Personal Collections
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 […]