Research

“As I have listened to Sophie von La Roche guiding her readers around some of the cities she visited herself, it has become apparent that … she relied … on an entangled model of discourses in which binary identities, and spheres, became shifting props and tools rather than oppressing patriarchal molds. … The window places her in between private and public, interior and exterior, and simultaneously enables her to see and be seen as well as listened to. Today, it is up to us to listen.”
Anne Hultzsch, ‘The City “En Miniature:” Situating Sophie von La Roche in the Window’, Journal 18, no. 15 (Spring 2023): 13, https://www.journal18.org/6782.

 

As part of WoWA (short for Women Writing Architecture 1700-1900), we study women’s experiences of, and commentary on, architectures and landscapes, focusing on the 18th and 19th centuries and 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 through the multiple ways spaces are ascribed with meaning through words. 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 and our aim is, to make this visible.

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).

Ongoing updates can be found on the WoWA Website and on our social media accounts: external page Instagram and external page Twitter.


Projects

She Writes Architecture c.1740-1848

PD Dr Anne Hultzsch
Project leader

She 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.

Haywood, Eliza. The Female Spectator. Frontispiece. 1, 1744.
Haywood, Eliza. The Female Spectator. Frontispiece. 1, 1744. https://bridwell.omeka.net/exhibits/show/fiftywomen/british/haywood

Women Making Space in South America 1700-1900

Dr. Sol Pérez-Martínez
Postdoc-fellow

Women 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.

Collage highlighting women in a photograph by Garreaud, Pedro Emilio. La Zamacueca. 1875
Collage highlighting women in a photograph by 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 fellow

This dissertation will examine the writings of five authors: Sophie von La Roche (1730-1807), Emilie von Berlepsch (1755-1830), Lucie Domeier (1767-1836), 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.

Johann Michael Rüdiger, Frontispiece, Frauen-Zim[m]er-Bibliotheckgen [...], Güstrau 1705
Johann Michael Rüdiger, Frontispiece, Frauen-Zim[m]er-Bibliotheckgen [...], Güstrau 1705   Bibliotheckgen