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.
