This website comprises writings produced over the last decade, from excerpts and abstracts of refereed articles, books, chapters, catalogue essays and transcripts of walking talks to descriptions of projects and works. The texts collected here engage with a number of interdisciplinary crossings between theory and practice, art and architecture, the critical and the creative, the personal and the public.

As a writer, researcher and educator of artists, architects and historians, through individual and collaborative research projects, my work over the past ten years has explored various interdisciplinary intersections: feminist theory and architectural history, fine art and architectural design, autobiographical writing and criticism.

I have been interested in generating new interdisciplinary knowledge and understandings through concepts and processes such as ‘critical spatial practice’ first introduced in my article ‘A Place Between Art, Architecture and Critical Theory’, Proceedings to Place and Location (Tallinn, Estonia, 2003), pp. 221-33 (published in English and Estonian) and later consolidated and developed in my book Art and Architecture (London: IB Tauris, 2006), and ’site-writing’ first initiated as a pedagogic tool through site-specific writing courses at the Bartlett from 2001, and then as a mode of spatializing art-writing first in Jane Rendell, ‘Site-Writing’, Sharon Kivland, Jaspar Joseph-Lester and Emma Cocker (eds), Transmission: Speaking and Listening, vol. 4, (Sheffield Hallam University and Site Gallery, 2005), pp. 169–76 and now in my forthcoming book: Site-Writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism (London: IB Tauris, 2010).

I started out as an architectural designer and came to architectural history later, and then moved into teaching art practice, and now to writing art and architectural criticism and teaching architectural history and theory. I have established history/theory courses which bring processes from fine art practice and architectural design to inform the production of writings which operate between history/theory/criticism and design exploring the creative potential of critical writing as a form of critical spatial practice.

Much of my research to date has involved working as part of a multidisciplinary team. In Strangely Familiar: Narratives of Architecture in the City, an exhibition, symposium, and catalogue, the working team included researchers, architects, graphic designers, film makers, multimedia artists. The initial project came out of an invitation to curate and design an architectural exhibition. Our response was to reject the notion of architectural history done only by architectural historians and 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. The interpretative stance revealed a place that was ’strangely familiar’, familiar because certain aspects were already known, strange because it was being revealed in a new way.

The Unknown City, the book that came out of Strangely Familiar, went further in inviting 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 and use the city.

I often work collaboratively as part of an editorial team. This was the case for Gender, Space, Architecture a book which brought together a series of seminal texts looking at the relationship between gender and feminist theory and architectural space. InterSections a collection of specially commissioned essays addressed questions of critical methodology in the relationship between critical theory and architectural history.

In my own individual research I have been investigating the relationship between feminist theory and architectural history, by examining the ways in which feminist theory questions the methods of architectural historical enquiry, the subjects and objects we choose to study and the ways in which we study them. For The Pursuit of Pleasure, I was seduced by two texts, one a feminist polemic, the other an urban narrative from the 1820s, which allowed me to explore the gendering of architectural space in London’s St James’s in the early nineteenth century through rambling (or the pursuit of pleasure).

At around the same time that I was finishing The Pursuit of Pleasure, I was invited to guest edit an issue of The Public Art Journal. I invited a number of theorists and practitioners to reflect on the notion of public art as social space. I was keen to locate public art as a form of practice engaged with the kind of issues already being developed through the writings of cultural geographers and other theorists. These ideas came out of my time running a Masters Course at Chelsea School of Art entitled the Theory and Practice of Public Art and Design.

Teaching public art gave me an insight into how theoretical ideas could become manifest in the making of objects and spaces. Armed with this knowledge I set out to find ways of bringing critical and conceptual thinking into architectural design education. My own work in this area suggests that the strategies adopted by fine artists who work outside galleries can offer a mode of conceptual and critical practice that could operate in architecture. This is the subject of a book on critical spatial practice for IB Tauris called Art and Architecture: A Place Between.

I have recently edited a special issue of the Journal of Architecture which 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 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. We decided to locate the themes of the conference around our own particular understandings of ‘Critical Architecture’. These turned out to revolve around four different intersections between architectural criticism and architectural design, what some might call critical practice. We felt that these both reflected issues of concern to practitioners and theorists alike, but also allowed the relation between criticism and design to be negotiated by participants in a number of varying ways. My own particular concern I called ‘Architecture-Writing’ and my paper for the journal connected Art-, Site- and Architecture- to Writing.

For the last few years much of my writing has questioned the very position that the author holds in relation not only to theoretical ideas and art/architectural objects and places but also to the space of writing. These interests have evolved into a project of ‘Site-Writings’ that range from critical essays on familiar artists to texts that are more speculative and poetic, engaging a number of disciplines, both theoretical (cultural geography, critical theory, feminist and postcolonial studies, literary, art and architecture criticism) and also practice-led (art, architecture and poetic practice). This work will be published in my new book Site-Writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism (London: IB Tauris, 2010).

When the artist Cristina Iglesias introduced her 2003 show at the Whitechapel, London, she described her work in terms of ‘déjà vu’ – ’some things you see will remind you of others’. These writings navigate the spaces of déjà vu – moving between inside and outside, intimate and distant, real and imagined, material and illusionary. As you travel through the Art-/Site-/Architecture-Writing some things you see, some things you read, will remind you of others. . .

This website has been designed and developed by Stuart Munro,