Women Writing Architecture 1700-1900
Wednesday, 4 March to Friday, 8 May 2026
HIL D 50.5 Foyer, ETH Zurich, Hönggerberg
Opening: Tuesday, 3 March 2026, 6–8 pm
6 pm: Welcome by gta exhibitions followed by an introduction from Anne Hultzsch
Book launch with roundtable discussion: Thursday, 7 May 2026 (time tba)
Through a forest of postcards next to an oversized bookshelf and historical prints, books, and objects, this exhibition showcases the results of a 5-year research project, funded by the European Research Council at ETH Zurich. Women Writing Architecture 1700-1900 (short WoWA) explores how female authors in the 18th and 19th centuries have contributed to architecture through writing. The project begins with the hypothesis that writing is a spatial practice, presenting, therefore, one of the processes that constitute architecture as both discourse and built manifestation that is made, experienced, used, and critiqued.
Women Writing Architecture 1700-1900 purposefully omits a grammatical preposition between ‘women writing’ and ‘architecture’. Rather than adding ‘on’, ‘of’, or ‘about’ architecture, and thus positioning female authors outside of architecture, we claim that the built environment is meaningfully constructed also through writing: women (and others) writing architecture. In a period in which women are largely invisible in positions of power within the historiography of architecture, they did have agency in the built environment. Focusing on German and English-speaking Europe as well as the southern cone of South America, WoWA group members Anne Hultzsch, Sol Pérez Martínez, and Elena Rieger have explored spatial practices expressed in a variety of textual genres. Travel writing featured large, as it is necessarily connected to place and space, and was one of the first genres in the 18th century in which European women were truly successful – linking their writing to supposedly feminine sensibilities. Female-led journalism emerged as women pushed into the booming market for essay periodicals, both as authors and readers. Instructive writing, too, increased dramatically over the period, and we have found architecture in such publications as cookbooks, etiquette manuals, or textbooks on gardening and home economics. Poetry as a form of urban chronicle (and activism) became as relevant as confessional and mystical writings of nuns.
In the exhibition, each postcard introduces one woman and her writing on architecture, space, or landscape with an image, a quote, and a short text explaining her life and work. Postcards present descriptions of buildings, cities, and landscapes, instructions on spatial organisation and movement, mappings of colonial land grabbing and othering, recipes for architectural cakes, stylistic histories, construction manuals, political pamphlets on women’s rights and landownership, design criticism, urban reporting, mystical evocations, aesthetic theory, technical reports, and much more. Authors come from a host of backgrounds: writing in English, Spanish, and German, they include different social classes, religions, ethnicities, and nationalities. Exploring the potential of their work for the history of architecture, we ask: what would be missing without her? And what if we had always included her in our historical research? What if these texts, and their female authors, had been read as relevant for architectural practice and history earlier? What would our canon, our common knowledge framework, our shared spatial consciousness look like? What if sketches out potential histories, pondering what a more equal and diverse, less prejudiced reception and historiography could have led to. What if also helped us to identify specific positions of agency claimed by the women we read: critic, historian, designer, educator, theorist, surveyor, patron. Noted on each postcard, these are purposefully chosen to align with practices commonly discussed within architectural histories. While the postcards serve as a project database – structured, available as searchable PDF and linked to an online bibliography – through their format and in print, they become a central tool of outreach and dissemination. Crucially, they encapsulate our aim of making visible the contributions of the authors we study. Emerging in the 19th century as a mail item combing a picture with a concise message, postcards have long been used to mediate and make known architectural motives. By sending out quotes, along with notes about the potential they might have had – and can still have – we employ the postcard as a tool of communication and knowledge production. Visitors become addressees: we invite them to take a postcard home to ponder: What did she have to say? What happens if we listen to her? And: who else have we missed?
The oversized bookshelf turns books inside-out: large cardboard mock-ups of books hold and preserve the scaled-up pages, originally printed and hung on the walls of our workshop rooms in Zurich, Rengo (Chile), and Montreal. Employing our collaborative Reading-with Guide, developed for this project, we conducted collective close readings to understand how these texts by women are evidences for architecture’s past. With groups of experts – from student to professor – we debated and annotated, speculated and questioned, laughed and pondered, learned and unlearned. Now, post-its and highlight markings bear witness to our slowing down to read anew and differently. Visitors are invited to pull out pages – as books – and read them in the reading window.
Placed in vitrines, printed matter, books and journals as well as historical illustrations and objects demonstrate that women have always been there as active agents of the built environment. They offer a glimpse into the amount of printed output women produced in the period. Available now in antiquarian bookshops and online marketplaces, often cheaply, their books, magazines, and pamphlets speak not only of the authors, but also of the readers that read their words, echoing the space-making of writing. They tell us that female writers found an audience – the well-used fragment of the English 18th-century cookbook with who-knows-which food stains or the list of subscribers in the German women’s journal speak for themselves. These women writing architecture found their public voice and made a public space for themselves, they were heard as agents of the built environment, among else. Going beyond the historical context, this exhibition also invites reflection on architecture as a practice of writing today: practitioners, historians, theoreticians, journalists, critics, curators, conservationists, developers, archivists, policymakers, inspectors … – we all write. We shape and make space through words. So let’s give space to our writing – and to those having paved our way.
The exhibition accompanies the new book Women Writing 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 installation by Rémi Madrona and Audrey Man. This exhibition is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 949525).
https://wowa.arch.ethz.ch
https://hultzsch.arch.ethz.ch/
The exhibition was made possible thanks to the gta exhibitions team; Flora Bühlmann, Jakob Draz, Mina Hava, Till Kadler, Margaux Koch Goei, Lucas Lenzin, Ella Mathys, Ivana Milenković, Sabine Sarwa, Philipp Stäheli and Julian Volken.