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 beginning of the Growing Library 2021 © Jana Jenarin

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 and expand knowledge at the Department of Architecture at ETH Zürich and beyond. What we read not only depends on our personal choice, but also heavily on what is actually accessible, in our curriculum, libraries, or online. When it comes to female architecture and feminist topics, we have been missing out on knowledge: in our studies, we haven’t been introduced to these references, they are missing in the inventory of libraries and the algorithms of online search engines are not saturated enough to recommend these references to us. To rebuild that knowledge, we need collective effort.

Starting with a hyper-specific selection of publications about and by the Swiss architect Berta Rahm, who moved away from designing buildings to publishing when she founded the ALA Verlag in 1966, the Growing Library will grow associatively by recommendations from the existing network surrounding the exhibition and the Parity Talks.