Ex libris: Archaeologies of feminism, architecture and deconstruction

Abstract

This paper explores the force of writing in architectural criticism, theory and history. Writing often plays the silent other to architecture, being continuously assumed rather than examined. Using the conceit of my library as an archive and repository for architectural and personal memory, this essay in part revisits a critical moment in the late 1980s: the literary turn in architectural theory. Interrogating later anthologies describing the transaction between writing, architecture and deconstruction (or post-structuralism), I note that the radical writing practices of the late 1980s have been largely excluded and marginalised in later collections of primary texts from the anthologised per..