Women Writing Architecture 1700-1900

Through a forest of postcards alongside an oversized bookshelf and historical books and objects, this exhibition presents the results of a five-year research project funded by the European Research Council at ETH Zurich. "Women Writing Architecture 1700-1900" (WoWA for short) examines how female authors contributed to architecture through their writings in the 18th and 19th centuries. The project begins with the hypothesis that writing is a spatial practice and thus represents one of the processes that constitute architecture both as a discourse and as a built manifestation - created, experienced, used, and criticized.

Each postcard introduces an author with an image, a quote and a short text explaining her life and work. We examine the potential of her work for architectural history and ask: What would be missing without her? And what if we had always included them in our research? What if these texts and their authors had already been read earlier as relevant to architectural practice and history? What would our canon, our shared framework of knowledge, our collective understanding of space look like then? We have built up our own archive and present a large-scale installation, a bookshelf with the annotated texts from the "Women Writing Architecture 1700-1900" workshops, including post-its and markers documenting the (un)learning required to expand the historiography. Printed matter, books and journals written by women, as well as historical illustrations and objects, show that women have always been present as active agents of the built environment. We invite visitors to take a postcard home with them and reflect: What did it have to say? Who else have we overlooked?

The exhibition accompanies the newly published bookWomenWriting Architecture 1700-1900: Expanding Histories, edited by Anne Hultzsch and Sol Pérez Martínez (gta Verlag, 2025).

Curated by Anne Hultzsch in collaboration with Elena Rieger and Sol Pérez Martínez. Graphic design, research and exhibition set-up with Rémi Madrona and Audrey Man. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement n° 949525).

https://wowa.arch.ethz.ch

https://hultzsch.arch.ethz.ch/

Note: This text was translated by machine translation software and not by a human translator. It may contain translation errors.