The Footnote Room
social
A low vaulted chamber under the College where footnotes from other worlds wash up as objects: a citation carved in slate, an annotation folded into a paper boat, a reference in a language no one in th...
social
A low vaulted chamber under the College where footnotes from other worlds wash up as objects: a citation carved in slate, an annotation folded into a paper boat, a reference in a language no one in th...
industrial
Where the river has cut the Field of Letters down to its bones: a cliff of blue-grey lias, layer on layer, made of lives. Mary Anning works it with a hammer, a basket and a terrier. Stones for the cit...
commercial
The top floor of a Roman palazzo, given entirely to one tall north window and the light from it. Here Artemisia Gentileschi paints the likenesses of women whom the world kept badly – portraits made by...
residential
A Heian palace pavilion of unpainted cypress on the river, its verandas over a garden pond, its bamboo blinds always half lowered. The city's invented women live here: heroines of tales and novels and...
commercial
The treasury of a city whose only wealth is attention. A courtyard house in the style of Fez, green-tiled roofs over horseshoe arches, a fountain at the centre, and on the courtyard wall a great brass...
social
Where the city argues in public. A plain semicircular hall of white plaster and oak tiers, modelled on the chapel where women declared their sentiments in 1848, with tall clear windows and no ornament...
military
A stretch of the city wall in the Quarter of Justice where the stone has worn thin as alabaster, and light and sound pass through it. Hildegard tends it after Compline. On quiet nights it carries hymn...
social
The house of Lady Reason, which came to the Cité as a Georgian drawing room of honey stone and stayed one: three fireplaces, walls of books, chairs Christine finds too soft. Above the central fireplac...
infrastructure
Three colonnaded terraces cut into the low hills north of the Field, joined by broad ramps, in the manner of a temple at Deir el-Bahari. This is where the city's stone is dressed and where damaged sto...
medical
A long hospital hall under a painted timber vault, in the manner of the Hôtel-Dieu at Beaune: two rows of curtained beds facing an altar at the far end. Women whose stones have blanched lie here, pale...
industrial
Hildegard's house, Romanesque and green: a twelfth-century abbey of rough red sandstone on the river where the Quarter of Justice meets the Field, with a herb garden, a cloister and a long writing hal...
military
The only way into the Cité from the Field. A Gothic gate-tower in pale limestone, flanked by carved women caught in the act of speaking; above the arch an inscription in the French of 1405, Nulle n'en...
infrastructure
A plain grey records office with rows of identical windows, the least beautiful building in the Cité and one of the most important. It collects documents from other worlds – forms, orders, leaflets, d...
residential
A walled garden among honey-stone cottages where new arrivals live their first season. Every plant in it is named for a woman who was forgotten, and the beds are tended on the Rota like the stones: a ...
industrial
A brick tower with a copper dome, named for Margaret Cavendish's world, with Ada Lovelace's Analytical Engine filling the hall at its foot: brass columns of figure-wheels, a barrel of punched cards, t...
infrastructure
Where every newcomer learns to read a stone. The College grew in layers: its ground floor is the cloister of a convent in New Spain, grey stone and red volcanic tezontle around a courtyard of orange t...