Personal Collections
In The Power of Gentleness, French philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle describes gentleness as a radical act of courage. Nænne is also about courage, about courage’s discomfort. I look out over the rooftops and hear the architecture of the city whisper: we cannot bear to tell the truth about our massive CO2 emissions. We don’t dare to […]
Over the last year, I have been always more aware of the weather as an aspect of architecture – as an abstract concept that features in concerns around climate change, usually catastrophic, apocalyptic even, that creates a sense of dread without a way of escaping it, but also as a lived phenomenon, very personal and […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 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. […]
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 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 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 […]
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 […]