Jane Rendell » Books

The Unknown City

admin — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 16:57:53 +0000

The Unknown City is a book about both the existence and the possibilities of architecture and the city. It is at once a history, geography and sociology of the urban as it presents itself today, and also a proposition, a move toward confronting the problems of how we might know of, and engage with, the urban. We offer here an approximation of this problematic, suggesting a move from things to flows, from filters to tactics. In doing so, essays shift from objects to actions, stasis to change, between external and internal, city and self, past and present, and so to future – and back again.

Publication Details: Iain Borden, Jane Rendell, Joe Kerr with Alicia Pivaro (eds.), The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space, (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2001).

The Pursuit of Pleasure

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The Pursuit of Pleasure focuses on rambling, an eighteenth and early nineteenth century form of urban exploration represented in texts such as Pierce Egan’s Life in London (1820-1). The author takes the figures and spaces of the ramble – specifically the rambler and the cyprian (precursors to the Parisian flâneur and prostitute) and the clubs, sporting venues, operas, assembly rooms, streets, arcades of London’s St. James’s – as a starting point for considering the gendering of public space. Drawing on critical theory, geography and philosophy, The Pursuit of Pleasure extends and critiques the discipline of architectural history from a feminist perspective. The gendering of space is considered to be a complex and shifting series of gendered moves and looks between men and women, constructed and represented through spatial and social relations of consumption, display and exchange.

Publication details: Jane Rendell, The Pursuit of Pleasure: Gender, Space and Architecture in Regency London, (London: Continuum, 2002).

Strangely Familiar

admin — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 16:57:16 +0000

Strangely Familiar was a cultural and educational initiative which aimed to explore, understand and communicate the complex intersection of architecture, cities and urban living. It did so in three ways:

•Publicly, by presenting and promoting new ideas about architecture and cities to the general public.
•Professionally, by presenting to architects and other urban design professionals new ideas about cities and urban living.
•Academically, through interdisciplinary enquires involving architectural history, art history, cultural studies, feminism, planning, sociology and urban geography.

Strangely Familiar was an affiliation of academics, journalists, designers, policy makers and other urbanists formed in 1994 by Iain Borden, Joe Kerr, Alicia Pivaro and Jane Rendell. Its programme of events occurred from 1995-97.

For Strangely Familiar: Narratives of Architecture in the City, an exhibition, symposium, and catalogue, the working group included architects, graphic designers, film makers, multimedia artists. Our response to an invitation to curate and design an architectural exhibition was to reject the notion of architectural history written only by architectural historians, consisting of boards on walls describing the work of famous architects. Instead we invited academics from disciplines outside architecture to provide a short narrative about a specific place in a city and an object related to that place. Each interpretative stance revealed a place that was ’strangely familiar’, familiar because certain aspects were already known, strange because they were being revealed in new ways.

Although contributions investigated a diverse range of different subjects and adopted a variety of political, interpretive and analytical procedures, Strangely Familiar identified three strategies for engaging with public space: memory and remembering; domination, resistance and appropriation; experience and identity

For The Unknown City, the book that followed Strangely Familiar, we invited practitioners from art, film, architecture, as well as theorists from geography, cultural studies, architectural and art theory, to comment on the relationship between how designers make and how occupants experience the city

Publication Details

Iain Borden, Joe Kerr, Alicia Pivaro and Jane Rendell (eds.), Strangely Familiar: Narratives of Architecture in the City, (London: Routledge, 1995).

Spatial Imagination in Design

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‘Spatial Imagination in Design’ examined imagination as a key ‘creative driver’ in the development of innovative and qualitative spatial design processes. It brought together an international group of academics and design professionals from 11 disciplines (architecture, computer sciences, creative arts, electronics, engineering design, environmental consultants, graphic and communication design, history of design, product design, psychology and urban design). The cluster focused on cross-sector and multi-disciplinary research and collaboration. Its activities were structured around 5 workshops which examined the relationship between imagination and the design processes of writing, drawing and modeling.

Spatial Imagination in Design produced a catalogue, Peg Rawes and Jane Rendell (eds), Spatial Imagination, (London, 2005), an exhibition, ‘Spatial Imagination’, curated by Penelope Haralambidou, the Domo Baal Gallery, London, (January 2005), a website www.spatialimagination.org/ designed by Stuart Munro, and a symposium, ‘Spaces of Exchange’, CABE (Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment), (January 2006).

PI: Dr Jane Rendell, CI: Dr Peg Rawes, RA: Dr Penelope Haralambidou; TA: Stuart Munro.

www.spatialimagination.org/

Intersections

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The authors of the essays in InterSections: Architectural History and Critical Theory, a book I edited with Iain Borden, examine the relationship between architectural history and critical theory, demonstrating different modes of writing theorised histories, bringing to the surface questions of critical methodology.

Iain Borden and Jane Rendell (eds) InterSections: Architectural History and Critical Theory (London, Routledge, 2000).

Gender, Space, Architecture

admin — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 16:56:14 +0000

Architecture is a subject which demands to be understood in context: that is, within the context of its production (society, economics, politics, culture) and the context of its consumption, representation and interpretation (different academic disciplines, interest groups, institutions, users). In the light of enormous and rapid shifts in theoretical, historical and critical debates, particularly with respect to feminism, understanding architecture in relation to gender demands an urgent contextualisation.

A major change in thinking about gender, feminism, space and architecture has occurred in the last five or so years and it has become vital to place current discussions within an intellectual history, enabling some understanding to be gained of the basis and development of these contemporary ideas. Gender, Space, Architecture intends to do just that.

The purpose of the book is to provide a comprehensive introduction to issues of gender as they pertain to architectural studies. This is the first such book to include a range of key texts from both within and outside of architecture published over the last 20 years, and also to provide a clear framework by which to investigate the subject. Gender, Space, Architecture simultaneously presents closure and aperture – a momentary recapitulation of seminal texts both past and present, as well as provide an opening of the territory to future new ideas and practices.

We imagine readers to come with varying interests from a number of different areas; from within architecture with an interest in gender, from within gender studies with an interest in space and architecture, and from within spatialised disciplines, such as geography and anthropology, with an interest in gender and in architecture.

Publication Details: Jane Rendell, Barbara Penner and Iain Borden (eds.), Gender, Space, Architecture: an Interdisciplinary Introduction, (London: Routledge, 1999).

Critical Architecture

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This special issue of the Journal of Architecture includes a number of papers presented at the ‘Critical Architecture’ conference held in November 2005 at The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. The conference was part funded by the British Academy and part funded by The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. The conference was organised by Jane Rendell and Jonathan Hill of the Bartlett, and was held in association with AHRA (Architectural Humanities Research Association) represented by Murray Fraser of the University of Westminster and Mark Dorrian of the University of Edinburgh.

‘Critical Architecture’ aimed to examine the relationship between critical practice in architectural design and architectural criticism. The intention was to place architecture in an interdisciplinary context, and to investigate the relationship between theory and practice, by exploring architectural criticism as a form of practice and considering the different modes of critical practice in architectural design: buildings, drawings and texts. The thirty nine speakers, including Andrew Benjamin, Howard Caygill, Philippe Rahm of Décosterd & Rahm, Kim Dovey, Steve McAdam of fluid architects, Hal Foster, Patrick Keiller, Sharon Kivland, Hilde Heynen, Ben Nicholson, Eyal Weisman, Sarah Wigglesworth Architects came from theory and practice, from inside and outside architecture and from twelve different countries.

Publication Details: Jane Rendell (ed.) Critical Architecture, special issue of the Journal of Architecture, (June 2005), v. 10. n. 3 and Jane Rendell, Jonathan Hill, Murray Fraser and Mark Dorrian (eds.) Critical Architecture, (London: Routledge, forthcoming 2007).

A Place Between

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This issue of Public Art Journal aims to break away from the traditional magazine format where a select number of critics comment on the practice of artists, while the artists themselves remain critically mute or worse still absent. Instead ‘Places Between’ attempts to complexify the ways in which we understand the relation of art and criticism, private and public, practice and theory, by showing how theoretical thinking can be practice and how practitioners can make theory. To this end a diverse range of artists, architects, theorists, historians and critics have been invited to make contributions precisely because their work is not traditionally considered within the terms of ‘public art’. For some this has provided an opportunity to present current work – theory, practice, images, script – as public art. For others this has allowed a chance to comment on current ‘public art’ and to explore different understandings of this ‘practice’ such that it is.

As editor, wherever I look, I find ‘places between’ the various works and ideas, images and words. But how can the reader navigate ‘Places Between’? Being ‘between’ it’s easy to feel lost. How then to chart the territory of ‘Places Between’? Here collaboration has provided some useful orientating devices. As well as sharing the intellectual concerns, the visual design creates a language, creates ‘places between’, which allow various connections and contradictions to be made between each of the contributions. has raised the question of Working with Rex Henry, between editing and designing this issue of Public Art Journal, has meant a constant exchange of the theoretical and the practical.

Publication details: Jane Rendell (ed.), A Place Between, special issue of The Public Art Journal, n.2, (October 1999).

Art & Architecture: A Place Between

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The traditional boundaries between art and architecture are increasingly blurred in work that has been variously described as site-specific art, public art and urban intervention. In art, such work has been variously described as contextual practice, site-specific art, public art, and in architecture, as conceptual design and urban intervention. Art and Architecture redefines such work as ‘critical spatial practice’. Rendell visits works produced by galleries who operate ‘outside’ their physical limits, commissioning agencies and independent curators who support and develop ’site-specific’ work and collaborative groups who produce various kinds of critical projects from performance art to urban design, asking crucial questions about the nature of public art and about the notion of ‘function’ in art and architecture. Looking back to precedents in land and community art, Rendell discusses a wide range of artists including Andrea Zittel, Jeremy Deller, Anya Gallaccio and Jane Prophet and pioneering work by architects as varied as Lacaton + Vassal, Shigeru Ban and Sarah Wigglesworth.

More than a survey, Art and Architecture draws on concepts from disciplines such as feminism, critical theory and cultural geography to explore the relationships between art, architecture, place, space and site. In the last ten years or so a number of academic disciplines have come together in debates concerning ‘the city’. These discussions around the urban condition have produced an interdisciplinary terrain of ’spatial theory’ that has reformulated the ways in which space is understood and practiced. Rendell draws on such influential spatial thinkers as Rosi Braidotti, Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau, Luce Irigaray, Doreen Massey and Edward Soja, as well as art critics such as Hal Foster, Suzi Gablick and Rosalyn Krauss, to provide starting points for considering the relationship between art and architecture with reference to several different theoretical themes such as ‘the expanded field’, ‘the dialectical image’ and ’social sculpture’.

Publication Details: Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture: A Place Between, (London: IB Tauris, forthcoming September 2006).