Jane Rendell

The Clubs of St. James's: places of public patriarchy - exclusivity, domesticity and secrecy

This paper explores the notion of gendered space through varying configurations of public and private with specific reference to a number of clubs in early nineteenth century Londons St. Jamess. The male-only venue of the club is considered to represent public masculinity through two forms of male control over space; first, patriarchal mechanisms which exclude women and second, fraternal mechanisms which exclude certain men. The paper outlines how the male club also operated as a private space within the public realm, both as a space of intimacy and domesticity rivalling the familial home, and as a site of private property and exclusivity. The male clubs of St. Jamess, specifically the four at the top of St. Jamess Street; Boodles, Brookss, Crockfords and Whites, were frequented by men of the same class who used their control of space to assert social and political allegiances and rivalries between men. The exclusivity of the first floor gambling room, a place of secrecy and privacy, is contrasted...

From chamber to transformer: epistemological challenges in the methodology of theorised architectural history

While many architectural historians are conscious of their methodological procedures, this aspect of architectural history is rarely singled out for any prolonged consideration. In addition, while many architectural historians have, in recent years, made increasing reference to various forms of theory in order to inform their interpretations, this aspect of their work has been similarly devoid of any concentrated analysis. In order partly to redress this situation, this article does not offer any worked examples of historical analysis but, rather, focuses on the epistemological challenges facing the architectural historian. In particular, the article argues for the necessity of engaging with different kinds of critical theory in order to understand architecture. As a result, nine challenges can be identified for the discipline of architectural history: to theory as the object of study, to new architectures, to the framing of interpretative questions, to the critical nature of history, to interdisciplinary debates, to the opening of methodological procedures, to selfcritical development of the discipline, to re-engagement with critical theory, and to praxis. Only when these challenges are met, the authors contend, will a proper methodology of architectural history be constructed.

The social condenser: a century of revolution through architecture, 1917–2017

In the centenary year of the Bolshevik revolution, this special issue is devoted to the idea of the ‘social condenser’—among the most powerful architectural concepts produced in the Soviet Union in...

Working Between and Across: Some Psychic Dimensions of Architecture's Inter- and Transdisciplinarity

Recent times have seen the appropriation of the terms inter- and transdisciplinarity, grounded as they are in critique and politic debate, to deliver instrumental government policy. This article argues that in order to understand how both inter- and transdisciplinary approaches pose critiques of disciplinarity in architecture, one has to acknowledge the importance of their relational aspects. I do this here by referring to examples where humanities theorists have used terms drawn from psychoanalysis to inform debates on interdisciplinarity, for example “anxiety” in the work of Julia Kristeva and “ambivalence” in the writings of Homi Bhabha. In order to examine the potential of transversal activities for providing critiques of institutionalized relations put forward by Félix Guattari, I also briefly discuss several other relevant psychic concepts, for example, first the notion of “transitional space” put forward by D.W. Winnicott, and secondly the more elliptical phrase, “the enigmatic message,” proposed by Jean Laplanche. In the article I suggest that it is only by paying attention to the psychic dimensions of inter- and transdisciplinarity that we can understand how such work may operate in sites of resistance and contestation.

Conclusion: the social condenser—a thing in itself?

In his 1968 paper ‘The Use of an Object’, the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott describes how ‘relating may be to a subjective object, but usage implies that the object is part of external reality’. For Winnicott, to use an object is to take into account its objective reality or existence as ‘a thing in itself’ rather than its subjective reality or existence as a projection. The change from relating to using is for him significant, as it ‘means that the subject destroys the object’ and that the object stands outside the omnipotent control of the subject, recognised as the external object it has always been. The conversation Michał and I had with the architects now in charge of the restoration of the Narkomfin—Natalya Shilova and Alexey Ginzburg, the grandson of Moisei Ginzburg, the building’s original designer—marked a turning point in my own relation to the Narkomin. This was a moment where I had to face up to the fact that I had been ‘relating’ to the social condenser, in Winnicott’s words, projecting my aspirations onto it, according to my need to find a socialist design history and typology to inspire me. I had been reading all that I could find (in English translation) about its history; but this had turned out to be a reading with the designer’s intention, reinforcing my act of relating to the building, rather than a reading against it or according to those uses that come after design and can involve appropriation. In trying to understand the Narkomfin historically, I had discovered its architect’s intentions, and since those intentions coincided with my own, this meant that I turned its objective reality and existence as ‘a thing in itself’ to my own ends. Encountering Alexey and his strong scepticism about the building as a socialist icon and his grandfather’s Marxist intentions made me wonder about my own idealism (again). Self-reflection is a theme that threads though many of the contributions to this special issue: wistful and in some cases passionate desires for socialist societies are critically re-valued through a careful attention to historical detail and to the contemporary context. Several of the authors have considered again their earlier attachments to ideas and architecture, revisited concepts and memories of places that once inspired them, and examined afresh sites of aspiration and hope in their own previous work. Victor Buchli’s essay is a beautiful example of this, in which the Narkomfin shifts from the centrepiece of his previous ethnography—a groundbreaking investigation and analysis of the building and its designers and occupants over decades —to become a palimpsest or motif of the process of condensation itself. This is why the transdisciplinarity of this issue shapes the ways in which we return to the Narkomfin, through not only architecture, but also art theory, psychoanalysis and ethnography. As Michał Murawski’s article also shows, the ethnographer’s sustained and deep-digging into the specificities of the uses of social condensers as they change over 578

Interview with Alexey Ginzburg and Natalya Shilova, December, 2016

AG: [With Natalya, we are analysing the development of residential architecture in Moscow.] In the middle of the nineteenth century, when capitalist society was already growing in the UK and the United States, there were estates established in Moscow, private estates, and some factory hostels, very simple ones. So, there was no idea of apartment buildings, although quite a few of them began to appear in the second half of the nineteenth century. But when the emancipation of the serfs took place in 1861, the nobility lost their source of profit and they began to rent their estates in the centre of Moscow [... ] by cutting them into smaller pieces. This way, our tenement houses appeared, when the estates were cut into huge parcels. Then, they started to construct tenement houses and started to do them as huge apartments like the Paris tenement houses of the nineteenth century, luxurious ones, with different entrances for the servants and the residents, and so on. The highest point of capitalism [... ] was at the beginning of the twentieth century, [... ]. It was the time [... ] when the demands of people in new circumstances, of people in new society became much clearer and an absolutely different typology of tenement houses starts to appear. The hoteltype tenement houses that we see constructed in 1910, 1911 and 1912. In some way, we see the predecessors of communal housing of the 1920s in these buildings. [... ] And that was already somehow the social condensing which was from my point of view connected to the growing density in the city, growing density because of the evolution of the property costs, the property costs, which rose much higher than before.