FEMINIST CRITICAL SPATIAL PRACTICE IN ARCHITECTURE
Collectivity, interiority, alterity, materiality and performativity
Tuesday 26 April 2022, 6.30 p.m.
Online lecture, meeting ID : 646 5060 5823
Archizoom, SG building, EPFL, Live stream
On the occasion of the exhibition Do Not Carry Your Flag Too Low, Matrix member Jane Rendell will give a talk about her work within Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative.
Jane Rendell will explore the work of Matrix in the context of both the development of feminist architectural practice in the UK from the 1970s to today and contemporary feminist critical spatial practice today. Jane Rendell will discuss how feminist architectural practice emerging in the 1970s–80s, and associated with second wave feminism, drew on feminist political theories of equality and difference to understand how sexism operates in the building industry and architectural profession, and to set up alternative modes of practice to support women in their roles as makers and users of the built environment.
Then, she will look at how feminist architectural practice of 1990s, was, as part of third wave feminism, explicitly theoretical and interdisciplinary, adopting and adapting feminist concepts from disciplines outside architecture, to produce a critical understanding of the gendering of spatial and visual representations. Finally, Jane Rendell will investigate how, since 2000, feminist architectural practice has become more activist, connecting, as part of fourth wave feminism, with intersectional concerns and public campaigns such as ‘me too,’ ‘black lives matter,’ and ‘extinction rebellion.’
Overall the focus will be on five qualities of feminist critical spatial practice in architecture and its concerns with collectivity, interiority, alterity, materiality and performativity.
Jane Rendell is Professor of Critical Spatial Practice at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, where she co-initiated the MA Situated Practice and supervises MA and PhD projects. Her research, writing and pedagogic practice cross feminism, architecture, art, history and psychoanalysis, and she has introduced concepts of ‘critical spatial practice’ and ‘site-writing’ through her authored books: The Architecture of Psychoanalysis (2017), Silver (2016), Site-Writing (2010), Art and Architecture (2006), and The Pursuit of Pleasure (2002). Her co-edited collections include Reactivating the Social Condenser (2017), Critical Architecture (2007), Spatial Imagination (2005), The Unknown City (2001), Intersections (2000), Gender, Space, Architecture (1999) and Strangely Familiar (1995). Working With Dr. David Roberts, she leads the Bartlett’s Ethics Commission; and with Dr. Yael Padan, ‘The Ethics of Research Practice’, for KNOW.