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 […]
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 […]
Since 2013, CENTRALA (Gosia Kuciewicz and Simone De Iacobis) have been custodians of the architecture of a living monument—Oskar and Zofia Hansen’s house in Szumin, which is under the care of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, and open to the public. This summer house belonged to these important Polish architects, and is a […]
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 […]
Architects have long drawn connections between memory and the work they produce. This conversation investigates three ways that memory shapes space – whether that is how, conceptually, it changes the ‘space’ of framework we ourselves have used to think about or know a certain work, as in the case of Denise Scott Brown; or whether […]
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 […]
The practice of WAI Architecture Think Tank questions the political, historical, material legacy and imperatives of architecture and urbanism. WAI is one of their platforms of public engagement, which include Intelligentsia Gallery and the education platform and trade-school Loudreaders. Amongst others, their work has been exhibited at the Chicago Architecture Biennial and the Museum of […]
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.
“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 texts that […]
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 […]
This slowly-growing collection was initiated as part of the gta (ETH Zürich) exhibition The Power of Mushrooms – Berta Rahm’s Pavilion for the Saffa 58. The collective intelligence of fungi acted as a model to conceive the Growing Library, an inventory of books and texts from and about FTIQ* architects and feminist topics to collectively create […]
The Foyer. is Marta and Blanca Vives, sisters and architects of the inner life of the project. Their intention for participating in Women Writing Architecture is to deepen insights of the texts that they curate from a Unique Narrative angle. Unique Narrative is the orphaned step zero; the recreation of an inner world through a […]
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 […]
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 […]
In episode 18 of ‘The 11th Book’, a reading room produced by Curating Architecture Collective Seoul, architect Ryul Song was asked to select 10 important books that are central to her practice as an architect, writer, editor and curator, and to tell the stories surrounding them. At the end, she was asked to imagine an […]
This collection lists the intellectual foundation for Anoma Pieris’s Australian Research Council Future Fellowship project: Temporal Cities, Provisional Citizens: Architectures of Internment (2015-2018). ‘I look to interdisciplinary scholarship for incisive analyses of political issues; on racism, structural exclusions and social injustices – topics that canonical architectural texts may avoid. Among books on my shelf that […]
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 […]
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 […]
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:
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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‘.
Over the weekend of 11/12 September 2021 the garden of ZAZ was populated by an event hosted by Annexe Book Fair, Zine Making, and Dumpling Making Workshop Join us and our guests to browse through a selection of key feminist texts and hear about why they are important and relevant to read today. After browsing, […]
The reading list of this 12-week seminar course led by Professor Mary McLeod of Columbia GSAPP and Professor Victoria Rosner from the Department of English at Columbia includes 21 texts written by women, from which this collection is made. The course introduction explains its critical intentions: This class explores alternative visions of domestic life from […]
Edited and directed by Mary McLeod and Victoria Rosner, this resource has been developed collaboratively since 2012, with entries still being added by scholars of architectural history. There are 34 of the projected 50 American women architects to date. The current list can be seen below, where 28 of the 35 entries have been written […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
A pioneering resource for women’s writing, a self-described textbase, the Orlando Project is edited by Patricia Clements, Isobel Grundy, Sharon Balazs, and Jeffrey Antoniuk of the University of Alberta, and Susan Brown of the University of Guelph. It was published by individual or institutional subscription on the web by Cambridge University Press in June 2006, […]
This collection is made to accompany the March Equinox edition of Insights, Women Writing Architecture’s newsletter, coming out at the end of the month. We welcome any suggestions for citations, and definitions to add to the Glossary – below the two definitions so far: A Glossary definition and its limitations Motherhood can be defined as […]
This collection has been compiled from a larger reading list used by Professor Andrew Clancy and Laura Evans in their teaching of Unit 3 at Kingston School of Art in London in 2020-21. A parallel unit with a different reading list was run by Catherine Blaney and Colm Moore at Queens University Belfast. Faced with […]
20 years ago, I researched the 1934 Levant Fair in Tel Aviv, an international exhibition whose purpose was to boost the economy and the commercial ties of the Jewish community in Palestine under the British Mandate (Mandatory Palestine, 1921-1948). This was also an important architectural event that marked the acceptance of the international style as […]
In November 2021, the editors at Women Writing Architecture wrote to Metropolis bookshop asking them whether they would be interested in contributing a collection to the annotated bibliography. The book buyer, Molly, wrote back with screenshots of their running list (so probably already transformed), explaining that these describe what we call ‘sisters in architecture’ These […]
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 […]
To accompany the exhibition Life Without Buildings curated by Adam Szymczyk, the gta exhibition team created Madame ETH located in Kiosk K67. This red kiosk was designed by Slovenian architect Saša Mächtig as a multi-purpose structure for the street. It takes the form of a modular smooth plastic shell, which here becomes a bookshop in […]
Loudreaders is an open pedagogical platform and free trade school, that engages with architectural education as a form of mutual aid and critical solidarity in the age of COVID-19. It is based on the emancipating and persecuted alternative practice of education performed by lectors like Luisa Capetillo in the tobacco factories in the Caribbean. The […]
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 […]
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 […]
This collection was put together by the Women Writing Architecture editors, and records the section of Royal Institute of British Architects devoted to Women in Architecture, collected under the classification 72-055.2. The books on this shelf at the back of the library numbered 53 in June 2020.
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 […]
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 […]
In the spring of 2011, Reto Geiser and Martino Stierli, lecturers for architectural criticism at the Department of Architecture, ETH Zurich, ran a seminar course focused on the making and collecting of oral histories. During this time, their students met and interviewed figures from the Swiss architectural scene, seeking to locate their position within the […]
This simple collection consists of recent books by women that can be found at the Hochparterre bookshop in Zurich. Some of them are accompanied by annotations written by the shop’s managers, Cornelia Thalmann and Anne Müller.
During the autumn of 2021, Dr Anne Hultzsch (Women Writing Architecture: Female Experiences of the Built 1700-1900 (WoWA)) led a seminar around reading history from women’s perspectives, questioning not only the subject matter and ways of seeing it, but also the mechanism for writing. Using the form of ficto-criticism, students were encouraged to understand this […]
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 […]