Week 6: Jane Rendell - Occupying Architecture (1998) 'doing it, (un) doing it, (over) doing it yourself- Rhetorics of Architectural Abuse'

The context in which Rendell began to explore what ‘doing’ Architecture really means cannot be ignored. At the end of the 1990s, as my earliest memories begin to form, Architecture was even more male dominated than it is today. A profession which in a practical sense had barely changed since the 1960s was beginning to finally enter the information age in earnest as only now was the CAD and modelling systems which are relied on so heavily in today’s society becoming common place. So with a strong feminist movement beginning to rise on the back of ‘Girlpower’ in popular culture (although more and more so this movement is being critiqued into todays media), and maybe more importantly the rise of the most revered female architect, Zaha Hadid, we have the young Jane Rendell comes forward with a radical set of ideas for a profession only just starting to invite change.

Rendell’s concept of ‘doing’ architecture, un-doing architecture and then maybe more interestingly the reaction and interaction w­­­ith ‘over doing it’ would have been a frightful departure for the architectural establishment. There’s something almost a bit rock and roll in the timing and reaction. Here Rendell is, challenging the conventions of the last 50 years with one foot in the door of the profession but not really liking what is inside the room. Standing up challenging not what we design, as many architectural theorist have previously, but how. Almost asking what the point of training for 7 years is when many have no real first hand raw experience of what a piece of architecture is, or at least can be.

As RIBA has published over the last 2 years, we are becoming very aware of the imbalance within the profession. As pioneers like Rendell, who has change ideas to teaching architecture continuously over the last 20 years, lead the way, slowly but surely the profession drags itself forward with a strange symmetry to what it had with technology. From my position it is a subject that is quite difficult to speak with any authority, not just through gender, but having been brought up and educated through a world where equality is the bare minimum it becomes difficult to grasp the impact of such pieces that were still written in my life time. However, with university places becoming much more equal in recent years, it’s not all as doom and gloom and as dystopian as the living in Architecture Rendell describes.