About WoWA
Source: Eugène Delacroix. July 28: Liberty Leading the People. 1830. Oil on canvas, 8'6¼" x 10'8" (2.60 x 3.25 m). Musée du Louvre, Paris. Women Writing Architecture: Female Experiences of the Built 1700-1900*, short WoWA, studies female experiences of architecture as recorded in documentary writing drawn from specific regions in South America and Europe between 1700 and 1900. While architectural histories often focus on male-dominated processes of design and production, this project takes a new stance by unearthing women’s contributions to the architectural sphere through writing and editing.
While not part of the canon, articles, travelogues, domestic manuals, or pamphlets authored by women in the period consistently featured descriptions of or commentary on buildings and cities, but these have never been examined collectively by architectural historians. Through a combination of macro and micro research, close and distant reading, geographical mapping and tracing of experience, WoWA addresses this gap opening up a new corpus and presenting architecture’s past through the female eye.
*This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No.949525).
*This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No.949525).
Coming soon
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 is entitled 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 Emma Cheatle (Sheffield), Sonja Dümpelmann (Munich) and Isabel Karremann (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.
Join us for the in-person colloquium: all welcome!
Sie Sehen. Wo Frauen Architektur Schrieben 1700-1900
Datum: Freitag, 29. November 2024
Ort: ETH Hönggerberg, HIL E 71.1
Zeit: 15.00-18.00 Uhr MESZ
Unser 5. WoWA Workshop & Kolloquium trägt den Titel SEEING HER / SIE SEHEN und findet am 29. November 2024 an der ETH Zürich statt. Die Veranstaltung beginnt mit einem privaten zweisprachigen Leseworkshop, gefolgt von öffentlichen Vorträgen am Nachmittag, und bringt eine vielfältige Gruppe von Wissenschaftler*innen unterschiedlicher Karrierestufen,Hintergründe, Fachgebiete und Epochen zusammen.
Emma Cheatle (Sheffield), Sonja Dümpelmann (München) und Isabel Karremann (Zürich) werden in ihren Vorträgen gezielt Orte untersuchen, die auf unterschiedliche Weise durch Schreiben ‘gegendered’ wurden: von Räumen des Gebärens und der Mutterschaft, dem literarischen Landhaus bis zu geschlechtsspezifischen Landschaften. Mit Reflektionen von Anna-Maria Meister (Florenz/Karlsruhe) und Anne Hultzsch (Zürich) werden wir die Architekturgeschichten des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts durch die Frage, wo Frauen Architektur schrieben, erweitern und verkomplizieren.
Nehmen Sie am Kolloquium vor Ort teil: Alle sind herzlich willkommen!
Publications
Hultzsch, Anne. ‘WoWA and its ‹Feminist bricks›: Building Histories’. kritische berichte - Zeitschrift für Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften 52, no. 1 (14 March 2024): 73–81. https://doi.org/10.11588/kb.2024.1.101461.
Hultzsch, Anne, and Sol Pérez Martínez. ‘Reading-With: A Collaborative Method for Inclusive Architectural Histories’. Architectural Histories 11, no. 1 (12 September 2023). https://doi.org/10.16995/ah.10332.
Pérez-Martínez, Sol. ‘Mujeres haciendo espacio en Chile 1800 - 1900: Santiago y la poeta popular Rosa Araneda’. _Revista Historia y Patrimonio_ 2, no. 2 (30 June 2023): 1–30., (https://doi.org/10.5354/2810-6245.2023.70518).
Hultzsch, Anne. ‘The City “En Miniature:” Situating Sophie von La Roche in the Window’. Journal 18, no. Issue 15 Cities (Spring 2023).https://www.journal18.org/.
Hultzsch, Anne. ‘Other Practices: Gendering Histories of Architecture / Otras Prácticas: Historias de La Arquitectura Con Perspectiva de Género’. ZARCH, no. 18 (2 September 2022): 30–41.(https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_zarch/zarch.202218696).Our projects
She Writes Architecture 1750-1850
PD Dr Anne Hultzsch
Project leaderShe Writes Architecture is located across WoWA’s geographies and focuses on three genres: travel writing, historiography, and advice literature. The project's aim is to read these texts as spatial critiques, revealing the influence their authors wielded over spatial practices, norms, and transgressions. Reading between continents and in the colonial contexts of the period, it complicates their gender with their class, race, and colonial privileges while centering their work within architectural and spatial histories.
Image source: Haywood, Eliza. The Female Spectator. Frontispiece. 1, 1744.
Women Making Space in South America 1700-1900
Dr Sol Pérez-Martínez
Postdoc fellowWomen Making Space in South America 1700-1900 examines the writings of women in Chile, Perú, Bolivia and Argentina during the 18th and 19th century to explore their spatial practices and their participation in constructing their country’s built environment. This postdoctoral project focuses on making visible women’s accounts of their involvement in three different urban sites: the street, the convent and the school, arguing that women ‘made space’ for themselves in the late colonial and early republican period in South America.
Image source: Garreaud, Pedro Emilio. La Zamacueca. 1875 1863. Photograph. A0007-000007. Cultura Digital UDP.
Situating the Frauen-Zimmer: Women’s Writings on, in, and outside of the Architectural Interior, 1783-1876
Elena Rieger
Doctoral fellowThis dissertation will examine the writings of five authors: Sophie von La Roche (1730-1807), Emilie von Berlepsch (1755-1839), Lucie Domeier (1770-1796), Louise Mühlbach (1814-1873), Louise Otto-Peters (1819-1895). The project utilises the spatial dimension that the term Frauenzimmer (women’s room) offers—a body present in space–as a lens for exploring the writings of women and their architectural descriptions. This dissertation argues, that women’s situated descriptions of architecture offer a valuable perspective that challenges dominant narratives which have historically excluded and marginalized certain groups.
Image source: Johann Michael Rüdiger, Frontispiece, Frauen-Zim[m]er-Bibliotheckgen [...], Güstrau 1705