Writing the Ideal Feminist City: Helen Rosenau’s Thoughts on Architecture in the European 20th Century

Abstract

This text considers questions that can be asked about Helen Rosenau’s (1900 –1984) publication The Ideal City in its Architectural Evolution in Europe (1959). In the context of contemporary understandings, it explores the way in which these questions are posed and the content that is reconstructed. It examines the connections between architecture and writing, architecture and books, and cities and writing, as well as Helen Rosenau’s reflections on the 20th city from an intersectional, queer-feminist perspective, including its characteristics and demands. It also aims to show how the book itself can be seen as a textual and written city, as well as a claim for a (queer-)feminist city. The analysis aims to demonstrate that the book itself is a resource for historical queer-feminist research and a document of scientific structures and their disappearance. It asks what possibilities there are for dealing with a text that has been written out of history. It thus constitutes a historiographical-epistemological study of Rosenau’s The Ideal City, with the aim of raising further questions and examining different structures and textures, not in parallel, but simultaneously.