Listen to Her! Female Experiences of the Built 1700-1900

This is the first of a series of workshops and colloquia organised by the ERC-funded project Women Writing Architecture: Female Experiences of the Built 1700-1900 (WoWA), based at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta) of ETH Zurich. Following an internal morning workshop for Group Hultzsch and invited guests, a public colloquium will be held in the afternoon. Talks by Christina Contandriopoulos (Montréal), Christian Parreno (Quito), Sigrid de Jong (Zurich), and Anne Hultzsch (Zurich) will explore female discursive spaces in France, Ecuador, Italy, and Great Britain around 1800.

Together, we will ponder how women ascribed meaning to buildings and landscapes through their writings. As a research group, we propose that by exploring women’s writing we can uncover female agency within architecture in a period commonly considered as male governed. Further, we argue that architectural history as a discipline, now more than ever, can and must look beyond the production of buildings to processes of reception and appropriation to fully understand the past of the built environment as experienced and shaped by marginalised groups.