New guidebook: ByWomen

Between fall 2020 and spring 2022, Liv Løvetand Rahbek visited and photographed countless places in and around Copenhagen as part of her work with the Women in Danish Architecture project. Her photos have now become a guidebook on architecture created by women.

The guidebook is called byWomen: A Guidebook to Everyday Architecture in Greater Copenhagen.

Written by Liv Løvetand Rahbek and project managers Svava Riesto and Henriette Steiner, byWomen is an invitation to experience architecture, planning, and landscape architecture in the Copenhagen area from a new perspective. It follows women who contributed as architects, planners, landscape architects, and designers, and it reveals their contributions to the physical framework of the modern welfare society. Modern architecture and the people who created it are far more diverse than we have been told.

byWomen is available for sale on the publishing house’s website

Copenhagen is full of architecture that women in creative communities have created and contributed to. This discovery is an important step on the road to a less gender-stereotyped understanding of modern architecture.

The book introduces fifty buildings and places designed by women from the 1920s to the 1980s. All of the photos were taken by Liv Løvetand Rahbek, who works on visual communication for the project Women in Danish Architecture 1925–1975. As part of her work, Liv Løvetand Rahbek visited and photographed a large number of places in and around Copenhagen.

The sites include buildings, parks, roads, and landscapes designed by women during the 20th century. The book is the result of visits and conversations with people in their homes, car journeys to remote cottages, cycle rides along hidden routes in the welfare landscapes around schools and other public buildings, and walks through quiet residential neighborhoods. Some places will be familiar; others have never appeared in a guidebook before. What they all have in common is that they tell a previously invisible part of the story of the materialization of the 20th-century Danish welfare state.

byWomen contains an introduction, photos, and anecdotes as well as maps, addresses, and registers. A small, practical companion that you can tuck under your arm, hold in your hand, or carry in your bag, it opens up new perspectives on fantastic architecture in Copenhagen and the surrounding area, all created by women.

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byWomen is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation. It is written by Liv Løvetand Rahbek, Henriette Steiner, and Svava Riesto, with contributions from the whole project team. The book was published on May 10 by IKAROS Press and can be bought through the publishing house and in DAC Design Shop.