Windowish Practices, Unreadable Backgrounds and Raw Semiotics. Tracing Minor Architectures and Ecologies of Signs in Women’s Writing

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_zarch/zarch.2022186216

Keywords:

Alternative Practitioners, Women’s Writing, Repertoire, Body, Affects

Abstract

Minor architectures can be defined as an open set of spatial practices and know-hows based on the agency of bodies. While these practices escape representation, codification or measurement, they have a fertile relation with literature. After framing this relationship, we analyze the work of three women writers (Carmen Martín Gaite, Ali Smith and Toni Morrison) to unveil them as minor spatial and material practitioners. While they have not been trained as architects many women throughout history have practiced and organized space in meaningful and wise ways, and they have become aware of minor spatial knowledges resting at the core of what architecture can be (and do). By inventing forms of embodied writing and material inscription, they have expanded a minor repertoire of spatial practices.

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Author Biography

Lucía Jalón Oyarzun, University of Zurich

Lucía Jalón Oyarzun is an architect and researcher. She graduated from the ETSAM School of Architecture of Madrid where she also defended her PhD “Exception and the rebel body: the political as generator of a minor architecture” (2017). She is currently Head of Research at ALICE (Atelier de la Conception de l'Espace) at EPFL and Research Fellow at the Center of Digital Visual Studies (University of Zurich), where she continues her interdisciplinary research on minor architectures around issues of secrecy and clandestinity as spatial compositions under capitalism, the effects of coded environments on the body’s spatial capabilities, and maps as instruments of (dis)orientation.

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Published

2022-09-02

How to Cite

Jalón Oyarzun, L. (2022). Windowish Practices, Unreadable Backgrounds and Raw Semiotics. Tracing Minor Architectures and Ecologies of Signs in Women’s Writing. ZARCH. Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Architecture and Urbanism, (18), 210–219. https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_zarch/zarch.2022186216