Emma Cheatle is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Newcastle University Humanities Research Institute and dissertation tutor at Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.
Emma Cheatle's inspiring book is a must-read for any historian of twentieth-century modernism. Drawing on a vast range of materials, Cheatle argues that Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass (1923) and Pierre Chareau's Maison de Verre (1932) are two key representations of early twentieth century sexual culture that can productively be read against each other. The insistence that Maison de Verre be understood within the context of contemporary struggles over sexual and reproductive rights for women is a ground-breaking one. More broadly, Cheatle's concept of 'part-architecture' itself sets out a mode of working that can go beyond the limits of the textual record, using the building's materiality and creative sited practices to offer new interpretations and speculative insights for architectural history and design thinking. Barbara Penner, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL