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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.
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Space as Matrix Constellation
Geraldine Tedder
The exhibition ‘Space as Matrix’ brought together artists and architects who stand against a hierarchisation of space and the relations within it. Their fields of action range from challenging the motivations of building specifications to working together with stakeholders on design processes to – more fundamentally – breaking with generic representations of space and collapsing divisions between architect and user, artist and viewer, academia and lived experience.
This glossator collects together the texts that inspired and in some cases were enacted during the exhibition (and which were acquired for Madame ETH’s book kiosk). Accompanying notes (the glosses in the margins) both give insight into the curating and hanging of the exhibition while reflecting on five relationships: creative alliances or textual connections, within the constellation of artists, architects and writers taking part.
Dates
Texts and Annotations from 1976 to 2019
Themes
Capitalocene
Critique
Domesticity
Feminism
Monography
Shared space
Ways of feeling
Writing
Publication Types
Article
Book
Fiction
Magazine
Online resource
Authors
Chris Kraus
Doina Petrescu
Dolores Hayden
Everyone Agrees
Lucy R. Lippard
Maria Fusco
Maria Fusco
Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative
Susan Hiller
Susana Torre
Ursula Mayer
muf architecture/art
muf architecture/art
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Publisher
Tabletwo Productions
Publisher
Verlag für moderne Kunst
Publisher
Black Dog Press
Annotation
Emilie Appercé on The Power of Place
7 September, 2024
The Power of Place, published in 1997, is relevant to anyone involved in the process of spatial and cultural production, or to young architects in search of alternative practices. It is for those who acknowledge the real way architects work, as a collective enterprise, which is not often the way architects talk about their work. Dolores Hayden is an inventive thinker whose pioneering work in community architecture comes from a way of thinking about urban preservation that goes beyond the conventional expert view of unique buildings, historic districts, and isolated monuments. She looks at urban landscape as public history, as a vast cultural panorama that recognises the lives of ordinary people. The book delves into descriptions of experimental projects that she has initiated and been involved in, and always involves a large of actors, including locals people, historians, students, and politicians in the city of Los Angeles.
The ideas that emerge from her studies of LA are pertinent to the meaning of urban preservation in any growing 21st-century city, which experiences a constant cycle of destruction and reconstruction. Hayden understands what is significant in shaping what we see and feel of city life.
Most of her projects imply breaking down the boundaries to collaboration that separate social and professional people, which means inventing a practice based on what one feels strongly about, inventing a life for oneself. Hayden is also concerned with the aesthetics of places, with what gives physical places a special character, but equally what the politics of these spaces are, in a questioning of how issues of gender race, age class, and ethnicity affect people’s access to the city. Any site in the city has an important history. This book shows how to unlock found urban histories, as crazy as they may be, to discover specific things often neglected but nevertheless full of originality and inspiration. Going through the pages, one learns about how important it is to find an attitude towards a place, towards people, in order to figure out how much really needs to be done, how much needs to be changed, how much needs to be appropriated to reveal the power of the place.
Volume
#11 no. 3 Making Room, Women and Architecture
Publisher
Ellipsis London Pr Ltd
Annotation
Elizabeth Darling on Making Space: Women and the Manmade Environment
28 May, 2021
I read this while studying for my Master’s in Architectural History in 1990-91. It was key for me in seeing how one might challenge the unthinkingness in the discipline (still regrettably present) about who is thought to be worthy of study. I loved all the chapters but especially that by Barbara McFarlane, on the women’s housing sub-committee established in Britain during the First World War to investigate women’s needs in housing. This opened up a whole new world to me of women’s voices in history and spurred me on to listen and look for those who had come to be ‘not seen’ in our pasts.
Glossary
The following themes have been noted as being present in the citations in your collection.
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by
Christian Crevels
Eric Crevels
The term ‘Capitalocene’ represents a critical attempt to advance from the notion of ‘Anthropocene’. Popularized by climate change debates, the term anthropocene describes a geological epoch in which human activity is currently the main driving force behind the global environmental transformation. Its use faces criticism, however, as the term fails to address the discrepancy in the relationships between different human cultures and the biosphere, attributing the phenomenon to a vague, undifferentiated notion of humanity. On the other hand, the idea of capitalocene recognizes that the environmental state of affairs is not a general consequence of human activity, but a specific result of a material culture fostered by the capitalist mode of production, globalized through the mould of Western industrial society. Therefore, it highlights the geopolitical origins of the crisis, as well as its economic nature, demonstrating the asymmetrical powers and the class struggles behind and within environmental conflicts.
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by
Women Writing Architecture
If art criticism is the analysis and evaluation of works of art, could architectural criticism be applied to specific buildings, or is the subject of critique much wider? It depends on the limits of the term architecture – which can flood into all realms of life and even be described, when freed from canonical definition, as including instances of human intervention for the purposes of living. So, if art criticism is framed by theory, as an interpretive act involving the effort to understand a particular work of art from a theoretical perspective and to establish its significance in the history of art, what could architectural criticism be? Of all the words in the glossary, critique raises the questions of why and who for? the most strongly.
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by
Helen Thomas
This important word is laden with implications, since it is often associated with the cult of domesticity developed in the U.S. and Britain during the nineteenth century that embodies a still widely-influential value system built around ideas of femininity, a woman’s role in the home, and the relationship between work and family that this sets up. When conventional boundaries of what and who constitutes a family are questioned, so too is this fixed definition of domesticity. Within writings about architecture, this extends to the physical and spatial qualities of the domestic interior, and their socio-political meanings as they change over time and geography.
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by
Annmarie Adams
Domesticity refers generally to life at home, often with connotations of togetherness and family. The most common examples of domestic architecture are houses and housing, though other building types sometimes include residential associations to communicate explicit messages about care and comfort. Long-standing symbols of domesticity are pitched roofs, chimneys and fireplaces, and fragrant kitchens, though these vary across cultures and geographie. Domesticity has been a focus for many feminist scholars, due to its close association with women and motherhood.
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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.
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by
Women Writing Architecture
An architectural monograph usually describes the work of an individual architect or designer, sometimes that of a partnership or collective, which is often interpreted through the life experiences – also recounted – of the subject. Sometimes the subject is a single building or project. Usually written by one author, a monograph presents a single point of view on the subject, often with scholarly credentials through which it assumes authority. The monograph is a familiar tool for defining the importance of the individual creative figure and establishing a place for them within the canon. Until recently, the lives and works of women architects and designers have not often been the subjects of monographs, but important work in redefining the canon of architectural history has led to a series of books addressing this discrepancy.
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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.
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by
Women Writing Architecture
Initially, this term was a means of gathering together and identifying texts that refer to how we know, think and act through the senses, although this intention has been interpreted differently by the various Women Writing Architecture editors. Sometimes, it seems to embrace emotions, sometimes it seems to embrace attitudes.
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by
Women Writing Architecture
Coming about in response to the intention to question the three terms of our name – women, writing, architecture – this term gathers texts that are concerned with the act of writing. Sometimes this has been interpreted quite freely by different editors, who each have their own understanding.
[{"page_number":"8","note":"A list of the artists and architects exhibited in 'Space as Matrix'\u00a0\r\n\r\ncurated by Geraldine Tedder, gta exhibitions, DArch ETH Zurich\u00a0\r\n(28th September 9th December 2022):\r\n\r\nMorgan Quaintance\r\nUrsula Mayer\r\nmuf architecture\/art\r\nMatrix Feminist Design Co-operative\r\nSusana Torre\r\n*\r\nand those who contributed to the programme:\r\n*\r\nMaria Fusco\r\nWomen Writing Architecture\r\nThe Alternative School of Economics\r\nSol P\u00e9rez Mart\u00ednez\r\n\u00a0Jos Boys\u00a0\r\nMorgan Quaintance\u00a0\r\nmuf architecture\/art\r\nThe Heretics by Joan Braderma","endnote":true},{"page_number":"4","note":"******************************\r\nThe second relationship in this glossator is between Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative and muf, architecture\/art:\r\n*\r\n(Matrix)\u00a0Making Space: Women and the Man-made Environment (muf)\u00a0more than one (fragile) thing at a time \/ This Is What We Do: A Muf Manual\r\n*\r\nmuf architecture\/art began practicing in 1995, shortly after the work of Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative ended. Pursuing similar convictions to Matrix, muf worked under very different economic conditions \u2013 those defined by competition in the architectural services market. The practice of Matrix was a reference for muf, and both worked in London\u2019s East End, and consequently with related social histories.\u00a0\r\n*\r\nAs Annamaria Prandi notes in her article on the exhibition Space as Matrix: Born out of the initiative of group of Bangladeshi women from the East End London to create a place for the knowledge and research of female identity, Jagonari Women\u2019s Educational Resource Centre (literally Rise Women), completed in 1987 had been conceived by Matrix together with its founders as a hybrid, secular space, in which women of different Asian faiths and cultures could meet. The center marks a historically politized period for London\u2019s South Asian community after the racially motivated murder of Altab Ali Baig in 1978.\u00a0\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u00a0","endnote":false},{"page_number":"3","note":"In the play's script, controversial Russian American writer and philosopher Rand lays out her philosophical system of \"Objectivism\" with its stubbornly anti-altruistic and individualistic position.\r\n*\r\nAs a critical counter to Rand, Gonda creates kaleidoscopic printed spaces in which image and text shift roles to affect presupposed ideals of identity and existence. Noting how the cinematic image actually gazes back at us, the book uses highly stylised and precisely composed full colour imagery, and features Dutch transgender model Valentin de Hingh, who also played in Cinesexual \u2013 the third film of the trilogy, exhibited in Space as Matrix.\u00a0\r\n*\r\nThe screenplay, printed in full in this book, comes from a series of interdisciplinary workshops where academics, curators, critics, and writers considered the possibilities of writing through rather than about Rand's play.\u00a0\r\n*\r\nThe screenplay's key textual reference is the production structure of F\u00e9lix Guattari's unrealized 1986 Project for a Film by Kafka, in which Guattari proposed a made-for-television mini-series inspired by episodes in Kafka's writings and life. Gonda cannibalises original writing and transcribed workshop material together with five letter-based passages from Ideal, nudging them into alternative personal pronouns, to make Gonda a book of voices.\u00a0","endnote":false},{"page_number":"5","note":"In 2011, muf renovated the park that commemorates the tragic event \u2013 Altab Ali Park in Whitechapel London. Having become an important meeting place for Bangladeshi communities, muf made several subtle interventions that highlighted the park\u2019s multiple social histories.\r\n*\r\n*******************************\r\n*\u00a0\r\n\u00a0The third relationship in this glossator is between Susana Torre, Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative and Lucy Lippard:\r\n*\r\n(Susana Torre) Space as Matrix (Matrix) Making Space: Women and the Man-made Environment (Lucy Lippard) From the Center\r\n*\r\nSusana Torre's essay Space as Matrix was the founding text for the exhibition. In the text, Torre challenges normative spatial theory based on binaries such as inside \/ outside, public \/ private, building \/ nature. In her 1981 text Space as Matrix, after which the exhibition is named, Torre lays out her ideas to dissolve such divisions, proposing a \u201cHouse of Meanings\u201d that is able to combine, in her words, \u201cthe formal integrity and completeness of an architectural object with the changing and temporary patterns that arise in the process of dwelling.\u201d Torre\u2019s written and drawn sketch for The House of Meanings represents a space as matrix, in which transitions between the natural and constructed, the enclosed and the open, one relation and another are given space \u2013 both metaphorically as a structural idea and actually in how Torre builds.\u00a0\r\n\u00a0","endnote":false},{"page_number":"2","note":"These marginal glosses make connections between different authors and actors, their texts and practices, within this Space as Matrix bibliographic collection that accompanied the exhibition and which can be found on womenwritingarchitecture.org\r\n*\r\n******************************\r\n*\r\nReadings by Maria Fusco from Legend of the Necessary Dreamer took place on 6th December 2022. Over the course of one day, she read intertwined extracts, some repeated some read only once, from her book Legend of the Necessary Dreamer. This event was was organised together with Women Writing Architecture.\r\n*\r\n******************************\r\n*\r\nThe first relationship in this glossator is between Maria Fusco and Ursula Mayer:\r\n\r\n(Maria Fusco) Legend of the Necessary Dreamer \/ The Happy Hypocrite (Ursula Mayer)\u00a0 But we Loved Her\u00a0\r\n*\r\nAlthough not explicitly connected in the events or in the exhibition, Ursula Mayer and Maria Fusco have worked together on several occasions \u2013 a reason to invite Fusco, in addition to her experimental writing on Architecture, to contribute to an event alongside Mayer\u2019s work in the exhibition. Publications that they have produced together include 'Gonda' \u2013 a book and cine roman published in 2013 by \"les presses du r\u00e9el' and part of a trilogy, including Medea and Cinesexual by Mayer: Gonda is informed by Ayn Rand's 1934 play 'Ideal'.\u00a0","endnote":false},{"page_number":"6","note":"\u00a0Transparent panels distributed throughout the exhibition were a further, spatial manifestation of Torre\u2019s earlier drawing, acting formally as a connecting medium between the other works, and conceptually as a lens through which to read them.\r\n*\r\nThe text, together with the drawing \u2018House of Meanings\u2019 as illustration, were first published in 1981 in the issue Making Room: Women and Architecture in the journal Heresies, which, incidentally, connects to the title of Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative\u2019s 1984 publication Making Space: Women and the Man-made Environment and included a text by Matrix member Susan Francis. For Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative, Susana Torre\u2019s writings, amongst them her text Space as Matrix, were, alongside other historians such as Dolores Hayden, an important reference. Both their feminist approaches were structural and aimed at changing the foundations of architectural practice and thinking, rather than inclusion in their currently architectural systems.","endnote":false},{"page_number":"7","note":"The journal Heresies was collectively edited by artists, writers and architects, amongst them Miriam Shapiro, Lucy Lippard, and Torre herself. Lippard and Torre also collaborated on several occasions outside of Heresies: Torre designed the book cover for Lippard\u2019s From the Centre: Feminist Essays on Women\u2019s Art (1976) and wrote an Afterword in I See \/ You Mean (1970). The documentary The Heretics (2009) directed by Joan Braderman was screened as part of the event programme accompanying the exhibition Space as Matrix.\r\n*\r\n********************************\r\n*\r\nAdditional note: Thoughts on the text Space as Matrix continued after the exhibition: The Indiana collective \u2013 a collective exploring the relationship between gender and space \u2013 organised a reading and discussion of Space as Matrix after visiting the exhibition.\r\n*\r\n********************************\r\n*\r\nThe fourth relationship in this glossator, not reflected fully in the reading list, is between muf architecture\/art (prolific creators of alliances) and\u00a0\r\nThe Alternative School of Economics, who ran a workshop - Feminist Economies in Architecture - together during the exhibition.\r\n*\r\n*******************************\r\n*\r\nThe fifth relationship in this glossator is between muf architecture\/art and Helen Thomas of Women Writing Architecture in the production of the\u00a0 experimental publication, morethanonefragile.co.uk.\r\n\u00a0\u00a0","endnote":false}]
Social Practices
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Publisher
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