Network Weavers: Women in CIAM Circles

Organised in connection with the exhibition Interwoven: Women Architects and the Resilience of Modernist Networks, this seminar explores the diverse roles women played within the milieu of the CIAM (International Congresses of Modern Architecture). Beyond practicing architects and designers, women also acted as intellectual mediators, organisers, secretaries, and partners who helped sustain and shape the social and professional networks of modernism.

The lectures and discussion will focus on the work and activities of Barbara Brukalska, Carola Giedion-Welcker, Ise Gropius, and Helena Syrkus, highlighting how their contributions supported the intellectual, organisational, and cultural infrastructure of the CIAM network. The seminar will be followed by a guided tour of the exhibition.

More information:
Sigfried Giedion and Carola Giedion-Welcker count among the most exceptional couples oft he twentieth century. Both worked as equals on several avant-garde fronts at once from architecture to art to literature. Numerous illustrious couples were in the Giedion’s circle of friends: Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Lucia and László Moholy-Nagy, Peggy Guggenheim and Max Ernst, Nora and James Joyce, Alvar and Aino Aalto, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Johnson and of course Ise and Walter Gropius. They worked together, vied with each other, and inspired each other’s work. Yet among those named were also women who set aside their own ambitions in order to be their partner’s assistant, muse or agent. One of them was Ise Gropius, who after some initial success as a journalist placed her writing skills exclusively at her husband’s disposal for his essays and lectures and also proved to be a gifted chonicler. For example in 1954 she sent detailed reports from a three month trip to Japan – her only known cohesive texts from the postwar period – to her friends in Zurich. The different roles played by these two outstanding women, Ise Gropius and Carola Giedion-Welcker, within the network of artistic and architectural modernism are made abundantly clear in their long-standing correspondence which is part of the Giedion collection in the gta Archive at ETH Zurich.

Speakers:
Małgorzata Jędrzejczyk is an art historian, curator, and expert in cultural diplomacy, she serves as Assistant Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice and head of the ‘Exercising Modernity interdisciplinary programme carried out by the Pilecki Institute in Berlin. She holds a PhD in art history from the Jagiellonian University, where she also completed the interdisciplinary Environment–Technologies–Society Doctoral programme. She has also studied at the Universität Wien and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She is the author and editor of publications on 20th- and 21st-century art and architecture, including ​​Die Moderne in Krakau (Müry Salzmann Verlag, Salzburg, 2025); Katarzyna Kobro: Movement of Space-Time (Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, 2021); Composing the Space: Sculptures in the Avant-garde (with Katarzyna Słoboda, Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, 2019). She has curated such exhibitions as Marta Antoniak: Elementary Particles (Bunkier Sztuki, Krakow, 2025), Sections: Gallery of Polish Architecture of the 20th and 21st Centuries (National Museum in Krakow; with Kacper Kępiński and Weronika Grzesiak, from 2021); Identity: 100 Years of Polish Architecture (National Museum in Krakow, 2019); and Composing Space: Sculptures in the Avant-garde (with Katarzyna Słoboda, Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, 2019). She is a member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) and the Association of Art Historians in Poland.

Aleksandra Kędziorek is an art historian, curator, researcher and editor based in Warsaw, Poland, she graduated from the Art History Institute at the University of Warsaw and CuratorLab at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm. Her work sits between architecture, design and visual arts. Her curatorial practice takes into account historically-conditioned and thought-provoking contexts. She uses her research strategies to seek inspiration and creative responses in the past to the challenges of the present. Most recently her focus was the sense of security in architecture (the Lares and Penates exhibition, created with Krzysztof Maniak, Katarzyna Przezwańska and Maciej Siuda for the Polish Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale, 2025), the use of textiles in interiors before the spread of electricity (The Clothed Home touring exhibition, created with Alicja Bielawska and Centrala for the Polish Pavilion at the London Design Biennale, 2021) and the role of aquatic plants in modernist architecture (Centrala’s White Waterlilies intervention at the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion in Barcelona, 2022). Prior to that, she co-ordinated an international research and exhibition project on Oskar and Zofia Hansen at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and tended to the summer house in Szumin (2013–17). She is co-editor of CIAM Archipelago: The Letters of Helena Syrkus (with Katarzyna Uchowicz and Maja Wirkus, 2019) and Oskar Hansen: Opening Modernism (with Łukasz Ronduda, 2014), among others. She teaches at the School of Form, Design Faculty of the SWPS University in Warsaw.

Almut Grunewald is an art historian, curator, and member of the scientific staff of gta Archive, within the Institute for History and Theory of architecture (gta), at ETH Zurich. In 2014, she completed her doctorate at the TU Munich on the subject of “Frederick Kiesler. His sculptures and his open artistic concept”. Between 2016–2018 she led the Sigfried Giedion and Carola Giedion-Welcker research project at gta Archive and edited the publication The Giedion World: Sigfried Giedion and Carola Giedion-Welcker in Dialogue (Scheidegger and Spiess, Zurich, 2019). Together with Sokratis Georgiadis she co-edited Sigfried Giedion’s unfinished book project Die Entstehung des heutigen Menschen (gta Verlag, Zurich, 2023). Recently, she edited the book Cooking Up Dinner Speeches (gta Verlag, Zurich, 2025) about Ise Gropius and her impressions of the three-month trip to Japan with her husband Walter Gropius.

Organised in collaboration with the Polish Institute in Prague and the Pilecki Institute in Berlin.