Jane Rendell: doing it, (un)doing it, (over)doing it yourself - Rhetorics of Architectural Abuse

Jane Rendell: doing it, (un)doing it, (over)doing it yourself

Rhetorics of Architectural Abuse

In this week’s chapter: Rhetorics of Architectural Abuse, Jane Rendall describes to the reader the doing, (un)doing and doing-it-yourself, of architecture.

To explain these three practices: we start with the “doing”, Rendell describes the “doing” of architecture as a utopian act of creation with simply no fuss or mess. Happening almost by magic the architect simply creates as if by accident.

Secondly, the “(un)doing)” of architecture is portrayed as subversive acts towards the building, for example the improper use of spaces once they have been created, or somehow using these spaces and forms of a building inappropriately.

Thirdly the act of “overdoing it” or “doing-it-yourself” is described as the time post-completion of a building and the time more specifically of when it is being used, occupied or enjoyed. It is during this time that the re-use, re-purposing, modifying, altering, decaying, destruction and general swaying from the original building’s ideologies occurs.

Rendell describes her experiences of her somewhat unconventional living arrangements, for example Rendell quotes:

“In my home the boundaries which control and contain public and private activities were intentionally blurred and transgressed. The bath sat in the centre of the room space. The roof space was bedroom, workroom and living room, and many other places all at once. From the bath you could look up into the sky, and down into the toilet, or directly onto the stove, beyond it to those eating at the table, and further through the window into the street. The beauty of lying in the bath and being able to talk to the person lying in the bed next to you, or downstairs to the person preparing food in the kitchen, showed to me the importance of rethinking the kinds of divisions of spaces which we so readily accept.”

 The reader receives an impression that Rendell has some issues with the way in which architecture has been taught to her, feeling as if she has been taught the wrong way, to obey the conventional.

Although it may be extreme, one has to admire her re-interpretation and reuse of spaces, it is interesting to imagine how spaces can be repurposed and explored in different ways from the conventional.