Jane Rendell

Prof. Jane RendellProf. Jane Rendell
Prof. Jane Rendell BA (Hons), Dip Arch, MSc, PhD is Professor of Architecture and Art and Director of Architectural Research at the Bartlett, UCL. She is actively engaged in questions relating to social sculpture explored in her books and ongoing dialogues with Shelley Sacks over several years, now extended to the wider social sculpture field through her engagement in the SSRU's steering group and core network. 

An architectural designer and historian, art critic and writer, her work has explored various interdisciplinary intersections: feminist theory and architectural history, fine art and architectural design, autobiographical writing and criticism.

She is author of Art and Architecture (2006), The Pursuit of Pleasure (2002) and co-editor of Pattern (2007), Critical Architecture (2007), Spatial Imagination (2005), The Unknown City (2001), Intersections (2000), Gender SpaceArchitecture (1999), Strangely Familiar, (1995).

Jane is currently engaged in a project of ‘site-writings’ which explores the situated practice of the critic-writer and examines the various positions occupied by critical engagement with art and architecture – ideological, material, emotional, spatial. ‘Site-Writing’ is what happens when discussions concerning site-specificity extend to involve art criticism, and the spatial qualities of the writing become as important in conveying meaning as the content of the criticism. It is an active writing that constructs as well as traces the sites of relation between critic and work.

Jane gives talks at galleries such as the Barbican, the Hayward, the Tate and the Whitechapel, and has recently written essays for artists and architects, including Jananne Al-Ani, Elina Brotherus, Hawkins/Brown, Sharon Kivland, Janet Hodgson, Tracey Moffatt, Sally Morfill, Michael Pinksy, Jane Prophet, Adriana Varejao and Richard Wentworth and galleries such as the Serpentine, the Wapping Project and the BALTIC.

She is on the Editorial Board for ARQ (Architectural ResearchQuarterly) and theJournal of Visual Culture in Britain, a member of the AHRC Peer Review College and chair of the RIBA President’s Awards for Research. In 2006 she was a research fellow at CRASSH (Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences andHumanities) at the University of Cambridge and received an honorary degree from the University College of the Creative Arts.