The Illustrated London News, launched in May 1842 as the first illustrated newspaper and quickly copied across Europe, North America and beyond, was full of architectural images. New buildings, ancient ruins, construction sites, royal visits, wars, theatre performances, exotic expeditions, historical essays and innumerable other subjects gave occasion to feature the built, whether for its own sake or as background setting. Images and texts were produced and consumed with an urge and at a speed never seen before. The building, through the illustrated press, left the static confines of the book and the framed print and became peopled by the purposeful bourgeoisie. Through a close analysis of a range of articles on the new Royal Exchange, the refurbished London Colosseum as well as the Queen's Scotland tour, this essay explores the role of the architectural image in the illustrated press by focusing on its relationship to the accompanying text. Untangling the mechanics of representation and perception, it identifies modes of intellectual, affective, and kinetic vision through which architecture was represented to the remote reading public. By externalising and stabilising vision, the Illustrated London News thus created a virtual public sphere in which the dramatic technological and material changes occurring in the period could be absorbed and normalized.

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“To write women back into history”, is an often-used phrase in recent feminist discourse. More and more scholars work to increase the visibility of those women who took charge of design projects in the recent and not so recent past. While crucial, such efforts are, in the paradox way of how privilege works, to an extent counterproductive: presenting these women (and other, historically marginalised figures) as exceptions from the rule – as eccentric trailblazers  - implies the majority of their female (or Black, indigenous, queer, other ...) contemporaries had no influence within (white, male) architectural practices. This position paper argues that we also need to look for other practices that enabled women (and others) in greater numbers to gain agency. Writing is one such practice: the recording of experience, critiques, and instructions to appropriate the designed, ascribing meaning to architectures and landscapes. Locating architectural agency in a practice that, while presuming some privilege, was much more open to marginalised groups than that of the architect, enables us to look at the past more inclusively: to write gendered histories that open up spaces for those that were there, in fact.