Reading-With: A Collaborative Method for Inclusive Architectural Histories

Abstract

This article describes reading-with, a new collaborative reading method developed as part of the ERC-funded project WoWA (Women Writing Architecture 1700-1900). It offers architectural and other historians a starting point to produce inclusive histories based on the writings of those so far invisible within disciplinary canons. Arguing that historiography can be made more inclusive if the historian’s approach to their sources changes, reading-with introduces a set of precise and timed reading tasks organised in layers to focus the researcher’s attention on different aspects of the narration as well as their response to the text. Based on methods developed in the fields of psychology and feminist oral history, it aims to disrupt learned, canonical reading methods, paying attention to the relationship between reader, text, narrator, and context. Performed by several groups of researchers and master students in Switzerland and Chile in 2022-23, the method has been tested with texts authored by women in the 18th and 19th centuries. It foregrounds their architectural agency and influence on architectural cultures, even if their links to the professional sphere have so far been regarded as marginal. Reading-with is an invitation to read otherwise to centre the experiences and agency of those not yet acknowledged.