BOOK LAUNCH #1
Tuesday 28 October
17:00 — Guided tour of the exhibition by Léa-Catherine Szacka
18:00 — Book launch Cooking Up Dinner Speeches: Ise Gropius in Japan, edited by Almut Grunewald, Zurich: gta Verlag, 2025. Discussion with Almut Grunewald and Irina Davidovici moderated by Léa-Catherine Szacka
In May 1954, Ise Gropius (1897–1983) embarked on a three-month trip to Japan together with the famous architect Walter Gropius. Their tightly timed tour, organized by the International House of Japan and financed by the Rockefeller Foundation, brought both of them into exchange with architects, artisans, artists, journalists, and university lecturers. In addition to promoting and writing speeches for her husband, Ise Gropius proved to be a gifted chronicler.
In detailed reports – her only known cohesive texts from the postwar period – she vividly describes the country and its people. She comments on lectures, discussions about reconstruction, evening parties, or the Bauhaus exhibition in Tokyo with as much humour and understanding as she does on the role of Japanese women, Zen Buddhism, or the local cuisine.
Extensively annotated by the editor and supplemented by contributions from Anne Hultzsch and Shuntaro Nozawa, this volume publishes Ise Gropius’s travelogues, in facsimile, for the first time.
This event take place on the occasion of the exhibition Crossed Histories, Gae Aulenti, Ada Louise Huxtable, Phyllis Lambert, on Architecture and the City at Archizoom, curated by Léa-Catherine Szacka.
BIOGRAPHIES
Irina Davidovici is an architect, historian, and the director of the gta Archive at ETH Zurich. Davidovici obtained her doctorate at the University of Cambridge in 2008 and Habilitation at ETH Zurich in 2020. The author of Forms of Practice. German-Swiss Architecture 1980–2000 (2012 and 2018) and The Autonomy of Theory: Ticino Architecture and Its Critical Reception (2024), Davidovici edited Colquhounery. Alan Colquhoun from Bricolage to Myth (AA, 2015) and co-edited thematic issues for Architectural Theory Review and OASE. Her latest book Common Grounds: A Comparative History of Early Housing Estates in Europe will be published with Triest Verlag in 2027.
Almut Grunewald is an art historian, curator, and member of the scientific staff of gta Archive 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 (2019). Together with Sokratis Georgiadis she co-edited Sigfried Giedion’s unfinished book project Die Entstehung des heutigen Menschen (2023). In 2022, she began her research for the now published book about Ise Gropius and her impressions of the three-month trip to Japan with her husband Walter Gropius.
Léa-Catherine Szacka is associate professor in architectural studies at the University of Manchester and director of the Manchester Architecture Research Group. She has also been a visiting professor at numerous institutions, including Harvard GSD, The Berlage, ETH, and EPFL. Since 2024, she has served as vice president of the European Architectural History Network. Szacka is the author of Exhibiting the Postmodern: The 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale (2016) and of Biennials/Triennials: Conversations on the Geography of Itinerant Display (2019). She is also co-author of Le Concert: Pink Floyd à Venise (2017) and Paolo Portoghesi: Architecture Between History, Politics and Media (2023), as well as co-editor of Mediated Messages (2018). In 2022, she co-curated the 10th International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam.