Another Architecture Conversation

“Women Writing Architecture” is about to cooperate with Juanzong Books to launch a regional academic research and data archiving in China, as well as a series of forums entitled “Another Architecture Conversation” which is exclusively supported by the Pro Helvetia Shanghai, Swiss Arts Council. The series of online conversations will be held every two months, aiming to build a bridge that will help make architecture more diverse, provide alternatives to existing binary structures, and allow more dialogue to flourish in the field of architecture. Juanzong Books will invite Chinese and foreign female architects and scholars to engage in dialogue, introduce their research and works, present more exchanges and dialogues, and make the participation of more practitioners visible. On the one hand, Juanzong Books will export high-quality Chinese building content to the rest of the world through this cooperation. On the other hand, more overseas female scholars’ vision has also been introduced into China. This not only gives international scholars an understanding of Chinese architecture, but also exposes Chinese readers to a wider range of architecture.

The independent database project “Women Writing Architecture” (hereafter abbreviated as WWA) was initiated by Helen Thomas, Editor and Senior Research Fellow of the Adam Caduso Chair of Architecture and Construction at ETH Zurich. Several of the core members of the editorial team and the initial content contributors to the database are teaching assistants and students of the Adam Caduso Chair of Architecture at ETH Zurich, and the project team also includes editorial members of gta Verlag (publisher of the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture at the Department of Architecture of ETH Zurich). They include both men and women who volunteer for the database.

WWA aims to create a building library of book notes archives as an online resource. Their authors are all women. The bibliography is continuously deepened through comments initiated by different individuals, and in this process, will produce new content with different connotations. WWA also designed to provide incentives for more institutions to start transforming and to provide new reading materials and references. This project is planned to provide teachers, writers, architects, students, and researchers with the possibility to embed more of a diverse and experienced perspective and thinking into their work by performing this explanatory work with different annotations. We will invite architectural scholars from all over the world to exchange ideas. While presenting their research and work, more communication and dialogue are presented to make the participation of more practitioners visible. Juanzong Books will also open a column on the WWA official website (womenwritingarchitecture.org) to continuously update annotations and texts from Chinese female architects and scholars.

VOL.01 “Architectural Publication as a Position”

Juanzong Books will gather a wide range of global forces to start the first series of online dialogue with Architectural Publication as a Position”. In this series, four senior practitioners from the architecture and design publishing industry will be invited to share their perspectives From topic selection, planning to publishing, they will share their positions and attitudes in publishing and discuss how to present women’s perspectives more professionally in the content.

 

 

Helen Thomas

Helen Thomas is an architect, writer and editor based in London and Zurich. She received a PhD from the University of Essex in 2002. Her PhD explored how post-revolutionary Mexican wild and urban landscapes were imagined, and then expressed and manipulated through architectural form. For four years, she was Learning and Interpretation curator for the V&A+RIBA Architecture Collections at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Her recent publications include Architecture Through Drawing (2019), Hopkins in the City (2019) Drawing Architecture (2018) Rudolf Schwarz and the Monumental Order of Things (2016).