Good morning everyone,

I am in Singapore! Fem Fri today is not about SG, but it's SG-adjacent - here is a newsletter of skyscrapers designed by women. Wikipedia kindly has a list of the tallest buildings in the world designed by women, so let's have a look together at some of the most interesting ones.

The tallest building designed by a woman is the St Regis Chicago, designed by Jeanne Gang, but my favourite is the second tallest. Also in Chicago and also designed by Jeanne Gang, here's Aqua:

Here she is talking about the St Regis though. If you, like me, are alarmed by the way tall buildings waggle around in the wind, this interview won't make you less alarmed but it will make you better informed:

With tall buildings, they're - essentially they're cantilevers coming out of the ground, so the wind affects them a lot. So we have to do a couple of things to make it comfortable when you're way up at the top. But to counteract that, you put a heavy weight of some sort up at the top that moves at a different rate than the building, and that kind of cancels out that movement. So we did that here. Actually, we use water on the top in a big tank, and it sloshes around. But then, to reduce the wind more and to be able to use less material for the building, we found we could do a void up there, high up in the building, so the wind passes right through. And it really - it does an incredible amount to reduce how much stiffness you have to have in the building.

https://www.npr.org/2022/06/11/1104368932/the-st-regis-chicago-is-the-worlds-tallest-structure-designed-by-a-woman

Wild that I've never featured Zaha Hadid in Fem Fri before. Maybe because I've never seen a photo of Leeza SOHO in Beijing before? I love this:

I also love her comparison of her architectural practice to playing the piano:

it’s laden with so many ideas that one cannot extrude a single one, there is no formal repertoire. two years ago I focused on one apartment to see how many variations you can come up with in a given space with the same parameters. I would work on this repeatedly for days and you see that there is maybe seven hundred options for one space. this exercise gives you an idea of the degree at which you can interpret the organization of space, it is not infinite but it’s very large. imagine if you multiply that to the scale of a bigger space, and the to the scale of a city. it is like a pianist constantly practicing – it’s the same level of intensity. it increases the repertoires immensely – it is unpredictable.

https://www.designboom.com/architecture/zaha-hadid-interview-quotes-dies-aged-65-03-31-2016/

Here's one readers in the UK can go and see, and it's also excellent - the Library of Birmingham by Francine Houben. Europe's largest public library!

Some lovely photos in this article too, an interview with Francie Houben:

what we did was to make a huge lower ground floor, then made a kind of composition of a square, with Shakespeare at the top of it. Birmingham is a very green city but not in the city centre, there are a lot of grey roofs so we wanted to make sure if we made terraces we wanted to make them very green, like elevated gardens. What is nice for a library is to have a garden to read in. So we made these two to add green space to the city.

https://www.dezeen.com/2013/08/29/libraries-are-the-most-important-public-buildings-francine-houben/

Happy Friday friends!

Alex xxx.