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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Women who Rewrote the History of Finnish Architecture The history of Finnish architecture, like the history of architecture in general, is full of women. Although Finland was one of the first countries in the world where women could train as professional architects, for a long time these women remained in the shadows of history. […]
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 […]
Between 11 and 26 February 2022 the editorial staff of Caryatide were installed, temporarily, at the Galerie d’Architecture de Paris, transforming the rooms into a hybrid space where working and exhibiting went hand in hand. The exhibition offered the visitor the opportunity to discover their projects-in-progress. A documented presentation of the projects at their respective […]
Day 1 (via texts) 8pm “Bad News I’m afraid… Me too…” Day 2 (18th January, 9-10pm) Impossible to read new things today. So, through streaming eyes, Anne Enright’s The Green Road, from 2015, swims again into view; specifically the second chapter, Dan, and then the next, Constance. I first read these two chapters immediately after […]
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 […]
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 […]
This list was made spontaneously by Pablo Bronstein on encountering Women Writing Architecture, responding to but not entirely reflecting his idea of Lady Decoratoresses. Curious about the reasons that many female designers reside in the shadowy corners of books written about male architects and designers, this list suggests some of the historical names that occurred […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Eureka! Touring Library is an annual project generated by JuangZong Books & Deng Yuanye, and in their words, it: brings together the world’s leading independent and academic publishing houses that are dedicated to the contents of architecture. Eureka! Touring Library showcases the best of the year’s newest publications, the private libraries of master architects, […]
This simple collection consists of recent books by women that can be found at the Copyright bookshops in Ghent and Antwerp. Some of them are accompanied by annotations written by founder Hilde Peleman.
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.
This collection responds to the process of curating the exhibition Artek and the Aaltos and at its heart is a celebration of Aino Marsio-Aalto as a practicing architect. The Artek and the Aaltos exhibition was shown at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery in New York between April 22 and October 2, 2016. The exhibition was accompanied […]
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, […]
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 […]
During its fourth year (2018), Cartha was concerned with Building Identity. The content – editorials, essays, projects, visual essays, and interviews – is divided into five parts, each one : ASSIMILATION The absorption and integration of people, ideas, or culture into a wider society or culture. The process of becoming similar to something. The process […]
The first part of The Possible Progress lays the theoretical foundation upon which a series of answers by key guests will be set. The editors begin with this complex question: The Positivist Stage, as stated by Comte, marked the entry into an era when, due to gradual but constant scientific developments, increasingly accurate predictions of […]
In 2020, the Cartha team invited specialists in computation, history, the arts, sciences and economics to contemplate the ways that the systems that generate the invisible structures of contemporary society, whose presence is outlined in the editors’ introductory extract below, are embedded in and inform their research. The outcomes of some of these discussions are […]
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 […]
This collection has been put together by the Women Writing Architecture editors from the syllabus of the Architectural Criticism seminar at ETH Zurich in 2020 led by Antje Stahl and Vera Sacchetti. The full syllabus can be found here.
This collection lists the syllabus of the first DRAG lab book club semester. The DRAG lab book club is a format for horizontal discussions open to all. It aims to provide a framework for joint reflection and the sharing of questions relating to architecture, its practice, and teaching. The events of the book club are […]
The following collection has been curated by Baubibliothek librarian Petra Gehrmann during June 2021, who has carried out the task of identifying books in the collection written by women that address the role and presence of women in the architecture profession.
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 […]
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 […]
The citations and annotations in this collection occurred in conversations with collaborators who have been involved in preparing the Women Writing Architecture annotated bibliography during the first six months of 2021.
The Reading Circle Performance The images show the covers of the text collections of Studio Caruso, chair for architecture and construction at the DARCH of ETH Zurich, led by Prof. Adam Caruso. Since 2011, these textbooks have been compiled and printed at the beginning of each semester with reference to the semester’s topic. Here, the […]
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 […]
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 […]
In 2020, Professor Mary McLeod ran a week-long seminar course at the University of Ljubljana, from which a collection of 24 citations has been made. The ambitions of the course are described in its introduction: This class explores the intersections between gender and modern architecture, examining themes such as domestic reform, images of the New […]
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, […]
The principal intention of African State Architecture is to open up discussion around understanding statehood through architecture through a comparative study of state buildings in a selection of African countries, including Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, and South Africa. Quoting from the research summary of this project based at SOAS, London: Public buildings help define and […]
Drawing Matter are continuously adding new texts to their website, and this collection begins with a snapshot of writing by women about architectural drawings that appear on the site in May 2021, when there was a total of 686 texts. Included in this selection of 151 texts are some interesting series, such as Philippa Lewis’ […]
This collection is an example of a short bibliography of writing by women about architecture encountered by following one of the myriad trajectories through interconnected archived material on the contemporary (2021) internet. Additional relevant texts are being added. The starting point was a lecture by Mindy Seu on The Pedagogy of Design in the Age […]
In response to the first COVID-19 lockdown, which caused the closure of all live venues, London’s Architecture Foundation created an ambitious 100-day programme of online events (100 weekdays from Monday April 6th 2020 to Thursday August 27th 2020). The channel often showed three or four lectures, readings, films, or performances a day. One element of […]
The reading list of this 5-week seminar course led by Professor Mary Pepchinski is composed of 15 texts written by women. This collection brings together the citations for those texts.
The reading list of this 9-week course led by Professor Mary Pepchinski includes 30 texts, 11 of which were either written or co-authored by women. This collection brings together the citations for those texts.
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 […]
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.
Throughout history, women have relied on places outside the mainstream in order to find a place where they can accomplish intellectual work. Sometimes these are physical places, other times they are mental constructions or propositions. This collection brings together some example citations from the Women Writing Architecture bibliography that can be used as a starting […]
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 […]
