Mari Lending

Mari Lending is a professor in architectural theory and history, a founding member of OCCAS (the Oslo Centre for Critical Architectural Studies), and the director the NRF-funded research project Provenance Projected: Architecture Past and Future in the Era of Circularity (2023–2027). She was a senior researcher in the projects Place and Displacement: Exhibiting Architecture, The Printed and the Built. Architecture and Public Debate in Modern Europe (funded by the Norwegian Research Council), as well as the EU–funded HERA project Printing the Past: Architecture, Print Culture, and Uses of the Past in Modern Europe (PriArc). Lending did her first dissertation (Mag. art) in comparative literature on Marcel Proust at the University of Oslo (1997) and her Ph.D. dissertation in architectural historiography at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (2005). She has been a visiting scholar at the GSD, Harvard University, Columbia University, Yale School of Architecture, and is at the Warburg Institute in London in the spring 2025.

Mari Lending publishes on literature, art and architecture, and has edited a number of books, book series and journals. Among her books are Plaster Monuments. Architecture and the Power of Reproduction (Princeton University Press, 2017), A Feeling of History, with Peter Zumthor (Scheidegger & Spiess, 2018), Images of Egypt, with Tim Anstey and Eirik Bøhn (Pax, 2018), Sverre Fehn, Nordic Pavilion, Venice. Voices from the Archives, with Erik Langdalen (Lars Müller/Pax, 2021), and Warburg Models: Buildings as Bilderfahrzeuge, with Tim Anstey (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2023). Lending was the President of EAHN (European Architectural History Network) from 2022–2024, and she directs the Provenance in Architecture. A Dictionary of Terms, co-edited with Uwe Fleckner, is forthcoming with Hatje Cantz in the fall 2025.


Selected articles
“Sverre Fehn hos Jean Prouvé», Arkitektur, vol. 2 (December 2024).
“Transient permanence.” RA. Revista de Arquitectura (special issue: Replicas. Architecture as Copy or Invention), vol. 24, 2022.
“Architectural Antiquization”. Footprint, special issue: The Architecture of Populism: Media, Politics, and Aesthetics, vol. 15, no 29, autumn/winter 2021 (2022).«Iliaden som kinetisk skulptur.» Agora. Journal for metafysisk spekulasjon no. 3, 2021 
«G for Gypsum». In Olivia H. Turner et al. (eds.) An Alphabet of Architectural Models (London/NY: Merell, 2021).
«Teaching Architecture full scale». In Lara Schrijver (ed.) The Tacit Dimension: Architecture Knowledge and Scientific Research (Leuven University Press, 2021). 
«Origins in Translation.» In Helen Thomas (ed.), Drawing Matter Extracts 2: Women Writing Architecture (Drawing Matter, 2021)
“Invented Ex Situ”. Future Anterior, vol XV, no 2 (winter 2018/ published 2020). 
“Temperert modernitet. Byggekunst 1919–1939”. Arkitektur N/Byggekunst 6/2019.
“Chambre/Room.” In K. Stene Johansen et al. (eds.), Living together. Roland Barthes, the Individual, and the Community (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2018).
“Preserved in Plaster”. In Brendan Cormier (ed.), Copy Culture: Sharing in the Age of Digital Reproduction (V&A Publishing, 2018).
 “Cablegram”. In Mari Hvattum/Anne Hultzsch (eds.), The Printed and the Built. Architecture, Print Culture and Public Debate in the Nineteenth Century (Bloomsbury 2018).
“Fabrics of Reality: Art and Architecture in László Krasznahorkai.” In Angeliki Sioli/Yoonchun Jung (eds.), Reading Architecture. Literary Imagination and Architectural Experience (Routledge, 2018).
”Negotiating Absence. Bernard Tschumi’s new Acropolis Museum in Athens.” Journal on Architecture, vol. 15, no. 5 (2009, reprinted 2018).
“Lost Continents, Projective Objects”. In Brita Brenna et al. (eds.), Museums as Culture of Copies: The Crafting of Artefacts and Authenticity (Routledge 2018).
“Reciting the Tomb of Tutankhamun.” Perspecta vol. 49 (2016).
”Architecture at the limit. Peter Zumthor’s Witchburning memorial in Vardø.” In Louise Bourgeois/ Peter Zumthor: Steilneset Memorial. Oslo: Press forlag, 2011/2016.
“Promenade among Words and Things: The Gallery as Catalogue, the Catalogue as Gallery.” Architectural Histories, 3(1): 20 (2015). 
“The Art of Collecting Architecture.” Volume, vol. 44 (2015).
“Out of Place: Circulating Monuments.” In Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen (ed.), Exhibiting Architecture – A Paradox? (Yale School of Architecture, 2015).
“The Urgencies of Theoretical Stuff.” In James Graham (ed.), 2000+: The Urgencies of Architectural Theory (NY: GSAPP Books, 2015).
 “Traveling Portals.” In Arrhenius/Lending/Miller (eds.), Place and Displacement: Exhibiting Architecture (Zurich: Lars Müller, 2014).
“The Permanent Collection of 1925: Oslo Modernism in Paper and Models.” Architectural Histories, 2(1): 3 (2014).
“Proust and Plaster.” AAFiles, no. 67 (2013).
“Wandering among Models: Stendhal, Proust, Sebald.” In T. K. Seim and Victor Plahte Tschudi eds.), From Site to Sight: The Transformation of Place in Art and Literature (Rome: Scienze e Lettere, 2013).
“Writing a Life from the Inside of a Drawing: Stendhal’s Vie de Henry Brulard.” Chora 6. Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture (McGill-Queen University Press, 2011).
”Landscape Versus Museum. J.C. Dahl and the Preservation of Norwegian Burial Mounds.” Future Anterior, vol. 6 no. 1 (2009).