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

Project Information

WoWA

Grant agreement ID: 949525

DOI

10.3030/949525

EC signature date 1 September 2020

Start date 1 February 2021

End date 31 July 2026

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 454 735,00

EU contribution

€ 1 454 735,00

Coordinated by

EIDGENOESSISCHE TECHNISCHE HOCHSCHULE ZUERICH
Switzerland

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - WoWA (Women Writing Architecture: Female Experiences of the Built 1700-1900)

Reporting period: 2024-02-01 to 2025-07-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Women Writing Architecture: Female Experiences of the Built 1700-1900, short WoWA, is a research project led by Dr Anne Hultzsch and based in the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. We study women’s experiences of, and commentary on, architectures and landscapes in the 18th and 19th centuries focusing on a dispersed geography consisting of the southern cone of South America as well as German and English-speaking Europe. While architectural histories often focus on male-dominated processes of design and production, with WoWA, we take a new stance by unearthing women’s contributions to the architectural sphere through writing, translating, and editing. We are not looking for female architects - or those designing spaces (this being an important undertaking too). Instead, we argue that architectural agency is executed not only through design practices but also – and as importantly – through practices of reception, critique, and, generally, sense-making.

We examine texts written by women - such as travelogues, manuals, histories, pamphlets - which for the major part have not yet been considered as sources for architectural histories. Our aim is to examine them collectively, as a significant force within spatial histories, not as singular exceptions to the rule. We demonstrate that women - as other marginalised groups - were not silent when it came to critiquing, shaping, or imagining their built environments. These female writers, we argue, did have architectural, or spatial, agency. Through a combination of macro and micro research, close and distant reading, geographical mapping, and tracing of experience, WoWA addresses a gap in previous research opening up a new corpus and formulating a method to examine it. Our aim is twofold: first, to show the agency and voice claimed by women in the period on matters concerning architecture and the environment; and second, to provide researchers with a novel approach to (re)read their writings, to listen to their voices, and to write inclusive histories of the built. Overall, this serves to build a more inclusive picture of our past, contributing to shape a more equal society today.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

WoWA is in its final year and we are focusing on finalising outputs and reaching an as wide audience as possible. With a major international conference in September 2023 and 5 international expert workshops in Zurich, Santiago de Chile and online we have reached out across and beyond our own field. Based on these experimental workshops which involved a collaborative close-reading of a short extract from one of our primary sources, we have developed the Reading-with Guide, a novel methodology enabling researchers to perform immersive, situated, and collective readings of texts by marginalised authors such as women, to explore their contributions to the architectural realm. We have collected key essays on how women have contributed to architectural knowledge, criticism, and meaning between 1700 and 1900 in the edited book WOMEN WRITING ARCHITECTURE 1700-1900: EXPANDING HISTORIES (gta Verlag, forthcoming 2025) which contains 28 chapters revealing the so-far neglected power of women writers in the period.

With these outputs and our strong online presence (website, YouTube channel, and active, research-led Instagram feed), we have gathered a new field of excellence in intersectional approaches to gender and architecture in the 18th and 19th centuries, in Europe and South America, centring colonial and gendered experiences. We publish widely, in leading specialist magazines as well as more general-interest outlets, both on our core area of research (18th-19th century architecture in Europe and South America), but are also often invited to apply our methods and approaches to other areas and periods, demonstrating the relevance and timeliness of our research.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Besides individual research on specific women from Great Britain, Germany, Switzerland, Chile, Peru, and Argentina and their influence on the built environment, our most significant progress has been made in terms of formulating and publishing our reading method. The Reading-with Guide, further sharpened and tested in 3 languages, is a new collaborative reading method which offers architectural and other historians a starting point to produce inclusive histories based on the writings of those who so far are invisible within disciplinary canons. Arguing that historiography can be made more inclusive if the historian’s approach to their sources changes, reading-with introduces a set of precise and timed reading tasks organised in layers to focus the researcher’s attention on different aspects of the narration as well as their response to the text. Based on methods developed in the fields of psychology and feminist oral history, it aims to disrupt learned, canonical reading methods, paying attention to the relationship between reader, text, narrator, and context. Performed by several groups of researchers and students in Switzerland and Chile in 2022–23, the method has been tested with texts authored by women in the 18th and 19th centuries. It foregrounds their architectural agency and influence on architectural cultures, even if their links to the professional sphere have so far been regarded as marginal. Reading-with is an invitation to read otherwise — to centre the experiences and agency of those not yet acknowledged. We intend to shake up the construction of our discipline’s references, influences, and reading lists by including women – and enabling others to include other marginalised groups. Until the end of the project, we expect to further prove, via a greater number of case studies, our hypothesis that women had agency within the built environment through processes of reception and appropriation. Until the end of the project, this method will be applied to present 100 Women Writing Architecture, offering other researchers inspiration and starting points to build on our work.

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