City of Ladies: Christine de Pizan and Architecture

In this public lecture, Penelope Haralambidou, Professor of Architecture and Spatial Culture and Co-Director of the Cinematic and Videogame Architecture MArch programme at The Bartlett, UK, will give a presentation of her design-led research project City of Ladies: Christine de Pizan and Architecture. 

'City of Ladies' is an interdisciplinary design research project that introduces and promotes the work of the medieval author Christine de Pizan to an architectural audience for the first time. In her celebrated text, The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), Christine describes the construction of an imaginary city, a female utopia built and inhabited by women. Her work has been seen as a proto-feminist manifesto, conflating the act of building with collecting stories of notable female figures from fiction and history and erecting a thesis against misogyny. 

Our research builds upon existing scholarship on the relationship between image and text in Christine’s work. It proposes an innovative, design-led analysis of the architectural and urban allegory in her text and a spatial remodelling of the accompanying illuminations (miniature illustrations). Performing history and theory through design, the research aims to establish Christine as the first speculative female architect and to project the powerful message of her allegorical city into the future.

About Penelope Haralambidou

Penelope Haralambidou is Professor of Architecture and Spatial Culture and Co-Director of the Cinematic and Videogame Architecture MArch programme at the Bartlett. Her interdisciplinary design research employs architectural drawing, model-making and digital film to explore architecture in relation to visual representation, art and cinema. She is the author of Marcel Duchamp and the Architecture of Desire (Routledge, 2013), and her work has been exhibited internationally.

Her solo exhibition City of Ladies (DomoBaal, 2020) presented her design-led research on Christine de Pizan. In 2024, she served on the invited international Research Quality Assessment at the Royal Danish Academy for Architecture, Design and Conservation. She is a panel member for REF 2029 and judge and chair of WORKS+WORDS 2026, Biennale in Artistic Research in Architecture, Aarhus.