Women Writing Architecture: Female Experiences of the Built 1700-1900

Women Writing Architecture: Female Experiences of the Built 1700-1900 Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta)
ETH Zürich

A Zurich postcard to a historical user / dweller / critic / outcast at Zunfthaus zur Saffran produced as part of the Int...
04/03/2025

A Zurich postcard to a historical user / dweller / critic / outcast at Zunfthaus zur Saffran produced as part of the Intersectional Histories course:

“Dear girl with the red apron,
Yesterday morning I saw you as I walked through the icy streets of Zurich. You were sweeping the portico of the Zunfthaus zur Saffran, perhaps to warm yourself up a little. I saw you again in the evening. This time, you were huddled against the warm wall of the façade, your gaze alert yet tinged with the shadow of sleep. I couldn’t stop thinking about you and the space where you spend your days.
Tell me, could you ever call this place home? The porch doesn’t belong to you, and yet it embraces you, along with the horses, the merchants... Can it truly be called home when it offers you no complete protection? When it is not yours, yet you are allowed to make it yours, if only for a while?
Can a portico, a sheltered corner, be more of a home than a closed and protected space, if it offers even a fleeting sense of belonging?
I think of you often.
With affection,
A fishmonger”

Text and image by a student of the Intersectional Histories Course.

Image:
1. Unknown. Das Rathaus in Zürich: La Maison de ville à Zuric. Before 1837. Zentralbibliothek Zürich, Zürich D2, Grossmünster-Qu., Rathaus I, 19.
2. Zürich 1860. Stadtarchiv.

From a ‘cottage’ in Chile, a ‘tea equipage’ in London, a ‘veranda’ in Mumbai, and a ‘shotgun house’ in New Orleans to a ...
25/02/2025

From a ‘cottage’ in Chile, a ‘tea equipage’ in London, a ‘veranda’ in Mumbai, and a ‘shotgun house’ in New Orleans to a ‘hôtel’ in Paris, this course presents global entanglements of built spaces while asking who we listen to when forming our understanding of architectural histories. We ask: how and by whom were architectures also made?

The course introduces students to intersectional history – how accounts of the past are shaped by intersecting privileges and marginalizations – as well as reception history – how the meaning of architecture is and has been shaped also by those who dwell in it and use it. As the ERC-funded group WoWA – Women Writing Architecture, it focuses on the 18th and 19th centuries, complicating European histories within colonial contexts, especially linking to the Americas and the Indian subcontinent. Through a set of lectures which are interspersed with exercises, students engage with a diverse set of primary sources – texts, objects, sites – to actively re-think and re-read the past of the built environment. Lectures tackle theories and concepts deriving from intersectional feminism, critical race theory, (de- and post-) colonialism and coloniality, as well as showcasing global microhistories of texts, objects, and sites that materialise the approach of intersectional histories. We reflect on what constitutes architecture – or architectures – from the point of view of the user, critic, and dweller.

In several structured exercises, students analyse a site in Zurich on both a micro and a global scale, producing their own global microhistories over the semester. In the following posts, we showcase some of the postcards designed while writing these microhistories during the autumn semester 2024.

Written by Anne Hultzsch
Design by Nathalie Bettoni

Seeing Her. Where Women Wrote Architecture 1700-1900Date: Friday, 29 November 2024Location: ETH Hönggerberg, HIL E 71.1...
20/12/2024

Seeing Her. Where Women Wrote Architecture 1700-1900

Date: Friday, 29 November 2024
Location: ETH Hönggerberg, HIL E 71.1
Time: 15.00-18.00 CEST

The 5th WoWA Workshop & Colloquium was entitled SEEING HER / SIE SEHEN and took place on 29 November 2024 at ETH Zurich. It featured a private bilingual reading workshop followed by public talks in the afternoon, it brought together a diverse group of scholars in terms of seniority, period, background, and expertise.

Talks by Sonja Dümpelmann (Munich), Isabel Karremann (Zurich) and Elena Rieger centred around specific sites ranging from maternity spaces to the literary country house and gendered landscapes. Together with the respondents, Anna-Maria Meister (Florence/Karlsruhe) and Anne Hultzsch (Zurich), speakers complicated architectural histories of the 18th and 19th centuries with the question where women wrote architecture.

Text by Anne Hultzsch
Design by Miranda Reynolds

In the 5th WoWA Workshop and Colloquium, we once more explore the entanglements of writing, reading, and architectural h...
27/11/2024

In the 5th WoWA Workshop and Colloquium, we once more explore the entanglements of writing, reading, and architectural histories. We challenge our own reading habits and biases, slowing down our analytical process, and listen to what she had to say about her spaces. The event forms part of our effort to build a diverse and inclusive corpus, and provide approaches to continuously expand this as we move forward.

After a private bilingual reading workshop in the morning, in which the WoWA team and guests will perform a close reading and listening of a historical text authored by a woman, the afternoon will open to the public with a colloquium presenting three speakers and two respondents. Talks will centre on specific sites ranging from the literary country house and gendered landscapes to the site from which we, as historians, write about her, the female protagonist.

Text by Anne Hultzsch
Design by Miranda Reynolds

This engraving depicts the ‘Victoria Press’ founded by the English women’s rights activist Emily Faithfull, in Coram Str...
27/11/2024

This engraving depicts the ‘Victoria Press’ founded by the English women’s rights activist Emily Faithfull, in Coram Street, London, in 1860. With the aim of extending women’s working opportunities in Victorian England, she founded the first woman-run print shop at that time. As we see in the illustration, Faithfull employed women as compositors who were responsible for selecting the typeface, designing and setting the job and preparing it to be printed in a previously male-exclusive trade. While women had once played a role in small, family-owned printing shops, the rise of industrialization in the 19th century transformed the industry. With this shift, tasks like setting type, reviewing copy, and managing printing equipment became largely the domain of men, removing women’s presence from the field. Faithfull was even appointed ‘Printer and Publisher in Ordinary to Her Majesty’ to Queen Victoria due to her reputation as a quality printer.

Image: Interior of Miss Faithfull’s printing office, established for the employment of women. ca 1860.

Text and Design by Miranda Reynolds

The 5th WoWA Workshop & Colloquium is titled SEEING HER / SIE SEHEN and will take place on 29 November 2024 at ETH Zuric...
27/11/2024

The 5th WoWA Workshop & Colloquium is titled SEEING HER / SIE SEHEN and will take place on 29 November 2024 at ETH Zurich. Featuring a private bilingual reading workshop followed by public talks in the afternoon, it brings together a diverse group of scholars in terms of seniority, period, background, and expertise.

Talks by Sonja Dümpelmann (Munich), Isabel Karremann (Zurich) and Elena Rieger (Zurich) will centre around specific sites ranging from maternity spaces to the literary country house and gendered landscapes. Together with the respondents, Anna-Maria Meister (Florence/Karlsruhe) and Anne Hultzsch (Zurich), speakers will complicate architectural histories of the 18th and 19th centuries with the question where women wrote architecture.

Design by Miranda Reynolds

We close our reading group series with our reading of Samia Henni’s multi-award-winning book ‘Architecture of Counterrev...
14/11/2024

We close our reading group series with our reading of Samia Henni’s multi-award-winning book ‘Architecture of Counterrevolution: The French Army in Northern Algeria’ (2017).

Samia Henni is a historian of the built, destroyed and imagined environments. She received her Ph.D. in history and theory of architecture (with distinction, ETH Medal) from ETH Zurich and has taught at Princeton University, ETH Zurich, the University of Zurich, Geneva University of Art and Design, and Cornell University. She was an invited Visiting Professor (2023–24) at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta), ETH Zurich. Currently she is the co-chair of the University Seminar ‘Beyond France’ at Columbia University, and a member of the Editorial Boards of the ‘Journal of Architecture’; ‘field: journal’; ‘Descamino; Manazir’; ‘Tamazgha Studies Journal’, and of the Academic Board of the African Futures Institute. In the fall of 2024, Samia joined the faculty of McGill University’s Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture.

She is the author of the multi-award-winning ‘Architecture of Counterrevolution: The French Army in Northern Algeria’ (2017), ‘Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara’ (2024), and the editor of ‘Deserts Are Not Empty’ (2022) and ‘War Zones’ (2018).
She is also the maker of exhibitions, such as ‘Performing Colonial Toxicity’ (Framer Framed, If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam; gta Exhibitions, Zurich; The Mosaic Rooms, London, 2023–04), Discreet Violence: Architecture and the French War in Algeria (Zurich, Rotterdam, Berlin, Johannesburg, Paris, Prague, Ithaca, Philadelphia, Charlottesville, 2017–22).

Source:
Henni, Samia. 2017. Architecture of Counterrevolution: The French Army in Northern Algeria. University of Chicago Press

Design by Miranda Reynolds

In this reading session, we focused on fiction to engage with a different way of writing. The readings were selected by ...
07/11/2024

In this reading session, we focused on fiction to engage with a different way of writing. The readings were selected by Carla Peca and Camila Medina Novoa.
Carmen Maria Machado’s ‘In the Dream House’ is the personal story of the author dealing with her experience of domestic abuse but also an essay on abuse in q***r relationships. ‘The Dream House’ is a literary place and, as such, a reflection of experienced spaces. How do we characterise this literary house: is it a shelter or a place that hides violence and crime? How are theoretical perspectives and history embedded in this story?

Dear Santhuran, a Black Spirit Memoir is a book composed of short letters dedicated to friends, family, and other writers. Through the accumulation of raw and embodied memories, the author, Akwaeke Emezi, shares with us part of their painful process of finding the shape of the self. Memories describing space and material qualities are not metaphors of internal experiences but the selected pieces of a reality that create and reflect a state of being.

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir ‘In the Dream House’ and the award-winning short story collection ‘Her Body and Other Parties’, which the New York Times listed in 2018 as one of ‘15 remarkable books by women shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century…’

AKWAEKE is an artist based in liminal spaces. Born and raised in Nigeria, their work spans literature, music, film, and visual art. They crashed into the literary scene in 2018 with their seminal debut novel ‘Freshwater’ and published seven books in four years, including the instant New York Times bestseller ‘The Death Of Vivek Oj’i and National Book Award finalist ‘Pet’.

Sources:
Machado, Carmen Maria. 2019. In the Dream House: A Memoir. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press.
Emezi, Akwaeke. 2021. "Shiny | Dear Marguerite" and "Nonexistent | Dear Ann" in Dear Senthuran, A Black Spirit Memoir. London: Faber & Faber.

Readings selected by Carla Peca and Camila Medina Novoa
Design by Miranda Reynolds

In this reading group session we read parts of ‘Frankenstein’ (1818), a novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley paired with...
31/10/2024

In this reading group session we read parts of ‘Frankenstein’ (1818), a novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley paired with texts by Donna Haraway and Gillian Rose. The readings were selected by Tatiana Carbonell Guillon.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, (1797-1851) was an English Romantic novelist best known as the author of ‘Frankenstein’. She wrote several other novels, including ‘Valperga’ (1823), ‘The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck’ (1830), ‘Lodore’ (1835), and ‘Falkner’ (1837); ‘The Last Man’ (1826), an account of the future destruction of the human race by a plague, is often ranked as her best work.

Donna Haraway (b. 1944 in Denver, Colorado) is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department and in the Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 2002, she was awarded the J.D. Bernal Prize, the highest honor given by the Society for Social Studies of Science, for lifetime contributions to the field.

Gillian Rose is a Professor at the School of Geography and the Environment since 2017, moving here from The Open University. Gillian is a cultural geographer. Although her empirical research interests have shifted over time, a central theme has been the techniques and politics of knowledge production about places.

Sources:
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. 1818. Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus. In Three Volumes. Vol. 2. 3 vols. Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones.
Haraway, Donna. 1991. ‘The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others’. In Cultural Studies. Routledge.
Rose, Gillian. ‘The Geographical Imagination: Knowledge And Critique’. In Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge, 62–85. University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Readings selected by Tatiana Carbonell Guillon
Design by Miranda Reynolds

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