Mari Lending is professor of architectural theory and history, and Head of Department of Form, Theory and History. She is a senior researcher in the research project Place and Displacement: Exhibiting Architecture (funded by Norwegian Research Council 2011–14), and is currently working on the book The Art of collecting Architecture.
She holds a M. Litt (Mag. art) in Comparative Literature on Marcel Proust (University of Oslo 1997), and defended her Ph.D. dissertation on historiography at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design in 2005. From 2005–2009 she was a postdoctoral fellow on the research project “Modernism on Display”. Lending has been a visiting scholar at the GSD, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. and at Columbia University, NY.
Lending has published widely on literature and architecture (in journals such as Journal of Architecture, Chora. Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture, Agora, Future Anterior, Faces, Nordic Journal of Architectural Research, Byggekunst/ Arkitektur N), edited book series on cultural critique and modernist prose, as well as various journals. She is editor-in-chief of Nordic Journal of architecture, coeditor for exhibitions for the European Architecture History Network’s Newsletter, and sits on the editorial board of Arkitektur N, and the book series As-Built. Her book Omkring 1900. Kontinuiteter i norsk arkitekturtenkning (2007) is a critical rethinking of the concepts of historicism and modernism in 19th and 20th century architectural discourse.