The Research Programme Modern Europe present the research seminar:

The Use of Public Space in a Historical Perspective
- by professor Jane Rendell, UCL, London

The lecture takes a collection of abandoned black and white photographs of modernist architectural icons found in a derelict arts and crafts house called 'May Morn' as a starting point for a discussion of London's post-war public housing projects. This talk goes back to an even earlier historical moment, to Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis’s Narkomfin Communal House (1928-9) in Moscow, a social condenser of the transitional type, whose design was influenced by, but which in turn inspired, Le Corbusier’s Unité d'Habitation (1947-1952) in Marseilles thirty years later. Certain principles of the Unité were then adopted and adapted in the public housing schemes of the Welfare State in the United Kingdom, specifically by the London County Council Architects Department in the Alton West Estate, Roehampton, London SW15, (1954-1958). The above theme touches upon the relationship between architecture, political (radical) ideas and the state.  

Related publications can be found here:

Jane Rendell, ‘May Mo(u)rn: A Site-Writing’, Nadir Lahiji (ed) Essays in honour of Frederic Jameson, (London: Ashgate, 2011).

Jane Rendell, ‘The Transitional Space of the Social Condensor’, Adam Sharr (ed) Architecture as Cultural Artefact. (London, Routledge, 2012).

Jane Rendell is a writer, art critic and architectural historian/theorist, whose work explores inter- and trans-disciplinary crossings between architecture, art, feminism and psychoanalysis. She is Professor of Architecture and Art at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London http://www.janerendell.co.uk/. She has put forward concepts of ‘critical spatial practice’ (2002/6) and ‘site-writing’ (2007/10) through such authored books as Site-Writing (2010), Art and Architecture (2006), and The Pursuit of Pleasure (2002). She is currently working on a new book on transitional spaces in architecture and psychoanalysis. She is co-editor of Pattern (2007), Critical Architecture (2007), Spatial Imagination (2005), The Unknown City (2001), Intersections (2000), Gender, Space, Architecture (1999) and Strangely Familiar (1995). Recent texts have been commissioned by artists such as Jasmina Cibic, Apollonia Susteric and transparadiso, and institutions such FRAC Centre, Orléans, and Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. She is on the Editorial Board for ARQ (Architectural Research Quarterly), Architectural Theory Review,The Happy Hypocrite, The Issues and the Journal of Visual Culture in Britain, and Ultime Thule: Journal of Architectural Imagination.