At the heart of Women Writing Architecture is an ever-growing annotated bibliography, an open-access list of texts written by women about architecture that challenges the boundaries of each of these three terms (always under scrutiny). Citations (in the centre) are added as recommendations by different people (everyone is invited to contribute) – as annotations (green, on the right) or within collections (blue, on the left).

Women Writing Architecture was launched at the end of June 2021.

As a process and mechanism, it is motivated by several ideas and intentions:

• to challenge notions of hierarchy and value. The means of gathering citations – the individual elements of the bibliography – through community suggestions via annotation or collection means that it is difficult to recommend, to promote oneself. Instead, a citation accrues value through its meaning to others
• to explore the relationship between a virtual realm and and an online community
• to experiment with publishing mechanisms that do not require capital
• to suggest an alternative to the ways that canons of (architectural) knowledge are created and perpetuated through reflection on the three core terms: women, writing, architecture, to engage with and embody issues including gender and its non-binary definition; the relationship between writing, reading and listening; how the role of architects and the profession and definition of architecture responds to socio-economic challenges presented by climate change, for example, and by the rebalancing of history and power through decolonisation

As time passes, many and more products are invented – podcast series, such as The Author Speaks and A Book I Love; Glossators; Annotation-bookmarks; wwa publishing …

Helen Thomas