Instructions
Welcome to the print version of your Personal Collection.
The Citations in your collection have been compiled into a document on the following pages. A summary has been created on the cover page, and a glossary at the end.
You can click to edit the title, author and introduction on the cover page, and add notes in the margins on any page.
Saving
Print your collection as a PDF or directly to your printer
Sharing
This collection is stored locally in your browser. If you would like to submit your collection to WWA to be featured in the Forum section of the website, please submit with your email address below.
Insights into Reframe, Rearrange, Repeat
Adam Caruso
One of the most challenging aspects of the preparation before each studio semester in my teaching chair at the Department of Architecture, ETH Zurich, is the selection of texts for the reader. While the overall theme for the studio will have been chosen, often the sites and programme have not been defined, and their selection will be informed by the content and spirit of the texts. It is always the intention that the texts will become instrumental in the development of the students’ design projects, something hat happens in different ways in each semester and each project. Sometimes it doesn’t work.
This collection includes the texts by women that were read during the autumn 2022 studio, and one extra.
Dates
Texts and Annotations from 1977 to 2013
Themes
Companion Text
Feminism
Shared space
Publication Types
Article
Book
Book chapter
Essay
Authors
Andrea Fraser
Kathy Acker
Louise Lawler
Rosalind Epstein Krauss
Rosalind Epstein Krauss
Rosalyn Deutsche
Publisher
"Parkett"-Verlag AG
Publisher
Tate Gallery Publishing Ltd
Volume
Rachel Whiteread: Shedding Life
Volume
Louise Lawler, October Files 14
Annotation
Monica Ciobotar on Louise Lawler’s Rude Museum
4 November, 2022
The Rude Museum, Louise Lawler, 1985.
In this essay, Louise Lawler talks about the deconstruction of the conventions in cultural institutions defined throughout history by by men. In the church as in the museum, the pervading power of men made women feel uncomfortable and powerless in the religious sphere.
This process begins with illustrations of the 14 apostles, none of them female, constituting one of the first moments when the image of women was left behind, up to the point where the image of women is not only neglected by also used to empathize with the power of men.
In the church of Saint Francesco in Assisi, Giotto depicted important episodes of the canonization of Saint Francesco using masculine tendencies in the symbolism of the frescos. A high point of male power is represented in Apparizione di san Francesco su un carro di fuoco, where the praying brothers and sons of Saint Francis are found in a hovel outside the city. Although the saint is bodily distant from his sons they behold their blessed Francis on a fiery and shining chariot and the hovel shines with a great light. This illustration is perceived from a masculine perspective in that it depicts Saint Francesco in a chariot, a man-made object. The fiery light accentuates the idea of power which the saint achieved by relinquishing his belongings and orientating himself towards divinity.
The frescoes Giotto made at the end of the 13th century in Assisi do not depicting women in a negative way, but rather neglect them, they are simply not included. With the intensification of politics and money in the church, which was initiated and continued by men, the image of women is not only irrelevant but also insulted. In the dome of Orvieto in the fresco Damned Hell, Fra Angelico depicts a woman powerless against the strength of men, the only character in a big crowd lying on the floor with no means of escape.
Volume
Passages in Modern Sculpture
Glossary
The following themes have been noted as being present in the citations in your collection.
-
by
Sara Ahmed
“In the chapters that follow, I refer to different kinds of feminist materials that have been my companions as a feminist and diversity worker, from feminist philosophy to feminist literature and film. A companion text could be thought of as a companion species, to borrow from Donna Haraway’s (2003) suggestive formulation. A companion text is a text whose company enabled you to proceed on a path less trodden. Such texts might spark a moment of revelation in the midst of an overwhelming proximity; they might share a feeling or give you resources to make sense of something that had been beyond your grasp; companion texts can prompt you to hesitate or to question the direction in which you are going, or they might give you a sense that in going the way you are going, you are not alone. Some of the texts that appear with me in this book have been with me before: Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway, George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss, Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. I could not have proceeded along the path I took without these texts. To live a feminist life is to live in very good company. I have placed these companion texts in my killjoy survival kit. I encourage you as a feminist reader to assemble your own kit. What would you include?”
excerpt from Living a Feminist Life (Duke University Press, 2017)
-
by
Women Writing Architecture
The central tenet of this powerful word is a belief in the social, economic, and political equality of women, and it is in this general sense that it has been applied as a thematic term in this annotated bibliography. While this is a clear statement, many complexities are embodied with the ambiguity of its terms, as well as the history of its struggle. As a descriptive term, it has been broken down into various categories which vary with the ideological, geographical and social status of the categoriser. For example, feminism is sometimes assigned chronological waves or stages: from the 1830s into the twentieth century – women’s fight for suffrage, equal contract and property rights; between 1960 and 1990 – a widening of the fight to embrace the workplace, domesticity, sexuality and reproductive rights; between 1990 and 2010 – the development of micropolitical groups concerned with specific issues; and the current wave of feminism that draws power from the me-too movement, and recognises the fluidity of biological womanhood.
-
by Tisch Zwei Verein Ennenda Lunchtime Workshop, July 2023
A principal condition of living in a large settlement, a city, for example, is the possibility of anonymity, which requires any collective space – both interior and exterior – to be shared by strangers. During the workshop, we discussed the ways in which the term ‘shared space’ breaks down the distinction between private and public, which has permeated discourse around the city and urban space since the 18th century.
The concept of ‘shared space’ also bypasses the focus on functional definitions of spaces, neighbourhoods, districts and regions. Shared space embodies the prevailing power structures defined by economic, political and social factors that produce the multiple and different realities of its users – for some threatening, or controlled, for others welcoming, comfortable, unseen. So, rather than being a qualifier of functional or dysfunctional inhabitation, it is an acknowledgement of the layers of meaning that a shared space can have, ultimately in any settlement, whether a village or a city.
[{"page_number":"1","note":"One of the most challenging aspects of the preparation before each studio semester in my teaching chair at the Department of Architecture, ETH Zurich, is the selection of texts for the reader. While the overall theme for the studio will have been chosen, often the sites and programme have not been defined, and their selection will be informed by the content and spirit of the texts. It is always the intention that the texts will become instrumental in the development of the students' design projects, something hat happens in different ways in each semester and each project. Sometimes it doesn't work.This collection includes the texts by women that were read during the autumn 2022 studio, and one extra.","endnote":false},{"page_number":"2","note":"This past semester was explicitly intended as a return to the tangible. After a few years of working intensely on programme and with concrete social situations in Zurich we, the teachers in the chair, promised ourselves and the students that we would return to narrower and more specifically architectural concerns. That is not to say that we would turn the clock back and look at the architecture of late-19th century Chicago or post-war Milan, but we would spend more time discussing floor plans, elevations and ideas for construction.","endnote":false},{"page_number":"3","note":"Two texts were included from Andrea Fraser's Museum Highlights: 'A Letter to the Wadsworth Atheneum' and 'Welcome to the Wadsworth'.In 'Welcome to the Wandsworth'. Andrea Fraser provides both the means to construct an institution critique of the history as well as the contemporary condition of the site. Her specific way of building up an argument and then performing it also suggests a technique for the students to take on and make projects that emerge from a critical position.","endnote":false},{"page_number":"5","note":"In 'Narrative Time: the question of the Gates of Hell', it is Rosalind Krauss's reading of Rodin's work within the context of modern industrial society and the way this challenges conventional ideas of originality and space, as much as Rodin's never finished masterpiece, that forms a thematic starting point to survey the sites and existing buildings, and an impetus for the design projects.","endnote":false},{"page_number":"4","note":"Louise Lawler's Rude Museum was not included in the reader, but the annotation touches upon issues addressed by Andrea Fraser.","endnote":false},{"page_number":"6","note":"I think that this semester, the idea of combining reading and reference, and the resonances that the students found between the texts and the site, have enabled texts and projects to become inseparably bound together.","endnote":false}]