulturarchiv Graubünden is a place of refuge for us women, said Edith Freitag, a long-standing member of the association. A testimony to the cultural life of women in Graubünden Frauenkulturarchiv Graubünden – the Graubünden, or Grisons, Women’s Cultural Archive – is located at Goldgasse 10, Chur, Switzerland. It is an independent and non-profit foundation for […]
At women writing architecture, we are teaming up with Jessie Buckle to investigate the concept of ‘bodymind’. We will be exploring it as a glossary term through a lunchtime workshop and developing means to explore it further and weave it into further projects. In the meantime, the beginning of our definition (below) is accompanied by […]
Disabling Architectural Environments is a collection extracted from a postgraduate thesis, ‘Disabling Architectural Environments: Absences in Architectural Conditions’, by Jessie Buckle. This is an auto-ethnographic exploration of the relationship between epilepsy, climate and the built environment.
This text was part of my PhD entitled Material Dramaturgy: Tracing Trails of Dust in the Architectural Design Process. It served as a preface before I delved into my research on the engagement with materials in the contemporary context of architecture. This collection you see now is somewhat different from the references I had in […]
CAC Seoul – Curating Architecture Collective Seoul – is currently running the Galpi Project 갈피 프로젝트 , starting in September 2023, which extracts architectural forms contained in books and buildings and builds its own reference tower. Based on the etymology of the word ‘Galpi 갈피’, which means “a gap between or between each overlapping […]
Seen, Heard, Built is an exhibition curated by the CABLE team in Shenzen, China, who contacted women writing architecture with an invitation to participate. This is how they explain their idea:
Spazio bookshop in Milan sells only books, around 300 at any one time, which have been researched, then read and then chosen for the list by Mariana Siracusa. This bespoke and intimate selection by the selector has been specially collected to represent Spazio on womenwritingarchitecture.org. To listen to Mariana discuss her favourite book, visit the […]
This collection was created by Natália Peťková in preparation for the Women Writing Architecture 2-day workshop in Ennenda, Glarus, Switzerland called ‘Being A Stranger’. Six of the books in the collection are accompanied by an annotation that connects it to the theme. Some of these can also be seen in the women writing architecture (publishing) […]
This semester, for three weeks in a row, master and bachelor students of the Studio Caruso at the ETH Zurich meet for the reading circle. By group, they perform a text of the reader in one of the three sites studied. After which, the whole studio, including the teaching team, gathered to discuss what happened. […]
This informal collection has been made by Kathleen James-Chakraborty and is based on her reading over one and a half years for an ERC project that she is leading called Expanding Agency: Women Race and the Global Dissemination of Modern Architecture The research project explores four ways in which women and ethnic minorities had an […]
Has feminism impacted architecture? asks Professor Annmarie Adams of McGill University … let’s discuss This 13-week graduate-level lecture and seminar course (ARCH 684) at McGill University covering 37 texts (only four by men) begins with this challenge. “If Architect Barbie gets us talking, then more power to her,” is the opening statement, quoted from Despina […]
The sixth and final theme in the Parlour Reading Room series built on and wove together ideas from the previous five themes to explore existing and emerging methods for practicing intersectional feminism within built environment professions.The discussion re-visited Sarah Ahmed’s thoughts on creating a killjoy manifesto in her Living a Feminist Life and how to […]
The Urban Design Group, based in London, has a small library of around 200 publication titles on its website, each of which is accompanied by a review. 50 of these were written, edited or co-authored by women, and so the editors of women writing architecture have added these to the list.
This collection is created to celebrate the journey of Andrea Gollbach and Uschi Neubauer, managing directors of Lillemors bookshop in Munich, who retire in June 2023. The book lists that they have put together over the years for Lillemors since 1975 will be presented to the Munich authorities who will create an archive, thus preserving […]
Resident artist at Plas Brondanw in rural North Wales, Siw Thomas talks to Helen Thomas about the writer Amabel Williams-Ellis, the importance of self-education and writing in her life, and making space for her creative work within the traditional women’s role managing family and home. Siw speaks of Williams-Ellis’ relationship with her husband Clough Williams-Ellis, […]
Each episode of The Author Speaks (T-A-S) series is a short interview where we find out a little about the approach and inspirations of different female producers of text, focussing each time on one of their works. Our circle of guests extends globally to women that in some way or another, engage with an idea […]
Our understanding of how urban designers and architects can design cities is still largely shaped by Western urban conditions and perspectives. In particular, the European city, with its steady and controlled growth, has long served as the backdrop against which new urban design methods and tools have been developed. As scholars who advocate a decentring […]
These texts by women were instrumental within a studio teaching semester in the Chair of Adam Caruso at ETH Zurich. To find out more, see the annotations in the Glossator ‘Insights into Reframe, Rearrange, Repeat‘.
This list was selected by Mindy Seu from her book Cyberfeminism Index during her extensive tour across the world to mark its publication. The online version of Seu’s work was a treasured reference for the Women Writing Architecture team when we were conceptualising the brief and presence of our project, so we are happy to […]
How is ‘a book’ defined? Is it delimited by the processes of publishing: through binding and printing, or can the physical boundaries that contain content be loosened? The Book Society is a bookshop and publishing house founded by Helen Ku and Kyungyong Lim in 2010. With curator Jeongyeon Koo they seek to expand the book’s […]
The following collection consists of recent books by women that can be found at the After 8 Books in Paris. After 8 book is one of several constellations that have contributed to the selection of books that are on sale at Madame ETH. It can be found at the kiosk K67 in the […]
Understanding space as matrix is to underline space as a complex layering of ever-changing social relations. It is to disrupt the normalcy of some, whilst not necessarily stressing other or new conditions under which these social relations arise – rather altering the terms on which they are founded. Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative, Ursula Mayer, muf […]
During the course of the semester, students were required to carry out a process of active reading, which has been described in depth in the article ‘Reading-With: A Collaborative Method for Inclusive Architectural Histories (scroll down for abstract). This deep engagement with historical texts is being developed by Dr. Anne Hultzsch and Dr. Sol Pérez […]
It was a day of heavy rain during the summer of 2022. When I arrived, drenched, at the Youlhwadang Book Museum, chief editor Soojung Yi and chief curator Hye-Gyoung Chung warmly welcomed me in. Youlhwadang is located in Paju Book City, a place about an hour away from Seoul by bus inhabited by a group […]
The Anglo Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen was born in Dublin in 1899. Her first seven winters were spent in the city that she describes as “a bold Italianate plan in tricky Celtic light”. The city left a profound mark on her sensibility, with its “climatic moodiness” where “all stood for stability”; it was a city […]
In the summer of 2022, Women Writing Architecture requested a list of publications from the Swiss Architecture Museum in Basel for the compilation of this collection. Out of a total of 80 publications in conjunction with the S AM exhibition, 32 publications are written by female authors. This is closely related to Ulrike Jehle-Schulte Strathaus, […]
This collection has been compiled from a reading list by co-director Tine Milz at Theater Neumarkt, who contributed to Episode 2 : A book I love. Who created and wrote the world we live in? Feminism is pretty often intricately linked to Sexism, Racism, Gender, and Politics. The third Chapter brings us closer to the way […]
Each episode of A Book I Love (A-B-I-L) is a conversation around a book that is special to one of the speakers. It is a companion text, in the words of Sara Ahmed, that in some way or another intersects with an idea of architecture. Episode 1: The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd, chosen by Helen […]
Loké excerpt The list is composed of selections made by participants in Loké and it’s predecessor, BI, which is discussed in the conversation between Erandi de Silva, editor of Loké, and Helen Thomas, editor at Women Writing Architecture: Helen Thomas: The origins of Loké lie in a project you started over ten years ago, called […]
What do buildings mean? This questioning of the subject has always been a less straightforward issue in architecture than in painting or sculpture. An iconography of painting can be relatively direct. A woman depicted with an iron studded wheel while clutching a martyr’s palm is St. Catherine, an image rendered with personal and historic moment […]
This collection was put together by the Women Writing Architecture editors, who analysed and gathered the titles of books written or edited by women that appeared within the Architecture and Landscape Design section of CMYK’s online shop. Out of 263 titles we found 89 female-authored publications, which constitute this collection. For more check out @CMYK_BOOKSTORE
This collection is composed of a list of twelve favourite books sent to us by Flora Bonnemé, founder of Technè Bookshop.
The fifth Parlour Reading Room collection considers the climate crisis through an intersectional lens, imagining our “still possible shared futures” (Osborne, 2018, 148). The collection highlights the need to undo dominant concepts of nature, the politics of failure for the politically depressed, the impact of Climate Change on Indigenous communities and whether the equal representation […]
The fourth Parlour Reading Room collection considers the built environment through an intersectional feminist lens, questioning equity and the city, and exploring the connections between public space and power. The collection touches on trans feminism, queer design strategies and the argument for community-led projects and design justice. In February 2022, we hosted a conversation between […]
The third Parlour Reading Room collection considers the built environment through a feminist lens, reflecting on and questioning accessibility and the importance of noticing the “diverse perceptions and experiences of occupying built space” (Boys, 2018, p. 37). Through the collection, we ask how the social model of disability manifests in architectural practice and the built […]
The second theme of the Parlour Reading Room explores inclusivity and diversity within built environment professions. With Denise Scott Brown’s essay, “Room at the Top? Sexism and the Star System in Architecture”, Marie-Louise Richards’ essay in Field Journal: “Becoming a Feminist Architect” and other read-watch-listen materials, we ask how status affects inclusivity within the architectural […]
The Parlour Reading Room was launched in August 2020 by Anwyn Hocking and Sophie Adsett. It offers an invitation for the Parlour community to delve deeper into themes related to intersectional feminist theory, practice and the built environment. The initiative provides the framework for individuals to self-organise book club groups with their friends, family and […]
