Margaret Staal-Kropholler (1891–1966) is regarded as the first woman architect in the Netherlands. She completed her first work as an unqualified architect in 1917. Less well known is that Grada Wolffensperger (1887–1965) became the first woman to complete the univer-sity course in architecture at the Technische Hogeschool in Delft that same year. A further twenty women had completed their architectural training by 1945.

Why and how did these women become architects at a time when women w...

Climate change and architectural design through the lens of time

Including a timeline with 45 key moments in climate awareness history and inspiring projects

The history of climate change and the history of architecture are connected in many ways. This book intertwines climate action and architectural design through time. It explores architectural experimentation in the past, depicts the present moment of transition and offers hopeful glimpses of the future.

It’s About Time revea...

Markets and market halls have always been more than about trade and nourishment. A detailed look at the histories of marketplaces provides evidence of the public health concerns they faced, as well as the social commotion, mobilization and, at times, unrest they hosted. This edited volume reappraises the market hall, examining both its architectural and its social and political significance.

Focusing on how these buildings embodied transformations in architecture and urbanism from the mid-nin...

Cities are experiencing a renaissance today, because we've begun to understand how they really work -- and how to make them work better for people.

This book is a lively, readable account of two revealing figures in the history of that renaissance: the urban economist Jane Jacobs and the architect Christopher Alexander. Their key insights have shaped several generations of scholars, professionals, and activists. However, as the book argues, this renaissance is still immature, and more must be...

The Modern movement began in the 1920s when a small group of young architects felt all that had gone before should be rejected and that architectural design should start afresh. This fresh start, they declared, should be based on modern technology and a new, modern approach to life. Their innovations became the 20th century’s dominant movement in architecture, crystallizing into the international style of the 1920s and '30s. In Exploding the Myths of Modern Architecture, Malcolm Millais exp...

Apparatus and apparatisation, the focus of the Cyber-Physical Architecture (CpA) issue #2 of SPOOL, refer to an assemblage of various components, tools, and instruments that in combination produce an exponential surplus beyond the linear sum of parts.

The CpA #2 samples various interests afforded by the apparatus and apparatisation in and of architecture and how they open up new potentials and opportunities. The first article, Building as Apparatus? (by Leach) addresses the theme of “buildi...

Over the last decades, the perception of glass in the engineering world has changed from that of a brittle, fragile material to a reliable structural component of high compressive load-bearing capacity. Although the structural applications of glass in architecture are continuously increasing, they are dominated by a considerable geometrical limitation: the 2-dimensionality imposed by the prevailing float glass industry. Cast glass can overcome this limitation: solid 3-dimensional glass compon...

Who were Le Corbusier’s photographers? The question is seldom asked yet is germane to under­standing the architect’s work. Le Corbusier used photography to promote modern architecture in ways no others did. He directed the photography of his buildings, selected the images that he liked, cropped them, abstracted them, and placed them on the pages of his many books. He mediated the medium of photography mani­pulating visual facts in an era when “the camera never lied”. Yet always ...