Group
Anne Hultzsch
Main Areas of Research
Funded by an ERC Starting Grant, our project Women Writing Architecture (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. 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.
We propose that, by exploring women’s writing, we can uncover female agency within architecture in a period that has thus far been considered as male governed. We argue that architectural history as a discipline, now more than ever, has to look beyond the production of buildings to processes of reception and appropriation in order to fully understand the past of the built environment as experienced and shaped by colonised groups. Over a period of dramatic social, political, technological, and architectural transformations on both sides of the Atlantic, WoWA explores specific case studies of women documenting both everyday experiences of built spaces as well as canonical architectural events. Interdisciplinary in method and scope and employing feminist approaches focusing on modes of writing, voice, and subjective experience, the team of PI, Postdoc, and PhD will expose female publics of architecture in and between Chile, Peru, Argentina, Britain, and German-speaking Europe at a time of industrialisation, colonisation and revolution, nation building and independence, historicism and professionalisation.
Anne Hultzsch joined the gta in 2021. Previously, she has held positions at the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL), University of Greenwich, New York University London, as well as Queen Mary University of London. She was a postdoctoral fellow at AHO, Oslo, in the project the Printed and the Built (2014-18) and has a PhD from UCL (2011). Her research focuses on 18th and 19th century architectural print cultures, the history of perception, travel, and the role of women in architecture before 1900. Author of Architecture, Travellers and Writers: Constructing Histories of Perception 1640-1950 (Legenda, 2014), Anne has contributed to a number of journals and edited books. She is the co-editor of The Printed and the Built: Architecture, Print Culture, and Public Debate in the Nineteenth Century (with Mari Hvattum, Bloomsbury, 2018) and of Building Word Image: Printing Architecture 1800-1950, a special collection of Architectural Histories (with Catalina Mejía Moreno, 2016). Most recently, she has edited a special issue of The Journal of Architecture on Nineteenth-Century Architectural Magazines (2020). Anne is also Communications Officer of the European Architectural History Network, an editor of its journal Architectural Histories and co-convenes the EAHN interest group Building Word Image.
PD Dr. Anne Hultzsch
We propose that, by exploring women’s writing, we can uncover female agency within architecture in a period that has thus far been considered as male governed. We argue that architectural history as a discipline, now more than ever, has to look beyond the production of buildings to processes of reception and appropriation in order to fully understand the past of the built environment as experienced and shaped by colonised groups. Over a period of dramatic social, political, technological, and architectural transformations on both sides of the Atlantic, WoWA explores specific case studies of women documenting both everyday experiences of built spaces as well as canonical architectural events. Interdisciplinary in method and scope and employing feminist approaches focusing on modes of writing, voice, and subjective experience, the team of PI, Postdoc, and PhD will expose female publics of architecture in and between Chile, Peru, Argentina, Britain, and German-speaking Europe at a time of industrialisation, colonisation and revolution, nation building and independence, historicism and professionalisation.
Anne Hultzsch joined the gta in 2021. Previously, she has held positions at the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL), University of Greenwich, New York University London, as well as Queen Mary University of London. She was a postdoctoral fellow at AHO, Oslo, in the project the Printed and the Built (2014-18) and has a PhD from UCL (2011). Her research focuses on 18th and 19th century architectural print cultures, the history of perception, travel, and the role of women in architecture before 1900. Author of Architecture, Travellers and Writers: Constructing Histories of Perception 1640-1950 (Legenda, 2014), Anne has contributed to a number of journals and edited books. She is the co-editor of The Printed and the Built: Architecture, Print Culture, and Public Debate in the Nineteenth Century (with Mari Hvattum, Bloomsbury, 2018) and of Building Word Image: Printing Architecture 1800-1950, a special collection of Architectural Histories (with Catalina Mejía Moreno, 2016). Most recently, she has edited a special issue of The Journal of Architecture on Nineteenth-Century Architectural Magazines (2020). Anne is also Communications Officer of the European Architectural History Network, an editor of its journal Architectural Histories and co-convenes the EAHN interest group Building Word Image.
Contact
PD Dr. Anne Hultzsch
