Responding to what the World needs NowSarah Stevens and Charlotte Erckrath interview Jane Rendell

Picture a student standing at a building — maybe at a threshold, or a street corner near a site they've been assigned to write about. They have all the conventional tools: formal analysis, historical context, and technical vocabulary. And yet, something is missing. The actual experience of being there — the body, the feeling, and the position of the writer in relation to the space — has no sanctioned place in the genre. That gap is where Jane Rendell's work begins. Rendell is a British architectural critic, theorist, and educator, and her concept of Site-Writing responds directly to that problem. The core claim is specific: conventional architectural and art criticism assumes a disembodied critical distance, and in doing so, it tends to suppress the writer's bodily position and lived experience. Site-Writing reframes criticism as materially and spatially situated. Writing doesn't just describe a site — it intervenes in it, responds to it, and transforms it. Rendell published Art and Architecture: A Place Between in 2006, followed by Site-Writing in 2010, with the subtitle The Architecture of Art Criticism. But the ideas didn't start on paper. They began in a classroom. In the mid-1990s, Rendell was invited to teach a two-year part-time master's course at Chelsea College of Art and Design called The Theory and Practice of Public Art and Design, with cohorts of twelve students per year drawn from public policy, landscape, fine art, ceramics, and glassmaking. That diversity mattered. Working alongside staff including Katherine Clarke of the architecture collective muf, and collaborating with geographers like Steve Pile and sociologists like Paul Sweetman, Rendell helped shift the course away from a taxonomy of materials toward site-specific, conceptual practice. That pedagogic experiment became the incubator for Site-Writing. What she discovered is that the module format itself had to change. Site-Writing, she explains in an interview conducted by Charlotte Erckrath and Sarah Stevens, might look like a seminar module, but it's actually taught through workshops — "more like one might teach studio." The pedagogy uses very short writing exercises, call-and-response, working in pairs, and improvisatory devices borrowed from performance practice, specifically from Leslie Hill and Helen Paris's site-specific theatre work. Students write through doing: they bring objects into seminars, make books as spatial artifacts, and devise pieces that physically intervene into sites. One student, Chee Kit Lai, made a book designed to be read on a return flight — timed and sized for that exact journey. The teaching migrated and multiplied. Rendell took the approach into architecture schools at Nottingham and the Bartlett, redeveloped it for a master's course called Theorizing Practices: Practicing Theory, and co-wrote a new program, Situated Practice, with James O'Leary. Over roughly the last decade, she's taught the module with Polly Gould, David Roberts, and Sarah Butler — Gould pushing the curatorial dimensions, Roberts developing participatory and manifesto-writing components, and Butler bringing her experience curating prose and fiction for public spaces. Most recently, Rendell and Gould co-curated Site-Writing: Arranging the Archive at the Building Centre, running from March to April 2024, which included works such as Wuyue Huang's Herb Archives. The record Rendell presents is emphatically iterative and collaborative. Site-Writing wasn't declared from above — it was built through successive experiments, student projects, and joint curatorial work. At the heart of all of this is a feminist intellectual commitment, and this is where the practice gains its philosophical depth. Rendell began bringing autobiography into her academic writing in the 1990s, inspired by bell hooks and Jennifer Bloomer, first using her own "I" in a piece called "(Un)doing It Yourself," for Jonathan Hill's collection Occupying Architecture. She's candid that this was transgressive — that feminism "has been really important for bringing subjectivity into play in writing" in a field that typically polices it out. Her key term here is autotheory, and it's worth pausing to consider what that actually means. Autotheory isn't just writing from personal experience, and it's not memoir. Rendell defines it precisely: it's "the way in which writing life's experience can also generate theory." She cites Sara Ahmed's concept of the "sweaty concept" — the idea that a concept emerges from a concrete, difficult, embodied experience rather than from abstraction. The experience produces the theory, not the other way around. Rendell notes that for many practitioners, autotheory has "almost replaced autobiography" as the relevant category because it preserves the self-making potential of life writing while doing genuine theoretical work. Fragmentation and multiple voices aren't stylistic flourishes in this framework — they're formal strategies with critical intent. Rendell describes interweaving three or four different voices in a single text: theoretical voices, found texts, other people's voices, and her own. In The Architecture of Psychoanalysis, she works with three interlaced strands — autobiographical, theoretical and psychoanalytic, and architectural history — each operating at a different tempo to produce a complex, layered temporality. Her undergraduate dissertation was handwritten, cut up, and reassembled on the floor. In a piece called "After he had gone," she composed a healing text from fragments of books her father had marked. The montage serves as both method and meaning. These choices serve a precise critical function regarding knowledge production in architecture. Rendell draws on Donna Haraway, Gillian Rose, and ethnographer D. Soyini Madison to argue that situated knowledge — knowledge produced from a specific, acknowledged position — is more honest and more rigorous than the false universalism of the detached observer. Walking, reading aloud, and attending to breath and posture: these become part of the interpretive method, privileging the embodied subject rather than erasing them. The philosophical framework that holds all of this together is what Rendell calls post-dualism: a refusal of hardened binaries — theory versus practice, subject versus object, self versus other — in favor of entanglement and relationality. Practice, in her account, isn't an illustration of prior theory. It generates theory. She argues that critiquing these binaries "is also an ethical requirement" — working between categories is not just epistemically useful but morally necessary, a response to what she names extractive capitalist and racist habits that damage people and planet. The ethical and the poetic are coupled in Rendell's framework through specific concepts. She draws on Foucault's notion of "ethopoiesis" — ethics as a practice of self-making — and on Joan Retallack's "poethics" and Denise Ferreira da Silva's "black feminist poethics." In this account, poetics and ethics come together as practices through which one remakes oneself in relation to others in the world, generating concepts from concrete, gendered, classed, and raced lived experience. The performative and collaborative methods in her teaching — Exquisite Corpse experiments, the Site-Reading Writing Quarterly, where authors swap reviews of each other's work — enact this ethic structurally. Reading aloud, Rendell notes, "brings the body back" to writing practice. The pairing of reviewers creates reciprocal accountability. The form is the argument. Which brings us to what Site-Writing actually demands — of architecture, of researchers, and of writers. Rendell is not gentle about this. Architecture "has to be willing to really change itself," she says, and abandon "old capitalist and racist extractivist habits" that are destroying lives and ecosystems. For researchers, Site-Writing insists on positionality and accountability — writers must be ethically responsible to sites, audiences, and research participants, in ways borrowed from critical ethnography. For writers, it opens formal license: the use of the "I," fragments, autotheory, vocal reading practices, and the arrangement of material into configurations — but not as self-indulgence. These are modes that generate concepts and enact ethical relations. Rendell frames all of this under the imperative of "responding to what the world needs now." The phrase carries significant weight. It's not a vague gesture toward relevance — it's a claim that writing practices have political and ethical stakes, that the way we write about space shapes how we inhabit and transform it. Site-Writing, in her account, is a practice of building different subjectivities, enacting relational ethics, and transforming disciplinary habits so that writing doesn't just describe the world but participates in shaping it. The student at the threshold at the start of this lecture had the wrong tools because the dominant tradition handed them the wrong tools on purpose — tools designed to keep the writer out of the picture. What Rendell has spent thirty years building is a different toolkit: one where the writer's body, experience, and position are the evidence; where fragmentation is rigor; and where the act of writing about a site is itself an act on it. 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