Personal Collections
Building in stone has been carried out by humans for many thousands of years. Over the centuries and across the world, techniques have developed, waned and been forgotten and then remembered, becoming newly vital and relevant. The guest editor of Insights June Solstice 2026 is Natália Peťková, who will be exploring the theme of building […]
Books make an immense contribution to how we understand architecture in showing us examples, opening up interpretations, narratives and ideas, and providing instruction and knowledge. But who makes them, and what are their motivations? Inspired by Women’s Day and challenged by the Architecture Foundation, editors at Women Writing Architecture sought out some of the women […]
There is reason, after all, that some people wish to colonize the moon, and others dance before it as an ancient friend. James Baldwin Simone and Gosia of Centrala, guest editors of the March Equinox 2026 women writing architecture Insights newletter, proposed Archeoastronomy and Collective Rituals as their theme: Regarding the theme for our contribution, […]
Generated through unjust judgements and behaviours rooted in unequal power relations, intersectional discrimination refers to inequitable treatment arising from multiple, overlapping forms of prejudice. It highlights how people whose identities place them outside the hegemony in more than one way can experience layered and mutually reinforcing forms of discrimination. Architecture’s discriminatory forces are woven into […]
This collection gathers together writing by women about the architecture of Accra, with a bit of added wider context. The list is quite long, and different kinds of text were found in a variety of places, often reflecting their geographical and socio-political situation. These range from reports of luxury housing developments by foreign architects, and […]
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 […]
I believe that the most accessible way to give you, dear readers, an idea of what you’ll find in this reading list is to roughly sketch out the introduction I gave at a workshop on success that I ran in Ennenda. I told the participants: The topic success emerged when we started thinking about value, […]
This collection is made to accompany the March Equinox edition of Insights, Women Writing Architecture’s newsletter. We welcome any suggestions for citations, and definitions to add to the Glossary (editors@womenwritingarchitecture.org) below the two definitions so far: A Glossary definition and its limitations Motherhood can be defined as the state or experience of being a mother, […]
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) […]
Each episode of The Author Speaks (T-A-S) series is a short interview where we find out a little about the approach and inspirations of different female producers of text, focussing each time on one of their works. Our circle of guests extends globally to women that in some way or another, engage with an idea […]
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 […]
Each episode of A Book I Love (A-B-I-L) is a conversation around a book that is special to one of the speakers. It is a companion text, in the words of Sara Ahmed, that in some way or another intersects with an idea of architecture. Episode 1: The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd, chosen by Helen […]
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 […]