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, and includes an annotation written by the shop’s managers at the time, 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
The Anna Göldi Museum in Ennenda, Switzerland, is dedicated to the promotion of and reflection on the 30 articles of human rights drafted by the UN in 1948 (The Declaration of Human Rights), to seek ways of giving them greater agency, both locally and generally. Das Anna Göldi Museum in Ennenda, Schweiz, widmet sich der […]
This collection is composed of a list of twelve favourite books sent to us by Flora Bonnemé, founder of Technè Bookshop.
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. […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 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. […]
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 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 […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.
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 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.
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
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
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 Barefoot Centre was founded by craftswoman and entrepreneur Barbara Sansoni. She published her first book on Sri Lankan architecture in 1978, under the Barefoot imprint, called Vihares & Verandas Ceylon. This list includes books edited or written by women about architecture that are on sale via the bookshop she founded.
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.
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 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 […]
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 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 […]
