"There was a real wave of women writing about architecture"
ETH Zurich Architectural historian Anne Hultzsch has researched how women wrote about architecture between 1700 and 1900. In this interview, she talks about her findings – and about the authors from housewives to princesses.?
Anne Hultzsch, your research topic is rather unknown. How did you come up with it?
The idea came partly from my teaching experience and a certain frustration with the canon of architectural literature, which is dominated by male figures before the mid-20th century. This is not wrong as such, but I wanted to convey a more inclusive history of architecture. So, I wondered: how can we talk about women or other historically marginalised groups in our field? I found a possible answer in my postdoctoral research on 19th-century British print cultures. In the 18th and 19th centuries, there was a real wave of women who began to write for a public audience, publishing books or magazines. So the idea for “Women Writing Architecture”, or WoWA for short, emerged: I wanted to find out from women's writing how they perceived, influenced, or criticised the built environment.
Which texts did you analyse?
We worked with different types of writing: books and magazines but also letters and leaflets. We started with travelogues. Of those, we found many because women at the time were considered particularly good at describing their direct sensory impressions. We read authors who had travelled to Rome, London, India and other places. They published their impressions of the encountered architecture – buildings, squares and cities – but also landscapes, such as English landscape gardens or the Alps. These books were often very successful.
About Anne Hultzsch
Architectural historian Anne Hultzsch is a Privatdozent at ETH Zürich. Since 2021, she has been leading the European research project "Women Writing Architecture 1700-1900". She studied architecture at the Technical University of Munich and architectural history at University College London, where she received her doctorate in 2011.
Did women write differently than men?
How spaces are perceived by different genders, or who has a right to access a public or private space, is generally more visible in texts written by women than in those written by men, who often portrayed themselves as universal beings. We also analysed many political texts, including in the context of the French Revolution: Mary Wollstonecraft and Olympe de Gouges both advocated for women's rights. They demanded property rights for women, for example, which had a direct impact on architecture. In addition, we looked at manuals, including cookbooks, which provided information on how to furnish a kitchen or how many servants a household should have. This translates into space: if a household has two servants who, among other things, take guests' coats, it needs an appropriate vestibule for this. Etiquette books explained how to behave. A woman of a certain standing could often only leave the house when accompanied. A female servant, on the other hand, was out and about in the city on her own because she had errands to run.
Who were the women who wrote back then?
Foremost, we found a large number of relevant women, which surprised us. For our exhibition, we are printing postcards featuring a hundred women whose texts we have studied in detail. Our list includes many more who we have not researched in detail. This breadth was important for the project: we are not talking about unique exceptions. There are a great many women who, in our view, are pertinent to the architectural history of this era. The majority were privileged, if only because they could read and write. Our edited book features aristocrats, a princess, but also women from the lower social classes: a formerly enslaved author, a housewife in India, a former actress in Germany. An English housekeeper wrote a very successful cookbook in which she explicitly uses architectural vocabulary in cake recipes: There are Greek temple fronts or chinoiserie, the art style popular in Europe at the time, which was based on Chinese and other Asian models.
And why did they write?
Many did so to earn money. The British author Jane Webb Loudon supported her family with her gardening books for women. In addition to Europe, we also looked at South America. In Chile, for example, there was no printing press until the early 19th century, so the context is an entirely different one. Before 1800, we found mainly nuns writing about spaces in monasteries, for example. Later, there were women's magazines and popular female poets, which are examined in our book.
How were women at the time able to take the liberty of writing?
Writing offered a loophole: it was not strictly considered professional work, as the women could do it at home. In this way, they did not completely reject the social position assigned to them. Although not always easy, writing was certainly possible for women. In addition to radical viewpoints, we also find many women who led relatively conventional lives and confirmed or only subtly criticised prevailing gender roles. Both groups wrote with great impact about architecture, and their texts help us to understand the buildings and cities of the time from their perspective.
How has this gender role changed over the 200 years from 1700 to 1900?
This varies from region to region and also depended on social class. It is important to note that societies at that time were much more diverse than we often assume today. The so-called liberation of women did not proceed in a linear manner either. One example: Napoleon's Code Civil, following the French Revolution, enshrined freedom and equality for many men, but the rights of women – and other groups – were effectively restricted, including regarding land ownership, which had a direct impact on building cultures. Also, it was not until the beginning of the Victorian era in Great Britain that the image of women as belonging in the home became firmly established. In German-speaking countries, the role model for certain social classes was much more rigid at the end of the 19th century than it had been around 1700. The figure of the housewife is an invention of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Our project highlights such historical complexities and their impact on architecture.
Which person has particularly remained in your memory?
For my own research, besides Jane Webb Loudon, there is also Maria Graham, a British author who was in India in the early 19th century and wrote extensively about Indian architecture and culture, albeit with considerable prejudice. She later travelled to Chile and was one of the first to describe the Chilean War of Independence and the cities that developed as a result. Graham tried not to specialise in any one subject, not to trespass into the realm of masculine authority. In her diary, she recorded her observations of an earthquake in Chile, among other things. However, when she wanted to give a lecture on this at the Royal Geological Society, there was an uproar because she was a woman interfering in a specialist field. Specialisation was a career driver for men, but for women, it was often dangerous, including in the field of architecture.
You spent five years researching the project. What new insights has your research brought to architectural history?
The large number of female authors who wrote about architecture and landscape is central, and we as historians should take their writings seriously. Our research helps to recalibrate our understanding of architectural history: whose history are we writing? And how do we think about architecture? My project demonstrates that spatial experience is not universal, but instead distinct for different groups. The sources we have studied prove, for instance, that the distinction between public and private, which is often regarded as fundamental for architecture and design, varies enormously. Our work therefore not only influences our understanding of the past, but also the present and future of architectural practice and criticism.
Women Writing Architecture 1700-1900
Over the past five years, the group "Women Writing Architecture 1700-1900" has been investigating how women in Europe and South America wrote about architecture. The project, funded by the European Research Concil ERC is based at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta) at ETH Zurich.
Book
A book on the research project has been published:
Exhibition
From March to May 2026, an exhibition on the project will be held in the gta foyer on the H?nggerberg campus of ETH Zurich.