A is for Architecture Podcast

⁠On Episode 129 of A is for Architecture, Dr Beth Weinstein, Associate Professor of Architecture and at the University of Arizona, discusses her recent book, Architecture and Choreography: Collaborations in Dance, Space and Time, published by Routledge in March 2024.

As Beth says, recounting her awareness of this subject, ‘I think that that encounter as a 20 something year old was the first moment when it became real for me to be able to imagine that one can bring architecture and choreography into really close proximity and have a very fertile exchange of knowledge, exchange of practice; to see how ideas from architecture can then become ideas that manifest in the way bodies move, occupy, interact in space, and to learn as an architect from this live unfolding event, and to begin to see space support event live. Like not “Here I am drawing on my drawing board and fantasizing about people, what people are going to do in my building five years from now, when it eventually gets built.” But I'm seeing this one-to-one prototype, if you will, and seeing how they are pushing the boundaries of what a body can do and be, in relationship to a space.’

Eloquently put.

Beth is on LinkedIn too. The book is linked above.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick

 

In Episode 128 of the A is for Architecture podcast, architect, journalist and scholar Austin Williams discusses his work and practice, and his ongoing Future Cities Project, specifically the Five Critical Essays series. 

Austin says ‘the idea behind [The Future Cities Project/ Five Critical Essays] was just to say that [architectural] debates are fairly stagnant, or unidirectional, or one track’. The project has tried, in the face of this, ‘to kind of open up some debates, have, like, live debates, face to face, panel discussions, writings, journalism, or what have you, just to kind of ask some questions effectively.’

It’s a good intention indeed.

Austin is also course leader/senior lecturer, PG Dip Professional Practice in Architecture at Kingston School of Art and an honorary research fellow at XJTLU University in China.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick

Dr Tanzil Shafique discusses his forthcoming book, City of Desire: An Urban Biography of the Largest Slum in Bangladesh, on Episode 127 of A is for Architecture. 

Published by Bloomsbury, and out in November, City of Desire describes ‘Karail, the largest informal settlement in Bangladesh [and] the production of informal urbanism through a brand-new approach rooted in deep ethnography and spatial mapping.’ There’s also, in a way a deep reading of a place as something more than just stuff. As Tanzil suggests, ‘following Latour's elegant actor network theory, there has been a lot of talk about how materials matter, but I want to take it up a notch and talk about [matter] at a settlement scale, and how, even within a city, how it [matter/ Korail] actively, you know, is an is an agent by itself.’ Now there’s an idea.

Tanzil is Lecturer of Urban Design and Director of the Postgraduate Programmes at The University of Sheffield School of Architecture. He is there, on X and LinkedIn.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick

In Episode 126 of A is for Architecture, Gabriel Esquivel, director of the T4T Lab, speaks about Design Technology and Digital Production: An Architecture Anthology, which he edited, and was published by Routledge in 2023.

The book ‘engages and deploys a variety of discourses, topics, criteria, pedagogies, and technologies, including some of today’s most influential architects, practitioners, academics, and critics’ to present the story of ‘architecture’s disciplinary concerns in the last decade’, illustrating ‘the shift to an architectural world where we can learn with and from each other, develop a community of new technologies and embrace a design ecology that is inclusive, open, and visionary.’ 

That’s the blurb’s thing, anyway. Have a big wee listen and find out.

Gabriel can be found on Instagram, LinkedIn, and via very many online resources, not least his T4T lab website. The book is linked above.  

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick

Episode 125 of A is for Architecture is a conversation with historian Dr Jessica Kelly, Reader in Design and Architectural History at London Metropolitan University. We discuss her 2022 book, No More Giants: J.M. Richards, Modernism and The Architectural Review, published by Manchester University Press.

It’s an interesting story, one that mirrors the development of the profession, and perhaps even produces it to some extent. As Jess says, ’I think Richards, although he would completely align himself, and he writes about being a modernist and seeing that as the future of architecture, he is also quite invested in the figure of the architect and the expertise of the architectural profession as a cultural elite, as a sort of guiding figure within society. And he wants to promote that the magazine is invested in promoting the profession, because as much as the Architectural Review is, as it's been described, a mouthpiece for modernism, and really does feature modernism a lot, it features a lot of other stuff as well. [there is] very much a plurality of conversations happening in [it]. […] I think for Richard and his circle and network of people, there is an overlap between [ideology and business and] the idea of whether someone's a consumer or a citizen blurs together in quite an interesting way. And for Richards and his contemporaries, their main objective is to get a public audience for what they understand to be the future of architecture.’

Jessica can be found on the London Met website, and the book is linked above.  

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick

⁠On Episode 124 of A is for Architecture Graham Haughton and Iain White tell me about their excellent book, Why Plan? Theory for Practitioners, published by Lund Humphries in 2019.

On the reason for theory for planning, Graham suggests: ‘ to a certain extent, theories sometimes can make reality. […] you could argue that some of Patsy Healy's work around collaborative and communicative planning, of new ways of trying to engage with communities in the planning process, by bringing them, giving them the knowledge to be able to debate with planners on an equal footing, really important in remaking planning. […] So at one level, in a way, we inadvertently, I think, have helped change practice by highlighting what was happening, trying to understanding it, not just as a separate theory, but through different theoretical lenses, using neoliberalism, using postpolitics and other kind of theoretical insights, to understand what this phenomenon that we were observing was.’ 

Iain is Professor of Environmental Planning at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Graham is Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning at the University of Manchester, UK

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick

Episode 123 of A is for Architecture is a discussion with Henrik Schoenefeldt, Professor of Sustainable Architecture at the School of Architecture, Design & Planning, University of Kent, about his research into the work and influence of the Scottish physician David Boswell Reid on the environmental design underpinning Barry and Pugin’s Palace of Westminster, London, UK. Initially an AHRC-funded scheme entitled ‘Between Heritage and Sustainability – Restoring the Palace of Westminster’s nineteenth-century ventilation system,’ and part of the Palace of Westminster Restoration and Renewal Programme, Henrik published Rebuilding the Houses of Parliament: David Boswell Reid and Disruptive Environmentalism with Routledge in 2020.

On the significance of Boswell Reid’s work at Westminster, Henrik says ’I think what is radical about this idea was, is to integrate different ideas into one holistic strategy [and] integrated ways of climatic controlling the environment as one holistic design, and [then] applied to a building of such enormous scale and complexity. […] But the interesting thing is that […] when the building was completed, you would see it become a common practice for building to have extensive ventilation systems. So even in the buildings built in Whitehall, new public museums built in South Kensington, the Royal Albert Hall -all of those starting to incorporate these ideas, although they were not necessarily direct descendants of Reid's specific solutions in the Palace of Westminster, but they reflect a general shift towards more technologically complex buildings.’

All good? Yes, De La Soul, it is. And all curious, too.

Henrik can be found on the University of Kent website, the book is linked above and the AHRC project is here.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick

In this episode of A is for Architecture, Dell Upton, Professor Emeritus of Architecture, UC Berkeley and Professor and Chair of Art History at UCLA, speaks about his book, American Architecture: A Thematic History, published by Oxford University Press in 2019.

To the question, What is American architecture? Dell suggests ‘That is a very long and vexed question, not only with American architecture, but in American culture. And it really starts from at the time of the American Revolution. How are we different from Europe? But how are we also connected to the best aspects of Europe, so can we be refined in a European sense, but also distinctively American? […] Louis Sullivan […] influenced by the poet Walt Whitman, begins to talk about [American] architecture in a kind of rhapsodic way, as somehow tied to the character of democracy, the character of the land, to the … well, he would say spiritual.’ 

But is it though? Listen to every word of Dell’s to see.

Dell has a Wikipedia page because he’s proper. You can also find him linked above, along with the book.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick

The title of this year’s Design History Society Annual Conference is Border Control: Excursion, Incursion and Exclusion and for this episode of A is for Architecture, three of the conference’s convenors, Dr Jessica Kelly, Professor Victoria Kelley and Professor Cat Rossi, took a bit of time to talk about it with me. 

The conference blurb states: ‘Whether geopolitical, human and non-human, or digital and physical, the solidification and liquification of borders raises questions around design's role in creating, undoing and negotiating divides.’ 

I don’t know very much, but I know what I like. And I very like the sound of this.

The conference website is linked above. Jessica can be found at her London Met profile here, and Cat and Victoria can be found at UCA here and  here. The Design History Society can be found here.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick

Professor Nigel Cross is the podcasts' 120th guest, Emeritus Professor of Design Studies at the Open University, design researcher who played a pivotal role in establishing design as an academic discipline, Editor in Chief of the journal Design Studies between 1984-2017, developing the concept of design thinking along the way. We speak about the second edition of his book, Design Thinking: Understanding How Designers Think and Work, published with Bloomsbury in 2023.

On design, Nigel says: ‘the key thing for me is to see it as a […] form of skilled behaviour, not as a talent or a gift, you know, something which you just magically have or you don't have. It's a form of skill. It's a set of cognitive and practical procedures that designers do in the process of designing. So that, I think is the most important thing for me to come out of what I've been researching - is to see it as a skill. And if it's a skill, then it can be enhanced, it can be trained, it can be educated.’

This is a refreshing and for some I suspect, rather challenging suggestion. If it can be trained, perhaps we might ask, why isn’t it more? 

Nigel is so big he has a Wikipedia page. I mentioned Nigel’s paper Design thinking: What just happened? published in Design Studies 86 (2023), and his earlier book, Design Participation (1972), which was the Proceedings of the Design Research Society International Conference, 1971: Design Participation.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick

Cultural historian Dr Robyne Calvert discusses her recent book, The Mack: Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow School of Art in the 119th episode of A is for Architecture. Published by Yale University Press, the book is a detailed study of The Mackintosh Building, one of the great icons of modern architecture, and its reconstruction, engaging with a whole host of significant - and sometimes paradoxical - issues for design practice: conservation, reconstruction, authenticity, pastiche, social value. These are strange discussions, perhaps. As Robyne puts it: ‘my perspective of buildings is that there's this sense for some folk that they're these, […] fixed monuments. We think of buildings as these iconic things that don't change, and they're, they're symbols of, […] our cities and all of that kind of stuff, but actually, that's completely wrong. Buildings change almost more than anything. They change through our use. They change through our interaction. We damage them. We change, we alter them. We do all kinds of stuff. And they're meant to change. They're not fixed monuments at all. [...] no one would blink an eye at duplicating […] Macintosh chairs […] but you make a copy of a building, and it's like, what are you doing?’

A great book, the best subject, and a fantastic writer and speaker. Therefore, a top episode.

Robyne was Mackintosh Research Fellow at Glasgow School of Art from 2015 to 2021. She can be found on X, LinkedIn and on her website. The Mack is linked above.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick

⁠In Episode 117 of A is for Architecture’s landscape architect Richard J Weller, discusses his beautiful book, To the Ends of the Earth: A Grand Tour for the 21st Century, published by Birkhauser this year. 

The book develops the historical practice of the Grand Tour – ‘an intellectual, cultural undertaking that was sort of a finishing school and an education for the aristocracy’ where, by travelling to the great sites of Antiquity, they would ‘buy art and take ideas and influences back home with them to England and model their gardens and their villas and their follies and their salons on the things that they had purchased and been influenced by’. Richard’s selection of 120 places ‘are emblematic of the contemporary global, planetary cultural conditions, [with text and drawings that delivers a ‘clear-eyed account of what these places are as a form of empirical evidence as to what we as a species have become in the Anthropocene.’

It's a fascinating book that touches on issues of aestheticization, the touristic gaze, virtuality and, possibly, a revived moral wanderlust.

Richard is Professor Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design and Co-Founder, The Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism & Ecology.  

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick

A is for Architecture’s 116th episode features the architect, writer, public speaker, TED-talker and all round polymath, Michael Pawlyn, discussing Flourish: Design Paradigms for Our Planetary Emergency, which he co-wrote with urbanist, curator and writer, Sarah Ichioka and published with Triarchy Press in 2021.

It’s a challenge, what Michael articulates: ‘What we suggest is that we - all of us - need to get better at distinguishing the maladapted frames and stories and metaphors, and articulate new, more regenerative ones. And I just want to caveat that ‘new’ in many cases, are newly appreciated worldviews, or mindsets, because many of these are examples of indigenous thinking that have endured for many 1000s of years, but were overlooked during the Industrial Age. And sometimes this is really quite uncomfortable, realizing that our existing worldviews are pretty seriously flawed.’ 

But it’s also an invitation, so have a listen and find out what.

You can find Michael at his practice, Exploration and on Instagram. You can find the book at flourish-book.com, linked above.  

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick

⁠Episode 115 of A is for Architecture is a conversation with Sofia Singler, Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow and College Lecturer in Architecture at St John’s College, Cambridge. We discuss parts of her book, The Religious Architecture of Alvar, Aino and Elissa Aalto, which she published with Lund Humphries in 2023.

Sofia says “my sense is that [Alvar Aalto] really valued religion and not just Lutheranism, and Finland, […] and specifically Christianity, as part of an unchanging European cultural tradition. And the attraction, the appeal, the value, the beauty of religion, and Christianity, in particular for him was that the message was always the same. And I suppose for that reason, the idea of renewing things and shaking things up and coming up with a new liturgy and a new building type felt a bit too radical for him, which is really interesting, given that, of course, he was quite radical himself as a designer. […] when it comes to religious projects, I think there was a degree of perhaps nervousness […] Out of a fear that perhaps these changes were too much and that they risked losing some of the cultural value of religion’.

You can find Sofia on the Cambridge University website here, and the book is linked above.  

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick

⁠In Episode 114 of A is for Architecture Jane Rendell, Professor in Critical Spatial Practice at The Bartlett, UCL, discusses some aspects of her recently republished book, The Architecture of Psychoanalysis: Spaces of Transition, which came out with Bloomsbury in the spring.

Jane says ‘I think what I'm more interested in is how architecture can allow us to think psychoanalysis differently, as well as allow us to look for things in psychoanalytic theory. For example, the spatial drawings of different psychic concepts like conscious, pre-conscious, unconscious or ego, Id, super ego. Freud uses these incredible drawings of these phenomena. So there are all sorts of spatial diagrams that by thinking architecturally one looks at in a different way […]. Architecture helps you think about psychoanalytic drawings, about spatial metaphors. […] But I think also, what becomes interesting is how one can start to think about the […] most architectural part of psychoanalysis [which] is probably the setting, the physical place in which that psychoanalytic relationship takes place.’

You can find Jane at her website here, and on the UCL website here. She is multi-located across the internet through her various activities.  

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick

⁠Episode 113 of A is for Architecture’s is a conversation with Cécile Brisac, founder of Atelier Brisac, a practice based in London and Paris, with a body of work produced since Atelier Brisac's founding in 2019, and previously with Brisac Gonzalez, and that includes the Museum of World Cultures, Gothenburg, Pajol Sports Centre, Paris, the Performing Arts Center, Aurillac, France and more recently housing at Lot 04A in Batignolles, Paris and Allée du Parc, Massy, France.

Describing her practice’s work, Cécile says ‘we're doing buildings that are uplifting, that have a certain amount of clarity, that are, you know, welcoming, and based around the users [and] designed with a sense of care. […]  in parallel to that is working at the scale of the city […] If you think of the word elegance in the engineering field […] the definition is something like ‘finding a solution to a range of problems that may not be connected to begin with’. […] that's what we're doing in a way.’

An elegant expression of complex things.

You can find Atelier Brisac on Instagram, and at atelierbrisac.com.  

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick

⁠A is for Architecture’s 112th episode is with the British architect, Tony Fretton. Previously founder and principal of Tony Fretton Architects, and more recently acting as a design consultant, and previously Chair of Architecture and Interiors at TU Delft, Tony’s work includes Westkaai, Residential Towers, Antwerp, The British Embassy, Warsaw, Art Museum, Fuglsang, Denmark, and the The Red House and the Camden Arts Centre, London.

Speaking of his work on galleries, Tony says:  ‘I think it's much more subtle and much more interesting to make buildings which sometimes are impressive and visible, and sometimes […] very low visibility. That's much more interesting, much more intellectually satisfying. And how can you make somebody feel comfortable, without [them] even seeing you do it? That's the measure of a good host, a good person, that you let people see the work. […] In Furslang we made a series of rooms which are different in character: one is for temporary exhibitions, and the other for small scale works in gold frames, and then there was section on Danish Impressionism. But each of them shares a vocabulary but it's treated in slightly different ways so that as you go through the room, you see the art but in the periphery of your vision the room stimulates you’.

Sums it up rather neatly.

You can find Tony on Instagram, on at tonyfretton.com, too.  

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick

⁠Episode 111 of A is for Architecture⁠ is a conversation with Des Fitzgerald, Professor of Medical Humanities and Social Sciences at University College Cork, about his fairly recent and quite well-covered book, The City of Today is a Dying Thing: In Search of the Cities of Tomorrow, which he published this year with Faber & Faber.

Green urbanism is undergirded by an expectation – a belief? - that it will deliver on modernism’s promises of emancipated, healthful lives. The City of Today contests this. As Des explains, ‘the book is really an attempt to start […] thinking critically about the growing trend towards green, traditional, small, human scale - I would even say 15 minute - cities [and] that kind of vision of the city is something we need to develop critical language for. […] there's a pretty close mapping between 19th century discourse of the cities effect on character or its capacity to degenerate particular sorts of character in a heritable way [...] and our own discourse about the relationship between particular shapes of buildings and mental health disorders.’

A little bit saucy and rather funny, man, book and podcast.

You can find Des professionally at UCC and on X.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick

⁠In Episode 110 of A is for Architecture⁠ Victoria Jane Marshall, senior lecturer in the Department of Architecture at the National University of , discusses themes and methods underpinning her recent book, Periurban Cartographies: Kolkata’s Ecologies and Settled Ruralities, which she published with Oro Editions in spring this year.

As Victoria notes, an increasingly public concept, the periurban describe those parts of urban peripheries that are ‘generally imagined […] as “becoming urban” and generally, in doing so, it sort of erases the rural in the imagination - of it just being a zone which is on its way to becoming urban, like a transition zone’. Instead, Victoria proposes, thorough the lens of a deep mapping in Kolkata, Bengal, we might instead ‘look more flat, and more even, at everything that's going on, and, and not bifurcate, not separate urban and rural, and not separate society and nature, but look at how they're all entangled together.’

It's a beautiful book, and Victoria's a great talker, the mapping is wonderful, so listen to her, see the book, and get freshness.

You can find Victoria professionally at her work and on LinkedIn. The book is linked above.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick

⁠Episode 109 of A is for Architecture⁠ has architect, professor and writer, Charles Holland, discussing his new book, How to Enjoy Architecture: A Guide for Everyone, published by Yale University Press this year.

As Charles says, How to Enjoy Architecture is ‘not a history of architecture, and it's definitely not a kind of polemic’. Rather, it ‘tries to open up architecture outside of a sort of standard linear history’ and is instead ‘a plea for more tolerance and pluralism, and for less condemnation […] it tries to say, there might be buildings that you don't like, but they might still be good. They might still be interesting. Just because they don't fit your tastes, that doesn't mean that they should be condemned in some way. So it tries to sort of make a plea for more interest and less condemning of things.’ 

A noble ideal. Have a listen and feel something.

You can find Charles on his practice’s website, on Instagram and X. The book is linked above.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick

⁠A is for Architecture’s⁠ 108th episode is a conversation with urban designer and President of the Congress for the New Urbanism, Mallory B.E. Baches. 

With roots in the works of Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford, and later through Leon Krier and Christopher Alexander, the CNU was founded in 1993 as a ‘planning and development approach based on the principles of how cities and towns had been built for the last several centuries: walkable blocks and streets, housing and shopping in close proximity, and accessible public spaces. In other words: New Urbanism focuses on human-scaled urban design.’ 

The movement’s influence has been very wide, underpinning new classical and traditional developments, such as at Brandevoort in Holland, Harbor Town, USA and Poundbury in England. Arguably, recent movements like 15 Minute Cities have their roots in New Urbanist logics too. As such, might New Urbanism best be understood as other modern?

You can find Mallory on her personal website, on Instagram, LinkedIn and X too.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick

⁠A is for Architecture’s⁠ 108th episode is a conversation with the architect Sam Jacob, principal of Sam Jacob Studio and Professor and head of Architectural Design Studio 3 in the Institute of Architecture (I oA) at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Formerly founding director of FAT with Charles Holland and Sean Griffiths, Sam’s work includes exceptional buildings and adaptations, exhibitions, interiors and things which, liberally distributed over the years of his practice[s], are to be found all over the internet. 

Sam puts it thus in the recording, ‘normally when we make architecture […] you start with a sketch, and then you make it a little bit more accurate, and you get it into Vectorworks, maybe. And then you might make a model, and then you do, you know, detailed design and the tender etc, etc. And that’s the kind of process and then you end up with a building. […] But if we think about like, architecture itself, maybe there's not really a point where it becomes real and different, you know, becomes part of the real world and different from all those other forms of representation, which you were using, as you went through the design process. Maybe we could understand architecture itself as a form of representation’. 

You can find Sam on Instagram.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick

Episode 107 of ⁠A is for Architecture⁠ is a discussion with Tim Ingold, Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen about Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, published by Routledge in 2013. 

Acts of making, as the blurb puts it, ‘creates knowledge, builds environments and transforms lives.’ The book reflects ‘on what it means to create things, on materials and form, the meaning of design, landscape perception, animate life, personal knowledge and the work of the hand’. It’s a beautiful subject, and a great conversation.

Tim is a fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He was awarded a CBE in 2022 for services to anthropology. His scholarship be found in all good libraries. He has a website, timingold.com, and his professional profile can be found on the University of Aberdeen website.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick

In Episode 106 of ⁠A is for Architecture⁠ Sabina Andron talks about her book Urban Surfaces, Graffiti, and the Right to the City, which she published with Routledge this year. 

The book discusses ‘the surfacescapes of our cities […] as material, visual, and legal territories [and] includes a critical history of graffiti and street art as contested surface discourses’ arguing for ‘surfaces as sites of resistance against private property, neoliberal creativity, and the imposition of urban order.’ 

Sabina is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Cities and Urbanism at the University of Melbourne and can be found on her personal website, as well as on social media, including  X and Instagram.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick

Episode 105 of ⁠A is for Architecture⁠ is with Pier Vittorio Aureli, writer and educator, and founder and principal of Dogma, the much-acclaimed architecture and research group founded in 2002 by Pier Vittorio and Martino Tattara. We talk about Pier Vittorio's 2023 book, Architecture and Abstraction, published by MIT Press.

Architecture and Abstraction, so the gloss has it, ‘argues for a reconsideration of abstraction, its meanings, and its sources. Although architects have typically interpreted abstraction in formal terms—the purposeful reduction of the complexities of design to its essentials, [this book] presents abstraction in architecture not as an aesthetic tendency but as a movement that arises from modern divisions of labor and consequent social asymmetries’, and the outcome of emergent socio-technical, economic and political realities. In the face of the AI-ification of the public imagination and, increasingly, material culture itself, this argument has great pertinence for design in and of the contemporary commonwealth. 

Pier Vittorio Aureli teaches at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), and can be found on through Dogma on Instagram.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick

In Episode 104 of A is for Architecture, is a conversation with Paul Watt about his 2021 book, Estate Regeneration and Its Discontents: Public Housing, Place and Inequality in London, published by Bristol University Press in 2021.

We discuss the story of council-supplied housing, and its transformation through various governments – not just Maggie’s Conservatives – from a common asset and social good, into an instrument of urban regeneration policy that has at its heart a very different image of the city, predicated a new model of the desired and desirable urban citizen.

Estate Regeneration draws on Paul’s deep knowledge and experience and extensive fieldwork ‘in some of the capital’s most deprived areas’ and shows ‘the dramatic ways that estate regeneration is reshaping London, fuelling socio-spatial inequalities via state-led gentrification’. It’s an important work of deep scholarship, for sure.

Paul is Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics, and can also be found on LinkedIn and Twitter/ X. 

 

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

In Episode 103 of A is for Architecture, Aaron Betsky discusses his recent book The Monster Leviathan: Anarchitecture, published by MIT Press in January this year. Until recently Professor in the School of Architecture and Design at Virginia Tech, and with previous roles as the President of the School of Architecture at Taliesin, director of the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Netherlands Architecture Institute, Curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the author of over 20 books. Aaron directed the Venice architecture biennale in 2008 and now operates as an independent scholar. 

The Monster Leviathan describes an architecture ‘lurking under the surface of our modern world […] an unseen architecture—or anarchitecture […] which haunts in the form of monsters that are humans and machines and cities all at once’ which Betsky suggests ‘are concrete proposals in and of themselves’ and which indicate to us now ways we might ‘construct a better, more sustainable, and socially just future’.

Aaron is on Instagram and LinkedIn and all over the internet, because he’s proper famous. 

 

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

In Episode 102 of A is for Architecture, Nimi Attanayake and Tim O'Callaghan, founders and principals of nimtim architects, talk about their work, practice and the social role of the practice/s of architects and our architecture. Their body of work is very lovely, but it’s not just this, having a richness born of a dynamic ethicality. The question then is, is the fruit of good ethics good architecture?

In an Architecture After Grenfell, an article they wrote around 2022, and which appeared in BD, they suggest ‘What is required is a reset for the whole industry. If morality is replaced by profiteering then the events at Grenfell tower will be the outcome. […] Whilst the world gasps at the cynicism and callousness revealed by the [Grenfell] inquiry, we should be positioning ourselves as the potential solution. Fundamentally, the problem is not one of process or competence, it is one of ethics and morality. Architects are uniquely placed to become the custodians of a new set of values that can run through every stage of a project. This may demand greater responsibility but it is a responsibility we should fight for and embrace.'

That’s what we’re here for, right?

Thanks for listening.

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Music: Bruno Gillick

In Episode 101 of A is for Architecture, Sophia Psarra, Professor of Architecture and Spatial Design, the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, discusses some of her recent book, Parliament Buildings: The Architecture of Politics in Europe, which she co-edited with Uta Staiger and Claudia Sternberg, and published in 2023.

‘Parliament Buildings brings together architecture, history, art history, history of political thought, sociology, behavioural psychology, anthropology and political science [to offer] an eclectic exploration of the complex nexus between architecture and politics in Europe.’ 

Well that’s what they say but see what you think.

Sophia is all across social media too, so seek her out. The book is Open Access.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

In this, the 100^th episode of A is for Architecture and the thirty-something in Series 3, Matthew Fuller speaks about his and Eyal Weizman’s 2021 book, Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth, published with Verso, which ‘draws on theories of knowledge, ecology and technology [to evaluate] the methods of citizen counter-forensics, micro-history and art […] an inspiring introduction to a new field that brings together investigation and aesthetics to change how we understand and confront power today.’ 

Matthew is Professor of Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, and has written many books and papers, which you can find out about via his professional profile. Otherwise, I find little trace of him online…

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

Episode n/3 of A is for Architecture is a conversation with Ashton Hamm, founding principal of uxo architects, a cooperative practice based in California, USA. Building on some themes and ideas in Ashton’s recent book, Practice Practice (Oro Editions 2023), we discuss the what, why, where and how of cooperative, worker-owned practice. This is an American tale, of course, because each cooperative is a formal, legal structure and so depends on contextual legal protocols, but it is an illustrative and inspiring tale too, which indicates another possible way of being architect.

You can find UXO on Instagram here. The book is here. Have a cheeky and a purchase and side with the good guys.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

Episode 30ish/3 of A is for Architecture is a conversation with Catherine Ingraham, writer and scholar, about Architecture’s Theory, part of MIT Press’ Writing Architecture Series.  As the publisher’s spiel has it, ‘architecture as a thinking profession materializes theory in the form of built work that always carries symbolic loads’. But can there even be architecture without theory? 

Catherine is a professor in the department of Graduate Architecture and Urban Design at the Pratt Institute, New York, where she was Chair of Graduate Architecture, between 1999-2005. Other significant written works by her include Architecture, Animal, Human: The Asymmetrical Condition (Routledge 2006) and Architecture and the Burdens of Linearity (Yale University Press 1998). From 1991 to 1998, with Michael Hays and Alicia Kennedy, Catherine edited Assemblage: A Critical Journal of Architecture and Design Culture.

Heavy stuff indeed. Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

Episode 29/3 of A is for Architecture is a conversation with Professor Neelkanth Chhaya, architect and scholar, and former Dean of the Faculty of Architecture, CEPT, Ahmadabad, Gujarat. We discuss India, notions of modernism (and postmodernism) in postcolonial contexts, indigeneity and identity, and the meaning of the/ a ‘vernacular’ in a globalising culture, as well as time, language, poetry, food and parampara…

We also talk about Balkrishna Doshi, and you can hear/ watch Chhaya speak about him and his work as part of a fascinating panel discussion – "Suppose We Don't Talk About Architecture" - An Homage to Doshi – produced by the Bengal Institute in 2023, and also featuring former podcast guest, Juhani Pallasmaa. Chhaya was named the inaugural recipient of the ‘Balkrishna Doshi: Guru Ratna Award 2023’, for his contribution to education, innovation, and mentorship.

I broke bread with Chhaya one night in Ahmedabad. He was amazing then, and he remains so now. Have a listen, find out for yourself, on all good podcast platforms.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

In Episode 28/3 of A is for Architecture, architect, curator and educator Laurence Lord speaks about his practice AP+E, which he founded with Jeffrey Bolhuis, and their civically-minded work in Ireland and Holland, his work at the 2023 Venice Biennial’s The Laboratory of the Future show, as Assistant to the Curator, Exhibition Design, and lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast.

Laurence can be found at the AP+E website, at QUB, on LinkedIn, X/ Twitter and Instagram.

Find it where the beautiful people listen to such things, and also those places they would really rather not.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

In Episode 27, Series 3 of A is for Architecture, Frank Jacobus and Brian M Kelly discuss their recent book, Artificial Intelligent Architecture: New Paradigms in Architectural Practice and Production, published by ORO Editions in 2023.

The book discusses the ‘impact of artificial intelligence in the discipline of architecture [through the] mass adoption of highly accessible machine learning tools [which has] allowed designers to test their limits and assess their role as an author in the design of the built environment.’ The book features essays from eighteen architects and designers that theorize and test the possibilities of AI, and its meaning and impacts as ‘ideation device and extension of the architect’s authorship.’ 

Frank is Department Head and Professor of Architecture and the Stuckeman Chair of Integrative Design, Penn State College of Arts and Architecture, the principal of SILO AR+D with Marc Manack, and can be sought out on Instagram. Brian is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and is on LinkedIn.

Available where good podcasts roam.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

In Episode 26/ 3 of A is for Architecture, Loretta Lees and Elanor Warwick speak about their book, Defensible Space on the Move: Mobilisation in English Housing Policy and Practice, published with Wiley in 2022. We discuss a few of its themes, including the emergence of the concept in America with Oscar Newman and others, its transference to Britain and its articulation and deployment by geographers, architects and policymakers, not least Alice Coleman, in the later twentieth century.

The book tells ‘the history of defensible space from the 1970s work of Oscar Newman on New York City public housing projects to Alice Coleman’s work in English boroughs and estates [using] oral histories and in-depth interviews with key figures alongside extensive archival research to examine the movement/mobility/mobilization of defensible space across the Atlantic as well as across, in and through academic, professional and governmental circles in the UK.’

Loretta is Professor & Faculty Director of the Initiative on Cities at Boston University, and is also on X. Elanor is Head of Strategic Policy and Research at Clarion Housing Group, and is on LinkedIn and X. 

Available on all good podcast platforms.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

Series 3, Episode 25 of A is for Architecture’s is a conversation with social and architectural historian, Ken Worpole, discussing his life and work, and focusing on the new edition of his book Modern Hospice Design: The Architecture of Palliative and Social Care, published by Routledge this year. As the gloss puts it, ‘At its core [the book is] a public discussion of a philosophy of design for providing care for the elderly and the vulnerable, taking the importance of architectural aesthetics, the use of quality materials, the porousness of design to the wider world, and the integration of indoor and outdoor spaces as part of the overall care environment.’ We talk about all this, and the place hospices play in the urban and ethical fabric of contemporary urban life. 

Ken’s personal website is here, and you can find links to his other works there, including the important New Jerusalem: The Good City and the Good Society (2017, The Swedenborg Society). Along with the landscape photographer Jason Orton, he also writes the online journal, The New English Landscape (also a book), documenting ‘the changing landscape and coastline of Essex and East Anglia, particularly its estuaries, islands and urban edgelands’.

Available on all good podcast platforms.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

Episode 23/3 of A is for Architecture is a conversation with Mark Jarzombek about his recent book, Architecture Constructed: Notes on a Discipline, published by Bloomsbury in 2023. The book presents ‘the long-suppressed conflict between […] between those who design, and those who build. [Jarzombek] reveals architecture to be a troubled, interconnected realm, incomplete and unstable, where labor, craft, and occupation are the 'invisible' complements to the work of the architect [and] pushes the boundaries on how we define the professional discipline of architecture’.

Mark Jarzombek is Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture, MIT. He Instagrams and LinkedIns.

Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music and YouTube.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

In Episode 22 of Series 3 of A is for Architecture, architectural historian, Swati Chattopadhyay discusses her 2023 book, Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire, published by Bloomsbury. ‘With the focus of history so often on the large scale - global trade networks, vast regions, and architectures of power and domination - Small Spaces shows instead how we need to rethink this aura of magnitude so that our reading is not beholden such imperialist optics [and] is a must-read for anyone wishing to decolonize disciplinary practices in the field of architectural, urban, and colonial history.’

Swati is Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara and can be found professionally there. 

Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music and YouTube.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

In Episode 21/3 of A is for Architecture, filmmaker and architectural photographer Jim Stephenson discusses his work, his method and his inspirations. Jim and Sofia Smith are currently exhibiting their work ‘The Architect has Left the Building’ at The Farrell Centre, Newcastle – an immersive film installation that explores ‘how people use buildings and spaces once the architect‘s work has finished’. 

Jim can be found on Instagram as clickclickjim. His personal website is here.

Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.  

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

Episode 20, Series 3 of A is for Architecture, is a discussion with Katie Lloyd Thomas, Professor of Architectural History and Theory at Newcastle University, about her 2021 book, Building Materials: Material Theory and the Architectural Specification, published by Bloomsbury. The book ‘offers a radical rethink of how materials, as they are constituted in architectural practice, are themselves constructed and […] uncovers [in the construction specification] a vast and neglected resource of architectural writing’.

Katie can be found professionally here, and socially here. The Production Studies 2024 conference can be found here, and is still open for attendees.

Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.  

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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In Episode 19/3 of A is for Architecture, John Pawson speaks about his design education, work, ethos and practice. John is recognised as the preeminent minimalist architect of the age, with work including Calvin Klein shops, St John at Hackney Church (2020), the Abbey of Our Lady of Nový Dvůr, Czech Republic (2004) the Moritzkirche, Augsburg (2013) and the Sackler Crossing at Kew (2006). Last year, a new book was published on John’s work – John Pawson: Making Life Simpler, published by Phaidon, and written by Deyan Sudjic. His 1996 book, Minimum, was something like a phenomenon.

You can find John on Instagram, and on his practice website.

Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, YouTube and Facebook .

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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In Season 3, Episode 18 of ⁠A is for Architecture⁠ Dana Cuff speaks about her recent book, ⁠Architectures of Spatial Justice⁠, published by MIT Press last year. Dana is Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, and founding director of cityLAB, both at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Architectures of Spatial Justice ‘examines ethically driven practices that break with professional conventions to correct long-standing inequities in the built environment, uncovering architecture's limits—and its potential.’ The book builds on Dana’s founding of cityLAB in 2006, ‘a research and design center that initiates experimental projects to explore metropolitan possibilities’ and which ‘leverages design, research, policy, and education to create more just urban futures with real impacts for communities in Los Angeles and beyond’, including through coLAB, and in partnership with community organisations.

Dana also founded and runs UCLA’s Urban Humanities Initiative which offers students from ‘architecture, urban studies, and the humanities a radical platform for crossdisciplinary, impactful, urban scholarship and action’, and which she wrote about in Urban Humanities: New Practices for Reimagining the City (MIT Press, 2020).

You can find some of Dana’s various books via the hyperlinks in the text above, all via the MIT Press website. Dana can be found here on the UCLA site, and here on X/ Twitter.  cityLAB can be gotten on Instagram here. There’s a good piece by Dana – ‘Why would architects let themselves be so vitiated?’ on Dezeen, laying into The Line here.

Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts, YouTube and Amazon Music.

Thanks for listening.

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Episode 17/3 of ⁠A is for Architecture⁠, is a conversation with ⁠Rob Fiehn⁠, writer, communications consultant, Director of the ⁠London Society⁠ and Chair of the ⁠Museum of Architecture⁠, about the London Society’s 2023 London of the Future book, a collection of essays by experts from various disciplines – ‘engineering, urbanism, architecture, manufacturing, futurology, journalism and more’ – speculating on ‘how the metropolis might be governed, organized and designed in the years to come.’ 

London of the Future is a plush publication, as you would expect, full of smart ideas and lovely images. It follows 102 years on from the London Society’s original publication of the same name when, ‘under the editorship of the architect Sir Aston Webb [it] published a collection of essays […] some rather more futuristic than others.’ (Gilbert, D. (2004). London of the Future: The Metropolis Reimagined after the Great War. ⁠Journal of British Studies⁠).

2023’s edition is futuristic indeed, but not sci-fi. There are ideas that, without too much effort - or perhaps not any effort at all - may well come to pass.

You can find the book on Merrell’s website here, and on the London Society website here. Rob professional alter ego is here, and he is on X here, LinkedIn here and Instagram too.

Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.  

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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In Episode 16/3 of ⁠A is for Architecture⁠, I spoke with the architect Petra Marko, director of ⁠Marko & Placemakers⁠, creative director of visual communication company ⁠Milk⁠ and now Director of the ⁠Metropolitan Institute of Bratislava⁠, about her work, placemaking as an urban development approach and the role of temporary or meanwhile interventions as mechanisms for producing good, sustainable  urban spaces with clear identity. All this is beautifully described in her recent publication - and the stimulus for our conversation - Meanwhile City: How temporary interventions create welcoming places with a strong identity, published by ⁠Milk⁠ in 2022.

Petra can be found can be found on the above websites, and on Instagram and LinkedIn. The book, Meanwhile City, can be found both via the Milk website to purchase, but also as a PDF to download here.

Petra is a good speaker, so get set and listen.

Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.

Thanks for listening. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + aisforarchitecture.org Apple: podcasts.apple.com Spotify: open.spotify.com Google: podcasts.google.com Amazon: music.amazon.co.uk

In Episode 15, Season 3 of  ⁠A is for Architecture⁠’s, Annette Fierro speaks about her book, Architectures of the Technopolis: Archigram and the British High Tech, published by ⁠Lund Humphries⁠ in November. High Tech has been the dominant style of British architecture for many decades, delivered in vast visions and buildings, in the work of acclaimed and revered designers like Richard Rodgers and Renzo Piano, Norman Foster, Nicholas Grimshaw and Terry Farrell, often in partnership with visionary engineers, particularly Ove Arup and Buro Happold. Growing off the back of a longstanding discourse, with roots in the utopic visions of early modernity, High Tech took its inspiration particularly from both the subversive, radical and audacious dream-worlds described in the design work of Cedric Price and Archigram, where the possibility of architecture-as-machine was deployed to deliver a civic, egalitarian, dramatic and joyful urban experience, one at once democratic and liberated, but also in the deep discontents in the failures of the dreich modernism of the postwar years. Annette can be found on the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design website here, where she serves as Associate Professor, on Instagram here, and on LinkedIn here. You can buy the book on the Lund Humphries website. Annette’s great, so have a listen. The book is well lush too. Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music and YouTube. Thanks for listening. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + aisforarchitecture.org Apple: podcasts.apple.com Spotify: open.spotify.com Google: podcasts.google.com Amazon: music.amazon.co.uk

In Episode 14/3 of  ⁠A is for Architecture⁠’s, Rowan Moore speaks about his recent book, ⁠Property: The Myth the Built the World⁠, published by ⁠Faber & Faber⁠ this year.

Rowan is the architecture critic at the Observer, and has previously published Why We Build (Picador/ Pan Macmillan, 2012), Anatomy of a Building (Little, Brown, 2014) and Slow Burn City: London in the Twenty-First Century (Picador/ Pan Macmillan, 2016).

According to the publisher’s gloss, Property ‘asks how we have come to view our homes as investments – and […] offers hope for how things could be better, with reform that might enable the social wealth of property to be returned to society’.  One wonders, though, given modernity qua modernity, if this doesn’t amount to a petition for a new society.

Rowan is here on Twitter, and his Observer profile is here. You can get Property online at the Faber & Faber website.

Good, wholesome fun. Have a listen and see for yourself.

Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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In the 13th episode of  A is for Architecture’s third series, I spoke with the remarkable architect and writer, Juhani Pallasmaa, former professor of architecture and dean at the Helsinki University of Technology, now incorporated as Aalto University. Pallasmaa’s work has been of huge importance to architects now active in the transformation of our towns and cities, with his description of a tactile, material and immanent embodiment visible in the work of almost all good, urban work now being built. His written work particularly stands, in a way, in counterpoint to the superficial and the visual, that occularcentric tendency born of late capitalist starcitecture, and the preferencing of the image over depth and the experiential. Central to our discussion were two of Pallasmaa’s great works – The Eyes of the Skin (John Wiley & Sons, 1996) and The Thinking Hand (John Wiley & Sons, 2009), both of which are worthy of continued study. You can listen to Jonathan Hale speak about Juhani’s inspiration, the phenomenologist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, on A is for Architecture here. Before he and I recorded this episode, Juhani had received a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Paimio Sanatorium Foundation, at the Sanitorium itself, where he also gave a talk entitled "The Ethical Meaning of Architecture: The relational and existential essence of art". A joy and an undeserved privilege, getting to speak to a hero like this. Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music. Thanks for listening. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + aisforarchitecture.org Apple: podcasts.apple.com Spotify: open.spotify.com Google: podcasts.google.com Amazon: music.amazon.co.uk

In Series 3’s 12th episode of  A is for Architecture I spoke with architect, writer, and thinker Keller Easterling, Enid Storm Dwyer Professor and Director of the MED Program at Yale University, about her 2021 book, Medium Design: Knowing How to Work on the World, published by Verso. To quote James Graham in the Journal of Architectural Education, ‘Medium Design emerged into a world marked by […] a growing desire for change within the architectural profession. […] Is Medium Design the closing bracket of the 2010s in architectural theory, or a hinge between the “before” and the “after”’. It’s a good question, which Easterling’s book begins to dissect, recognising the language on which the discipline has grown dependent, proposing action in its stead. Medium Design: Knowing How to Work on the World is available on the Verso website – it’s quite affordable. Keller’s Yale profile is here, and her personal website here. You can watch Keller talk about the work at ETH Zurich in a lecture from a year ago here. Words, words, words, said sharp Hamlet. Well listen, and find out. Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music. Thanks for listening. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + aisforarchitecture.org Apple: podcasts.apple.com Spotify: open.spotify.com Google: podcasts.google.com Amazon: music.amazon.co.uk

In episode 11, series 3 of A is for Architecture I spoke with architect Chris Dyson, principal of Chris Dyson Architects, and Dominic Bradbury, about his (their) new book, Chris Dyson Architects: Tradition and Modernity, published by Lund Humphries this year. Chris Dyson Architects’ practice has a reputation for sensitive modern work in historic contexts, which the book documents, describing in text and lovely images what the blurb says is the practice’s works’ ‘overriding sense of different elements – be they material, temporal or cultural – coming together into coherent wholes [making] architecture that feels old and new at the same time.’ Chris Dyson Architects: Tradition and Modernity is available on the Lund Humphries website here. Chris’ practice website is here, Instagram here, X here and LinkedIn here. There are a few nice bits online with Chris, such as this profile in Building Design here, and a couple of videos on YouTube - Architects at Home  and one on preserving and enhancing the heritage of The Goodsyard here. Dominic’s website is here; he has written a huge number of books on material culture, which are certainly worth a look. His Instagram is here, LinkedIn here, and X here. Old-new. What a fusion, as Jacques Lu Cont almost put it. Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music. Thanks for listening. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + aisforarchitecture.org Apple: podcasts.apple.com Spotify: open.spotify.com Google: podcasts.google.com Amazon: music.amazon.co.uk

In A is for Architecture’s Episode 10/3 Katrin Bohn and André Viljoen – architects, academics and activists – speak about their work on urban agriculture, specifically the idea’s they developed in CPULs Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes: Designing Urban Agriculture for Sustainable Cities, published by Elsiever in 2005, developed and represented in Second Nature Urban Agriculture: Designing Productive Cities, published by Routledge in 2014, and which won the 2015 RIBA President's Award for Outstanding University-located Research.

CPULs are part of Bohn and Viljoen’s proposal for ‘a resilient urban entity […] that enables sustainable urban food systems for the pleasure of its individual citizens and the benefits of environment, economy, culture and society as a whole.’ It’s pretty wild as an idea, and a provocation (perhaps), but it might also be the future, one of universal rights to good food, clean air, open space and healthy, collective, vigorous physical labour in the metropolis. And that’s before you even get to work.

You can find Bohn & Viljoen’s practice website here where there are links to many useful resources, and links to CPULs is here and Second Nature is here. Andre’s profile at University of Brighton is here, and Katrin’s here. They also linger marginally in the socialmediasphere: you can find Andre on LinkedIn, and Katrin on LinkedIn, too.

Yummy cities for the win.

Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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Episode 9/3 of A is for Architecture is a conversation with the architect, artist, writer and teacher, Tom de Paor, ‘one of Ireland’s foremost architects’. We speak about a lot of things, but spend most time thinking about his work Desert/ Dysart, documented beautifully in a book with Peter Maybury, published by Gall Editions as part of Maybury and Paul Clarke’s Notations collection, and due for a significant feature in A+U next spring, and also the Pálás Cinema, Galway, which opened in 2018.

Tom’s work is extensive and highly considered, and includes the National Sculpture Factory Cork (1998), Clontarf Pumpstation and landscape (2007), the Druid Theatre, Galway (2009), and a number of submissions to the Venice Architecture Biennale since the inaugural Irish pavilion he designed, the widely celebrated work N3 – ‘a martyrium in peat’. In 2022 dePaor staged the exhibition ‘i see Earth: building and ground: 1991–2021’, curated by Nathalie Weadick, reviewed in The Times here.

You might find Desert for sale via Peter Maybury’s website, although the print run was small, so I doubt it. There’s a good review of it – and the series – on Maybury’s website by Michael McGarry writing in Perspective magazine. Tom’s practice website is here and Dysart’s emergence is documented on Instagram as dysart_dysert_disert_desert. Keep your eyes peeled for the feature on it in A+U next year. You can hear/ watch Tom speak about Desert/ Dysart as part of the KU Leuven Faculteit Architectuur’s Going Public YouTube lecture series here, with a lecture called ‘House and Garden’ in 2022, and on the Pálás Cinema at Harvard’s GSD, in a talk entitled “previous, next” from 2017, here.

Power springs up, as Hannah Arendt said. So does Tom.

Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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A is for Architecture’s Episode 8, Series 3, is a conversation with a trio of great scholars, Tahl Kaminer, Leonard Ma and Helen Runting, about their recent book, Urbanizing Suburbia: Hyper-Gentrification, the Financialization of Housing and the Remaking of the Outer European City, published by Jovis in July this year.

Addressing the ongoing exodus from the inner city apparent across the world and the appropriation of the suburbs by new communities, the book examines ‘the relationship between three current processes underway in global cities: the hyper-gentrification of inner cities, the financialization of housing, and the structural changes occurring in the suburbs […] using the examples of four key global European cities: Amsterdam, Berlin, London, and Stockholm.’

You can find the book on the Jovis website here. Tahl’s Welsh School of Architecture profile is here, Helen’s Malmö University profile can be found here, and she’s on Insta and X too. Her practice, Secretary Office for Architecture, is worth a look. Leonard can be found at the Estonian Academy of Arts here, and on Drawing Matter here.

Knowledge is power, so listen and learn, and grow in power.

Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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Episode 7/ 3 of A is for Architecture, is a conversation with writer, photographer and teacher Paul Dobraszczyk, about his book, Animal Architecture: Beasts, Buildings and Us, published by Reaktion Books in March this year.

Animal Architecture ‘considers many different animals, opening up new ways of thinking about architecture and the more-than-human [and] asks what we might require in order to design with animals and become more attuned to the other lifeforms that already use our structures’. That’s what the blurb says, anyway.

You can find Paul on X here, Instagram here and at his website here. The book is on the Reaktion website, and you can watch Paul talk about it with UNSW’s Dr Siobhan O'Sullivan on her Knowing Animals podcast on YouTube. Very recently Paul wrote on The Conversation about another pathological effect of big, shiny glass buildings – bird killing. Ah, modernity, you little wonder.

Worth a sticky beak, I reckon.

Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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In episode 6/ 3 of A is for Architecture, architect, writer, teacher and researcher, Charlotte Skene Catling talks about her practice Skene Cailtling de la Peña, which she founded in 2003 with Jaime de la Peña. The practice’s work has been widely published and to considerable critical acclaim, blending as it does context, occupation/ use, earth, soil, sedimentation and historic records, in a process they term geoarchaeology. The term has academic connotations, and how this is actualized in Skene Catling de la Peña’s practice is worth hearing told. It particularly fascinating where it touches on Aino and Alvar Aalto’s Toppila silo in Oulu, Finland, which they are turning into a regenerative/ cultural space with the Factum Foundation. You can find Charlotte all over the internet. She wrote a column for the Architectural Review, Domus and The Burlington Magazine, teaches at the London School of Architecture, Instagrams and LinkedIns. There’s a lovely article at Drawing Matter on The Dairy House, excerpted from Françoise Astorg Bollack’s Material Transfers: Metaphor, Craft, and Place in Contemporary Architecture, published by  Monacelli Press in 2020. Have a look at Flint House, which was the RIBA House of the Year 2015, and is covered most stylishly in this Architectural Review vid. Deep stuff. Subterranean, even... Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music. Thanks for listening. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + aisforarchitecture.org Apple: podcasts.apple.com Spotify: open.spotify.com Google: podcasts.google.com Amazon: music.amazon.co.uk

In episode 5/ 3 of A is for Architecture, Liz Postlethwaite talks about her practice as a participatory artist, permaculture designer and Director of Small Things Creative Projects, a social enterprise with a focus on regenerative culture through designing and writing scaled interventions in public. Permaculture is mimetic, promoting the management of land and habitats by paralleling and replicating natural ecologies. (It’s also more than this, as Liz explains.) It has direct relevance for architecture and practice, reframing the relationship of designers and sites/ context towards greener, more holistic, ethical and slower ways. It also offers a number of simple motifs for understanding the integrated and rhizomatic nature of environments, people, stuff, action and intention. Believe, it’s a good thing, even if you’re not a hippy. You can find Liz online at the Small Things Creative Projects website, and also on Liz’s personal website. Liz runs training and mentoring workshops which you can read about on the Permaculture Association website. Liz is on Instagram as @mudandculture, and can be found on LinkedIn here. Liz writes a Substack, Mud and Culture, which you might want to subscribe to. Listen to the podcast, slowly, repeatedly and thinkily. Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music. Thanks for listening. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + aisforarchitecture.org Apple: podcasts.apple.com Spotify: open.spotify.com Google: podcasts.google.com Amazon: music.amazon.co.uk

In episode 4/ 3 of A is for Architecture, Stuart Vokes and Aaron Peters speak about their practice, Vokes & Peters, and their elegant domestic and civic buildings in the heart and hinterlands of Brisbane. Our discussion sprung from their recent book, Migrations from Memory, a collection of essays by Stuart Vokes and Aaron Peters reflecting upon twenty years of practice, published by Canalside Press in 2023. Vokes & Peters’ domestic work is particularly wonderful, and rightly acclaimed, embodying a civility and civicness that is distinct and significant. There is much online about it. A quote from Stuart from the book’s opening illustrates something of their approach: ‘One can be poetic about a house and describe it as a city in miniature – just like the city, one can find a range of rooms, enabling a range of events and behaviours that satisfy the spectrum of human emotions. But I am equally satisfied with the idea that a house might be considered a room of the city – a room where we feel at home, the one place left in the city where we might find real reverie and contentment. A house needn’t be another public place, at least not always.’ Vokes and Peter are all over the internet, but for one, there’s a decent video on their Auchenflower House (pictured on the podcast image) in Brisbane from 2020 on the Architecture AU website, and you might also have a sticky at their recent Blok Stafford Heights, winner of this year’s New House Under 200 Square Metres in the Houses Awards, and covered in the Guardian. Their own website features an excellent selection of written work too. Both Stuart and Aaron are on Instagram. Migrations from Memory is available on the Canalside Press website and everywhere else that's decent⁠. Listen to the podcast, and work something out. Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music. Thanks for listening. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + aisforarchitecture.org Apple: podcasts.apple.com Spotify: open.spotify.com Google: podcasts.google.com Amazon: music.amazon.co.uk

In A is for Architecture’s third episode of the series, Monica Degen and Gillian Rose speak about their 2022 book, The New Urban Aesthetic: Digital Experiences of Urban Change. The book ‘explores how cities worldwide are being transformed and reconfigured by the twin forces of digital technologies and 'urban branding' [generating] ‘sensory bodily experiences [which] this book terms the new urban aesthetic.’ Documenting this shift through global examples, the book helps us understand the how and why of the experience of contemporary urban space.   Gillian is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford, and Monica is Professor in Urban Cultural Sociology at Brunel University London. Gillian can be found on X, Monica is also on X and LinkedIn, as well as on the Timescapes of Urban Change website, where you can see her speak about other interests and research.  The New Urban Aesthetic is on the Bloomsbury website, where you can – probably should – buy it. Listen, learn, share, go on now. Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music. Thanks for listening. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + aisforarchitecture.org Apple: podcasts.apple.com Spotify: open.spotify.com Google: podcasts.google.com Amazon: music.amazon.co.uk

In Episode 2, Season (or series) 3 of A is for Architecture, Simon Henley talks about his work as a designer, researcher, maker and teacher, and the work of Henley Halebrown, the practice he founded in 1995. Initially we had agreed to explore a notion Simon suggested of ‘beneficial building’. We never go there precisely, but perhaps in spirit. Henley Halebrown are increasingly significant players in the production of new urban housing, particularly in London, where their work has grown in stature and reputation. This year, their Taylor & Chatto Courts and Wilmott Court, Frampton Park Estate has been shortlisted for the RIBA Neave Brown Award for Housing, and the Hackney New Primary School and 333 Kingsland Road won the International Architecture Award 2023. Previous work  includes a litany of acclaimed schemes, including Chadwick Hall student housing in Roehampton which was nominated for the Stirling Prize in 2018. A great conversation, for sure. Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.   Thanks for listening. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + aisforarchitecture.org Apple: podcasts.apple.com Spotify: open.spotify.com Google: podcasts.google.com Amazon: music.amazon.co.uk

In the first episode of A is for Architecture’s third series, the effervescent Denise Scott Brown talks about her journey to and through architecture, as a designer, writer, planner, urbanist, theorist and teacher. It is a wonderful, remarkable story, told with great eloquence and elegance, and one which deserves continued attention.

Denise’s work with her practice Venturi Scott Brown has inspired a great many people, with buildings including Franklin Court, Philadelphia (1976), the Children's Museum, Houston, Texas (1992), the Sainsbury Wing, National Gallery, London (1991), the Seattle Art Museum (1991) and the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego (1996). Her and Robert Venturi’s written work has been hugely impactful too, and includes the totemic Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, (1972, with Robert Venturi and Steven Izenour), Architecture as Signs and Systems: for a Mannerist Time (2004, with Robert Venturi), the significant essay Room at the top? Sexism and the Star System in Architecture (1989), and Studio, Architecture’s offering to academe (2016). Threaded through it all is a genuine belief in the value of ordinary and everyday ways of being and doing the built environment.

There is a huge amount of material online, in libraries (in real books!), in magazines and journals, and to listen to about or featuring Denise. Go find a book, and think about it all. As she said, ‘People have learnt from Las Vegas, but they haven’t learnt the half of it yet’.

It was an extraordinary sensation speaking with Denise, like swimming in very deep waters.

Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.  

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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Episode 37/2 of A is for Architecture is a conversation with Alan Dickson,  co-founder and director of Rural Design, an acclaimed and innovative architecture practice based on the Isle of Skye, Scotland. Rural Design’s work is characterised by a reappropriation of vernacular forms and construction traditions, which is both contemporary and contextually embedded.

Have a listen and a look around.

Rural Design’s website is a good one, and they are on Twitter and Instagram. You can see their work on Dezeen, ArchDaily, in the AJ, and a lot of other places too.  The Rural House scheme we spoke about can be found here. I first met Alan in 2012 when he came to the Glasgow School of Art to give a lecture, which you can watch on Vimeo here.

Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.  

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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In Episode 36, Season 2 of A is for Architecture, Eleanor Jolliffe and Paul Crosby speak about their book, Architect: The Evolving Story of a Profession, published by RIBA Publishing in March this year. Eleanor is an architect with Allies and Morrison and writes regularly for the architectural press, including a column for Building Design. Paul, also an architect, now leads the professional practice/ Part 3 course at the Architectural Association.

Thematically a chronology of the emergence of a very particular discipline, Architect looks at ‘the key questions of where the architectural profession originated in the Western tradition, why it is, how it is today and where it might be going next [and] postulate that architects' ability to adapt and reinvent themselves in the past will stand them in good stead for the uncertainties of the future.’

We shall see, shan’t we? In the meantime, listen to these two fine folk, and find out.

Eleanor is professionally here, at BD here, on LinkedIn here and tweets here. Paul’s AA profile is here, and LinkedIn-able here. The book is on the RIBA website here, where you can buy it.

Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.  

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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Episode 35/2 of A is for Architecture features Charles Holland, principal of Charles Holland Architects, and Professor of Architecture at the University of the Creative Arts, Canterbury. We speak about Charles’ work and research, focusing on his 2022 Davidson Prize-winning proposal, Co-Living in the Countryside, ‘a proposal for new rural housing […] developed as a collaboration with artist  Verity-Jane Keefe, urban designer Joseph Zeal-Henry and the Quality of Life Foundation.

‘Co-living in the Countryside responds to the brief for co-living and proposes a new rural housing typology [allowing for] shared spaces, flexible and adaptable house types and an approach based on mutual, cooperative governance’ on a site in Sussex.

There’s much online about Charles’ work, both recent and in his previous iteration as founder-director of FAT, a design practice with a remarkable body of work that challenged the pieties of much late modern architecture. You can have a look at it here. You can find Charles on Twitter, Insta and LinkedIn. Co-Living has been covered in Dezeen, Architecture Today and the AJ (£), among others.

Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.  

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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In Episode 34/2 of A is for Architecture, Andrew Beharrell and Rory Olcayto talk about their book, The Deck Access Housing Design Guide: A Return to Streets in the Sky, published by Routledge this year. Andrew is a Senior Advisor for the London-based architects, Pollard Thomas Edwards, where he was formerly director and senior partner. Rory is  writer and critic at PTE, and formerly  editor of the Architects’ Journal and chief executive of Open City.  

‘Despite a chequered history that saw it linked with urban decay and social malaise in the 1970s and 80s, deck access housing […] is fast becoming the default solution for mid-rise housing in the UK, and London in particular. This is in part down to architects’ renewed interest in post-war Modernist typologies, but also due to specific planning standards that favour the qualities – dual-aspect plans, ‘public’ front doors – of deck access design.’ It features work from architects such as AHMM, DO Architecture, Henley Halebrown, Mæ, Maison Edouard François and Waechter + Waechter, among others.

The book has been covered in the press, including on Dezeen, the Architects’ Journal and Architecture Today. Then head to the Routledge website, where you might consider buying it.

Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.  

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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Episode 33/2 of A is for Architecture’s features Ben Derbyshire, Chair of HTA Design LLP and  Immediate Past President of RIBA. We talk about Home Truths, Ben’s 2022 book, published with Hatch Editions.

The book, so it states, is ‘a manifesto for professional practice in an era of multiple crises – in social, economic and racial disparity, in housing supply and affordability, in climate change, in our emptying high streets and homelessness in our town centres.  […] setting out the essential ideas and likely future developments that aspiring planners and designers of homes and places need to know about and bear in mind for their work, [reflecting on] the foundations for contemporary practice.’ You can watch Ben give it some on the NLA website here.

Great chat, lovely chap: listen, learn and share.

Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.  

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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In Episode 32 of A is for Architecture’s second season, Susannah Hagan talks about her book Revolution? Architecture and the Anthropocene, published by Lund Humphries in 2022.  Susannah is an emeritus professor of architecture at the University of Westminster, founder of R_E_D (Research into Environment + Design) at the Royal College of Art, and has been a leading light in the establishment of environmental design as a serious, measured discipline within architecture. Revolution? is the fourth book in a series Susannah has written, documenting the relationship of architecture to the natural environment, including Taking Shape: A New Contract Between Architecture and Nature (Routledge, 2000), Digitalia: Architecture and the Environmental, the Digital and the Avant-Garde (Routledge, 2008), and Ecological Urbanism: The Nature of the City (Routledge, 2015).

The book deals with a peculiar difference – that of the wild success modernism in the twentieth century, contrasted to ecological architecture’s remarkable failure to impress upon the public its argument or ethics. For the publication, Susannah wrote ‘the particularities of [sustainable] architecture’s problem […] lie in its 20th century history and its self-perpetuating self-aggrandisement. What use is a profession of self-styled leaders who in the main have been, and still are, loitering at the back?’

That’s a good question, always. Have a sticky, see what you think. And share like you give a damn.

Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.  

More on Susannah here (on Wikipedia!), on Research Gate here, and on R_E_D here. There’s a good article in the AR from 2015 called Ecological Urbanism, which she also penned. You can get the book at the link above off the Lund Humphries website.  

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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In Episode 31/2 of A is for Architecture, Torsten Schmiedeknecht and Jill Rudd discusses their recent book, Building Children’s Worlds: The Representation of Architecture and Modernity in Picturebooks, a collection of essays by various scholars, co-edited with Emma Hayward, and which was published by Routledge this year. Jill is Professor of English at the University of Liverpool and Torsten is Reader in Architecture at the Liverpool School of Architecture, University of Liverpool. (Emma is a secondary school English teacher and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Liverpool).

‘The kinds of architectural worlds [children] are exposed to in picturebooks during their formative years may be assumed to influence how they regard such architecture as adults.’ How, then, has children’s literature sought to socialise young readers to the nature, values and stories of the modern epoch? In Building Children’s Worlds ‘scholars address questions such as: Is modern architecture used to construct specific narratives of childhood? Is it taken to support ‘negative’ narratives of alienation on the one hand and ‘positive’ narratives of happiness on the other? Do images of modern architecture support ideas of ‘community’? Reinforce ‘family values’? If so, what kinds of architecture, community and family? […] This book reveals what stories are told about modern architecture and shows how those stories affect future attitudes towards and expectations of the built environment.’

Big questions demand clever answers, so have a listen to the imaginative duo and see what you think. Sharing is caring, so do that too.

Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.  

More on Jill and her work is on the University of Liverpool website here. Torsten is here and his LinkedIn is here. (Emma is on LinkedIn here.) You can get the book from Routledge here.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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In Episode 30, Season 2 of A is for Architecture, Professor Albena Yaneva discusses her very recent book, Architecture After Covid, published by Bloomsbury this year. Albena is Professor of Architectural Theory at the Manchester School of Architecture and Director of the Manchester Architecture Research Group at the Manchester Urban Institute, University of Manchester.

‘Architecture After COVID is the first book to explore the pandemic's transformative impacts upon the architectural profession. It raises new questions about the intertwined natures of architectural production, science, society, and spatial practice [exploring] how the pandemic modified the spatial conventions of everyday life in the city, […] transformed building typologies [and] leads us to rethink the social dimension of architecture and urban design; and ultimately proposes a radical re-evaluation of the conditions of architectural practice’.

Well, that’s what the blurb says, anyway. ‘Listen to Albena and see if it’s right.

Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.  

Albena can be found on the Manchester School of Architecture website here, and she Twitters here; her LinkedIn is here. You can get the book here. Our previous conversation, Bruno Latour, ANT and Architecture can be gotten on Spotify and iTunes.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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In Episode 29/2 of A is for Architecture, Professor Gary Boyd speaks on his book, Architecture and the Face of Coal: Mining and Modern Britain, published by Lund Humphries in December 2022. Gary is Professor of Architecture in the School of Natural and Built Environment, Queen’s University Belfast.

Mining and the Face of Coal is one output of a Major Research Fellowship Gary got from the Leverhulme Trust in 2018, and it describes a powerful story of heavy industry and the life of coal and coal miners in the development of modern Britain, including the emancipation of working class communities through collective action, politics and representation, as well as via policy, public debate and corporate enterprise. Mining, as Gary says, occupied a pivotal position in society, which ‘meant that miners were treated seriously […] all industry was completely influenced by mining or completely dependent upon it, so mining became this thing [which had] leverage. And this leverage meant obviously that they demanded at times bigger wages, but it also meant they became recipients, sometimes after actively canvassing for it, of goods and services, and especially services to do with their lifestyle, and that includes ideas of hygiene, ideas, ultimately, of housing, and also caught cultural and social pursuits. This generates a series of architectural interventions.’

The story of the coal industry is a fascinating and, for all of us of a certain heritage, retained history, the decline of which marked a significant portion of our personal histories. Its architecture has vanished, more or less, so this is an important study, describing a recent archaeology, in a way, of an epoch-defining practice. Thus, this podcast and Gary’s book are worth a sticky, believe.

Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.  

Gary can be found on the QUB website here. You can get the book here.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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In Season 2, Episode 28 of A is for Architecture, Gordana Fontana Giusti discusses her 2013 book, Foucault for Architects, published by Routledge, as part of the Thinkers for Architects series. Gordana is Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at Kent School of Architecture & Planning, University of Kent, where she also serves as Deputy Head of School.

Foucault for Architects ‘concentrates on a number of historical and theoretical issues often addressed by Foucault […] in order to examine and demonstrate their relevancy for architectural knowledge, its history and its practice’. In an AA Files 26 essay from 1993, Paul Hirst suggested Foucualt’s relevance to architecture lay in his breaking down ‘the barrier between the common-sense category of objects and that of discourse: words, explanations, programmes, etc., which are held to be about objects. In architecture this yields the stubborn and conclusive distinction between buildings as objects, and architectural theories, programmes and teaching that are about buildings. This installs a split between architecture and architectural discourse. The building is an object or non-discursive entity around which float the words of discourse.’

Listen to Prof Gordana, and get some answers.

Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.  

Gordana is presenting her thinking on Foucault at an event titled Dialogue 1: Foucault/Merleau-Ponty/Latour as part of a Thinkers for Architecture programme run by the AHRA, on 24 to 27 April 2023 at Manchester, UK, alongside previous podcast guests Jonathan Hale and Albena Yaneva. You can get the book here (20% off in April, apparently), and find Gordana professionally here, on LinkedIn here, on Instagram here, and on Twitter here.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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In Episode 27/ 2 of A is for Architecture Bryan Cantley speaks about his very extraordinary body of work, beautifully documented in Speculative Coolness: Architecture, Media, the Real, and the Virtual, published by Routledge earlier this month. Bryan is Professor of 3-Dimensional Design at the Department of Visual Arts at California State University, Fullerton, and founder/ director of Form:uLA, an experimental architecture, design, and graphic communication studio. As the blurb has it, ‘Cantley’s work offers a unique and critical insight into the emergence of a liminal territory that exists between the real and the virtual that mainstream architecture has yet to exploit.’  Speculative Coolness documents Bryan’s extraordinary, imaginative and alluring architectures, with essays by other leading theorists and writers discussing it import and impact. Aaron Betsky said eight years ago, ‘experimental architecture is a marginal phenomenon, pursued by a few brilliant, but isolated figures: Perry Kulper or Bryan Cantley come to mind’. No so marginal now, is it? Listen, share and subscribe to the show on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.   Speculative Coolness is available on the Routledge website here. Bryan is to be found on the CSUF website here and on Instagram as both bcantl3y and speculativecoolness. His own website, bryancantley.com, features a 20% discount code for the book you’d be wise to use (till 30/4/23). Bryan’s previous book, Mechudzu: New Rhetorics for Architecture, published by Springer Verlag GmbH in 2011. Bryan will be speaking on Speculative Coolness at UCLA in May this year. Thanks for listening. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + aisforarchitecture.org Apple: podcasts.apple.com Spotify: open.spotify.com Google: podcasts.google.com Amazon: music.amazon.co.uk

Episode 26 of A is for Architecture’s second season is a conversation with architect, urbbanist and writer Reinier de Graaf, partner at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), about his recent book, architect, verb: The New Language of Building, published by Verso in February this year.

In ten chapters, architect, verb covers much ground, from sustainability and beauty, to starchitecture and gentrification, and aims ‘to debunk myths projected onto architecture by the outside world’ […] Once a profession known for its manifestos, architecture finds itself increasingly forced to adopt ever-more extreme postures of virtue, held accountable by the world of finance, the social sciences or the medical sector.’

It’s a funny book, and provocative too, but fundamentally, as Reiner says in this episode, his passion and criticality is born out of a love for architecture and ‘a sincere love for the profession.’ Have a listen and share, and subscribe to the show.  

You can find architect, verb: The New Language of Building on Verso’s website here, and Reinier on OMA’s website here. There’s a gloss on the book on OMA’s website here. I have long read Reinier’s work, and you might too: start with his previous book, Four Walls and a Roof: The Complex Nature of a Simple Profession, published by Harvard University Press in 2017. There’s an article on Dezeen from February that you might read too.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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In Episode 25/2 of A is for Architecture I spoke with Head of School and Chief Executive of the London School of Architecture, Neal Shasore and Jessica Kelly, Reader in Architectural & Design History at University of the Creative Arts (UCA) and (also) teacher at London Metropolitan University, about their edited anthology, Reconstruction: Architecture, Society and the Aftermath of the First World War, published by Bloomsbury in February this year.

Our conversation addresses some of the overarching themes in the book, which features ‘[s]ixteen essays written by leading and emerging scholars [about] a period of reconstruction, fraught with the challenges of modernity and democratisation’, revealing ‘how the architectural developments of this period not only provided important foundations for what happened after 1945’, but also saw the emergence of new typologies, styles and practices responsive to a damaged but renewed - and global - society.

Critical but ever sophisticated, this is a much needed shot of Edwardian elegance in the rippling Po-PoMo arm of this series.

You can find Reconstruction of Bloomsbury’s website here, ready for your coin or plastic. Neal’s LSA profile is here, and his LinkedIn and Twitter are here and here and his Insta is here. There’s a video of Neal giving a lecture for the Architecture Foundation on his previous book, Designs on Democracy: Architecture & The Public In Interwar London on the YouTube here. Jessica’ UCA profile is here, here LinkedIn is here and her Twitter is here.

Thanks for listening.

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A is for Architecture’s Episode 24, Season 2, is a conversation with Patrick Lynch, founder and director of Lynch Architects, writer, scholar and guv’nor (with Claudia Lynch) of Canalside Press.  We spoke about a few of Patrick’s written works, and some of Lynch Architect’s recent built projects too, focusing the discussion around Patrick’s discussions of the ground of architecture.  

• Being-With/A Tacit Alliance: Architecture, Publishing, and the Poetic Reciprocity of Civic Culture in The Hybrid Practitioner Building, Teaching, Researching Architecture (2022), eds. C. Voet, E. Schreurs and H. Thomas, published by Leuven University Press.
• Situated Praxis, Prudence, and the Anonymity of Beauty: On Tension and Metaphor in the Civic Art of Neave Brown in Part of a City: The Work of Neave Brown Architect, (2022) eds. P. Lynch, C. Lynch and D. Porter, published by Canalside Press.
• Progress is a Myth, Change is the Reality: The Fossil Poetics of Robin Walker (2018) in Change is the Reality: The Work of Robin Walker Architect (2018), eds. P. Lynch and S. Walker, published by Canalside Press.
• Civic Ground: Rhythmic Spatiality and the Communicative Movement between Architecture, Sculpture and Site (2017), by Patrick Lynch, published by Artifice Books on Architecture.

Our discussion covers a little of Patrick’s multifarious interests and concerns, and includes Neave Brown, urban change, housing, civility, context and theology, as well as The Zig Zag Building, Kings Gate, and n2 & Nova Place, all in London, and all quite recent.

It’s all good. Have a sticky.

You’ll find the texts we touch on at the links above, where you can buy them, or download them. Lynch Architect’s website is here and their Twitter is here, Patrick’s profile at London Met is here, his LinkedIn is here and his Instagram is here.

 

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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In episode 23, Season 2 of A is for Architecture, I spoke with UC San Diego professors, Fonna Forman and Teddy Cruz about their two recent books, Spatializing Justice: Building Blocks and Socializing Architecture: Top-Down / Bottom-Up, published by MIT Press in August 2022 and March 2023 respectively. Fonna and Teddy run Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, a ‘a research-based political and architectural practice in San Diego, who investigate ‘issues of informal urbanization, civic infrastructure and public culture […] Blurring conventional boundaries between theory and practice, and merging the fields of architecture and urbanism, political theory and urban policy, visual arts and public culture’ [leading] urban research agendas and civic/public interventions in the San Diego-Tijuana border region and beyond’. Fonna is Professor of Political Science and Teddy is Professor of Public Culture and Urbanism at UC San Diego, where they also co-direct the Centre on Global Justice and the X-Border Lab.

Both books are well worth a read, and are full of thoughtful, practice-based insights and provocations, drawing on a rich, political interpretation of the spatial conditions of exclusion found in a very extreme condition. Spatializing Justice is ‘a practical handbook for confronting social and economic inequality and uneven urban growth in architectural and planning practice’. Socializing Architecture follows this, urging architects and urbanists ‘to design political and civic processes that mediate top-down and bottom-up urban resources, and to mobilize a new public imagination toward a more just and equitable urbanization.’

Big, important stuff, so be a diamond and have a listen.

You’ll find Spatializing Justice and Socializing Architecture on the MIT Press website, linked above, where you can buy them. Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman’s website is here, with more information on their work and practice to be found all over the internet; their Instagram is here, Fonna’s LinkedIn is here, Teddy’s UC San Diego profile is here, Fonna’s is here.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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Season Two’s twenty-second episode features Kim Dovey, Professor and Chair of Architecture and Urban Design, Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne, speaking about his very wonderful body of work on informality, informal urbanism, place and placemaking. We discuss his forthcoming Atlas of Informal Settlement: Understanding Self-Organized Urban Design (Bloomsbury 2023, with, Matthijs van Oostrum, Tanzil Shafique, Ishita Chatterjee and Elek Pafka), Mapping Urbanities: Morphologies, Flows, Possibilities (Routledge 2018), and Becoming Places: Urbanism / Architecture / Identity / Power (Routledge 2010), and just one of his marvellous papers, Towards a morphogenesis of informal settlements (2020, Habitat International, with van Oostrum, Shafique, Chatterjee and Pafka).

Kim is fantastic, of course, at describing the most common form of urban form and housing type of all: ‘In a formal urban design and planning process, the urban design and planning comes first, and then the architecture follows. In an informal process, in the most informal of informal settlements, the architecture comes first, or tends to come first. So the people just build buildings. And if you like the, the street network is then an emergent phenomenon that comes out of the whatever's whatever spaces are left after the buildings are produced. But then, there's a lot of processes, which are much more mixed on that as well.’

For more like that, listen and learn.

You can get Mapping Urbanities andBecoming Places from the Routledge website here and here, and bookmark this link to the Bloomsbury website for August, when the Atlasdrops. Kim’s can be found on the Melbourne School of Design here, and on ResearchGate here. Kim co-leads the Informal Urbanism Research Hubtoo.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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In Episode 21, Season 2 of A is for Architecture I spoke with Maurice Mitchell and Bo Tang, respectively Professor and Reader of/ in Architecture, within the School of Art, Architecture and Design at London Metropolitan University, and together directors of Architecture of Rapid Change and Scarce Resources [A R C S R], an ‘an emergent, studio based, teaching and research area within the practice and academic discipline of architecture’. I got to hear about their 2017 book, Loose Fit City: The Contribution of Bottom-Up Architecture to Urban Design and Planning, published by Routledge, which is ‘about the ways in which city residents can learn through making to engage with the dynamic process of creating their own city. It looks at the nature and processes involved in loosely fitting together’.

The idea of loose in the sense of [a] loose fit city, Bo suggests in our conversation, may be defined as ‘bringing together different intentions, or allowing them to come together in a way that more than one party is able to contribute to the conversation, to the decision making process, to have a voice across scale, across time to try and come to an understanding of shared matters of concern that may then lead to a civic assembly’.

As before, lovely guests, a wonderful, inspiring book and proper, easy conversation. Listen, share, want, get.

You can get Loose Fit City off the Routledge website here but also elsewhere online. Bo can be found on the London Met website here, and Maurice here. Bo is here on Twitter, and here on LinkedIn. There's a boss video of Maurice giving an online lecture for the Architecture Foundation on Laurie Baker and Balkrishna Doshi here.  

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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In Episode 20, Season 2 of A is for Architecture’s I spoke with Flora Samuel, Professor of Architecture at the University of Cambridge, holding the professorial chair and until recently, professor at and founding member of Reading School of Architecture, University of Reading about Housing for Hope and Wellbeing, published by Routledge this year which, Flora said, is ‘the best one I ever wrote, I think, & certainly the cheapest.’. Flora was elected the first RIBA Vice President for Research in 2018 and has been instrumental in the development of the Urban Room movement in Britain, through her CCQOL research project on community consultation through mapping. She co-authored Public Participation in Planning in the UK for the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Excellence and also wrote the very well received Why Architects Matter in 2018, also by Routledge. 

Housing, Flora says is ‘really a very slippery subject, isn't it? It's the one about which we all intimately know a lot from our own lived experience, but has been very poorly studied […] because it's very difficult to make comparisons, you can never compare one bit of housing over the other because everything is different. So it's not a tidy like hospital or something like that’. 

Tidy, like a hospital. So is this episode, so enjoy it. 

Flora is a significant voice in the British architecture scene and there’s much on and by her online and in paper. Have a look around, for sure. There’s a good video – The Social Value of Design - of Flora and Peter Murray speaking for New London Architecture here. 

Flora is lively on Twitter here, and her LinkedIn is here. 

Thanks for listening. 

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Available on iTunes/ Apple, Spotify, Google and Amazon.

Episode Nineteen of A is for Architecture’s second season is a conversation with Mae’s founding director, Alex Ely, talking about his practice’s recent book, Towards a Resilient Architecture, published by Quart in 2022. Mae’s work has an increasing focus on sustainability integrated into the whole life of the scheme. As Alex put it when we spoke, ‘I suppose reflecting on 21 years of practice, I suddenly sort of recognise that, in every project we've done, there's been an element of inquiry or hunting for alternative ways of doing things that might lend themselves to more sustainable solutions. That's not to say that environmental architecture has always been at the forefront of our mind. But the point about the book was actually saying: Right, now it needs to be, and we need as a practice to step up. But then so does the industry.’

You can get Towards a Resilient Architecture off the Quart website here but also elsewhere online. You can have a look at Mae’s built work on their website and all the online magazines too, but of particular pertinence to our discussion are their Sands End Arts & Community Centre, Fulham, their proposal for the Oxford to Cambridge Corridor and the John Morden Centre, Blackheath.

Alex’s professional profile is here, and his LinkedIn is here; Mae’s is here. Mae’s Instagram is here, their Twitter is here, and Pinterest is here.

Cheers!

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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In episode 18, season 2 of A is for Architecture, I met (on Zoom…) with Ed Parham, Director of Design & innovation at Space Syntax, to talk about its origins, objectives, methods and motivations. Space Syntax, the brainchild of Bill Hiller, formed as the Space Syntax Laboratory at The Bartlett, University College London, and now led by Tim Stonor, is ubiquitous in architectural thinking, almost a shorthand for any form of data-led complex spatial analysis. I wanted to understand it better, and Ed, as an architect, seemed like the ideal person to unpack it for a naïf like me.

Space Syntax describe their work as providing ‘a science-based and human-focused approach to the urban planning and design process. We help people to see, in clear and straightforward terms, how buildings and urban places can be designed to optimise their functional performance.’

Ed and I spoke about Space Syntax’s work at Astana/Nur-Sultan work, which you can watch on YouTube here, and the AD article, Urban Futures: Designing the Digitalised City.

You can read Bill Hiller’s seminal text, Space is the Machine, at spaceisthemachine.com, and here’s a lovely essay, A Tribute to Bill Hillier, given at the 13th Space Syntax Symposium, in 2020, by Margarita Greene, Tao Yang, Vinicius Netto, Ruth Conroy Dalton, Sophia Psarra and Frederico De Holanda.

Ed’s professional profile is here, and his LinkedIn is here. Space Syntax’s Instagram is here, their Twitter is here, YouTube here, LinkedIn here and Facebook here.

Listen ‘n’ learn.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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In this the seventeenth episode of A is for Architecture’s second series, I speak with Sally Stone, Reader and Programme Leader for the MA Architecture and Adaptive Reuse programme and Director of the Continuity in Architecture Atelier at the Manchester School of Architecture. Among other things, Sally writes a lot, and we spoke about one recent book of hers, Inside Information: The Defining Concepts of Interior Design, co-written with Ed Hollis (Edinburgh College of Art) and published by RIBA Books in 2022.

Inside Information deals with interiors, which is an under-interrogated part of Capital-A Architecture, focused as it is so often on exterior conditions, formal aesthetics and urban presence. Sally, and the book, unpack this quite a bit. As the blurb puts it: ‘We spend most of our time inside buildings [so] [m]astering the language, thinking and history of the interior is critical to understanding and designing spaces. This essential primer transcends the boundaries and genres that often define interiors, providing a comprehensive view of the concepts and vocabulary of interior design.’ The book (and Sally) do this indeed.

Sally’s professional profile is here, Instagram here, and Twitter (even) here. You can get the book via the link above. It’s graphically well lush and full of ideas, information and insight.

Listen around, and find out.

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In Episode 16 of Season 2 of A is for Architecture, I speak with Gevork Hartoonian, Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture at the University of Canberra, Australia, about his 2012 book, Architecture and Spectacle: A Critique, published by Routledge. The issue of the architectural spectacle has perhaps been the dominant idea in urban and architectural thinking for the last two or three decades, most explicitly seen in Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum at Bilbao, a model of design that has been replicated globally since that building’s opening, but permeating design education and practice almost everywhere, in the near universal pursuit of spectacular solutions to the postmodern urban condition. Gevork’s book discusses this phenomenon, ‘[f]ocusing on six leading contemporary architects: Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Bernard Tschumi, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas and Steven Holl’ and putting forward ‘a unique and insightful analysis of "neo-avant-garde" architecture [and] discusses the spectacle and excess which permeates contemporary architecture in reference to the present aesthetic tendency for image making, but [also] by applying the tectonic of theatricality discussed by the 19th-century German architect Gottfried Semper. In doing so, it breaks new ground by opening up a dialogue between the study of the past and the design of the present.’

Gevork’s professional profile is linked above, he’s on LinkedIn here too, and his Instagram can be found here. There’s a great wee critique by Gevork on Zaha Hadid on The Charnel House here. There’s a serious academic piece by Gevork in the Journal of Architecture (v7/ 2 2002), on the merits of Gehry too: Frank Gehry: roofing, wrapping, and wrapping the roof.

Happy listening!

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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In Season 2, Episode 15 A is for Architecture, I speak with architect and writer, Jonathan Hale, Professor of Architectural Theory at the University of Nottingham, about his 2017 book, Merleau-Ponty for Architects, published by Routledge as part of their Thinkers for Architects series. Merleau-Ponty was a leading phenomenologist, whose work ‘has influenced the design work of architects as diverse as Steven Holl and Peter Zumthor, as well as […] architectural theory, notably […] Dalibor Vesely at Cambridge, Kenneth Frampton, David Leatherbarrow and Alberto Pérez-Gómez in North America and Juhani Pallasmaa in Finland. Merleau-Ponty suggested that the value of people’s experience of the world gained through their immediate bodily engagement with it remains greater than the value of understanding gleaned through abstract mathematical, scientific or technological systems’ and gives us tools to think about other ways of understanding ‘space, movement, materiality and creativity’ in architecture. Phenomenology was very front-and-centre when I was a student, but has sort-of become implicit in design thinking now, and (apparently) barely needs explaining. Jonathan does explain it though, which I am grateful for, through Merleau-Ponty’s work.

Jonathan’s professional profile is here on the University of Nottingham website, and he can be found on LinkedIn here too. Jonathan tweets on Twitter, so have a follow if that’s your thing, and have a read of Merleau-Ponty’s ‘Body Schema’ on the Body of Theory website, an article Jonathan originally wrote and published in Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism, edited by Ariane Mildenberg, and published by Bloomsbury in 2019.

Happy listening!

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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In Episode 14 of the second season of A is for Architecture, I speak with architect and scholar (and personal hero), Henry Sanoff, professor emeritus at the North Carolina State University. Henry has a remarkable story to tell, starting in the office of Frank Lloyd Wright (on the Guggenheim!) and then on to Edward Durrell Stone, before heading off to Jamaica to test his mettle as an architect and to develop a programmatic, ethnographic approach to design. This led to a long career in community participation design, and we discuss three texts he produced through this: Community Participation Methods in Design and Planning (Wiley, 2000), Participatory Environmental Design (CreateSpace, 2018) and also Visual Research Methods in Design (Routledge, 2018).

Henry has produced an abundance of academic outputs over his long career, but this pales in comparison to his very broad and deep community projects, which are the basis for his writing. All his texts are filled with cases and examples of how stuff can get done with communities to make better architecture. You can hear him speak about it in this informative Lockdown Era online lecture ‘Henry Sanoff - Community Participation Methods in Design and Planning’ for North Carolina State University College of Design. Henry is on LinkedIn here and his ResearchGate profile contains links to downloadable versions of most of his works.

Happy listening!

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In Episode 13 of Season 2 of A is for Architecture, I speak with architect, writer, teacher and television presenter, Piers Taylor about his journey to architecture, and the development of his practice, Invisible Studio. We speak about the way he works, his approach to design-as-making and making-as-design, the problems of professionalism, and touch on his 2020 doctoral thesis, Developing a Framework for Describing, Planning and Evaluating Empowerment in Architectural Making Projects, which he undertook at the University of Reading, supervised by Flora Samuel.

Piers has produced a huge amount - written, spoken and designed - and there’s much online to see of his and Invisible Studio’s work. Some recent highlights include a rammed earth yoga studio, a shelter from ‘timber sourced within the Westonbirt arboretum in Gloucestershire, England’, and a mixed-use performing arts centre in Watchet, England. Invisible Studio was featured in a lovely wee movie, made by Laura Mark and Jim Stephenson, as part of their Practice series, in 2020.

Invisible Studio’s website includes a blog, documenting the practice’s thinking and work, as well as other media matters. Piers is on the socials, too, and you can find him on Twitter here (Invisible Studio is here), and on Instagram here.

Happy listening!

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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In the 12th episode of the 2nd season of A is for Architecture, I speak with architect, curator, scholar and teacher, Dr Ruth Lang, about her recent book, Building for Change: The Architecture of Creative Reuse, published by gestalten in August this year. Ruth wears many hats, working for Mae as a writer, editor and researcher, at the Design Museum as Research Lead for the Future Observatory, as well as being lead on the Critical Practice module at the LSA and lead on the Radical Practice MA module at the RCA.

Building for Change asks: ‘How can we build a sustainable future in a time of climate change and dwindling resources?’ and goes on to document a number of global projects by leading architects which have embraced creative/ adaptive reuse as a means of enhancing existing fabric, reducing waste and maintaining cultural and historical identity in places where the normative option may have otherwise been the knock down/ rebuild model.

You can see Ruth’s LinkedIn profile here, and she tweets here.

I met Ruth through her publishers, a guest suggestion by my boss, Chloe Street Tarbatt.  Alongside being generally polymathic, Ruth is great to hear speak, believe.

Happy listening!

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In episode 11 of A is for Architecture’s second season, I speak with architect, scholar, teacher and activist, Dr. Jos Boys, about her long term project, The DisOrdinary Architecture Project. Jos was a founding member of the ground-breaking feminist architecture practice, Matrix, a ‘radical, […] women-led platform […] integrating new interdisciplinary and intersectional ways of working across theory and practice’, and whose work was recently featured in a retrospective exhibition – How We Live Now: Reimagining Spaces with Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative - at the Barbican. Jos has also written widely on her approach to space, design and research, including Doing Disability Differently: An Alternative Handbook on Architecture, Dis/Ability and Designing for Everyday Life (2014) and as editor, Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader (2017), both published by Routledge.

The Handy Guide: The DisOrdinary Architecture Project infographic sheet can be downloaded here, and is on Issuu here. You can hear Jos speak on some of the ideas we cover here at the Arizona State University - DisOrdinary Architecture: A Virtual Lecture by Dr. Jos Boys; at the Architectural Association- Doing Dis/ability and Architecture Differently?; and for A+DS, where Jos gave the Andy MacMillan Lecture 2021 - The DisOrdinary Architecture Project. There is much else online, so have a good look.

I met Jos through Kathy Li at the Glasgow School of Art, when after Fire 1, and teaching out of a rather dour spec office on Sauchiehall Street, Jos came up and gave us all a dose of hope. She’s really quite wonderful, so have a listen, do.

Happy listening!

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In episode ten of season two of A is for Architecture, I speak with Beatriz Colomina and Evangelos Kotsioris, about their book Radical Pedagogies, co-edited with Ignacio G. Galán and Anna-Maria Meister and published by MIT Press in 2022. Beatriz is Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture at Princeton University and Evangelos Kotsioris, Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Radical Pedagogies documents and analyses the long history of experimental architecture education programs that ‘sought to upend disciplinary foundations and conventional assumptions about the nature of architecture […] challenged modernist and colonial norms, decentered building, imagined new roles for the architect, and envisioned participatory forms of practice’ in favour of greater diversity, insight, democratic voice and justice, and away from top-down educational - and practice -models.

You can get the book via MIT Press’ website here; it’s certainly worth a look. You can also find out more about Beatriz Colomina here,  and listen to her lecture on similar themes to the book for the Strelka Institute here, in a lecture she gave in 2019, entitled Radical Pedagogies. Evangelos can be found at MoMA here, on Instagram here, on LinkedIn here and watched speaking about the façade of the UN Secretariat Building as part of MoMA’s ArtSpeaks program here.

As any of us in it, or who’ve gone through it might attest, architectural education seems to trend to the centre, and its base form remains remarkably resilient to change, even in the face of the great technical, social and cultural shifts that have transformed the contemporary world. Radical Pedagogies documents the visions – hopes, I suppose – of folk who tried, and in many cases succeeded, in testing new forms of learning practice in the face of this shifting landscape.

Happy listening!

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In the ninth episode of A is for Architecture’s second season, I speak with Paul Dobraszczyk, architectural writer, teacher, photographer and artist, about his book Architecture and Anarchism: Building Without Authority, published by Paul Holberton in 2021. The book documents sixty examples of what it defines as anarchist projects, which ‘key into a libertarian ethos and desire for diverse self-organised ways of building […] that embrace the core values of traditional anarchist political theory since its divergence from the mainstream of socialist politics in the 19th century.’

You can get the book via Paul Homberton’s website here. You can also find out more about Paul Dobraszczyk on his personal website, including his portfolio of photography, writing and art, as well as an ace blog and links to his socials (under construction…). His Instagram is here, anyway, and his Twitter is here.

I’ve always been intrigued by the possibilities of anarchism, although I’ve been too disorganised to sign up to any particular group. Paul does a decent job at explaining it, and its role and potential in and for the contemporary city.

Happy listening!

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In the eight episode of this year’s A is for Architecture’s, I speak with Professor Erika Doss of the University of Notre Dame’s Department of American Studies, Indiana. We discuss her book Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2010 which describes and analyses the ‘thousands of new memorials to executed witches, victims of terrorism, and dead astronauts, along with those that pay tribute to civil rights, organ donors, and the end of Communism [which] have dotted the American landscape’ as well as those ‘spontaneous offerings of flowers and candles that materialize at sites of tragic and traumatic death.’ Pitched around the sticky territory of history versus memory and the rights the them, the podcast reflects on the role of memory culture as a cultural, spatial and material instrument in urban culture.

You can get the book via The University of Chicago Press’ website here. You can also hear Erika talk on The Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History at The University of Texas at Dallas’ podcast here, and also give a talk – Public Art, Public Feelings: Creativity and Controversy in Public Culture Today- at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design in 2010. You can watch Erika speak at the Minneapolis Institute of Art here, with a talk entitled Monumental Troubles: Reckoning with Problematic Public Art in America.

The tension between history and memory for architects is a significant one, and the rise of memory-culture is a huge cultural shift off which architecture increasingly depends, so Erika’s insights are meaningful and valuable.

Happy listening!

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In A is for Architecture’s seventh episode in 2022/3's offer, I speak with Professor Gwendolyn Wright of Colombia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation (GSAPP), New York and presenter of PBS’ History Detectives. We met on Zoom to talk about her 2008 book, USA, part of Reaktion Book’s Modern Architectures in History series, a book which ‘traces a history that spans from early skyscrapers and suburbs in the aftermath of the American Civil War up to the museums, schools and ‘green architecture’ of today [describing] diverse interests that affected design, ranging from politicians and developers to ambitious immigrants and middle-class citizens […] Wright reframes the history of American architecture as one of constantly evolving and volatile sensibilities, engaged with commerce, attuned to new media, exploring multiple concepts of freedom.’

You can get the book via The University of Chicago Press’ website here. You can also hear Gwen talk at GSAPP with Michael Kimmelman about architecture’s public, in a presentation entitled Who's Listening? Also, here she is speaking when accepting the Society of Architectural Historian’s Award for Excellence in Architectural Media in 2012, and here  about History Detectives as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival. Gwen’s website is here; her LinkedIn is here.

Gwen is an amazing communicator, a seriously insightful analyser of modern architecture and a delightful person to listen to. The book is marvellous, of course, as you shall hear…

Happy listening!

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In the sixth episode of 2022/3's A is for Architecture series, I speak with Sarah Wigglesworth, director and founder of Sarah Wigglesworth Architects. Sarah is a writer and educator, as well as one of Britain’s most celebrated architects, with a body of work stretching back over two decades encompassing participation, community and public buildings, housing, masterplanning and urban design work, all of which is (as I read it) shot-through with a conscientiousness about the social potential and obligation of architecture as a discipline and practice, in favour of social, ecological and spatial margins. We speak about Sarah’s practice, her background in practice and education, and some of the myriad motivations which underpin her work, including her recent renovations to her home, 9-10 Stock Orchard Street, school design schemes and [a few threads of] the rich tapestry of influences that inform her approach to design.

Sarah Wigglesworth Architects can be gotten to here; you can hear Sarah speak about the scheme here for Dezeen, and with New London Architecture here. There’s info on Stock Orchard Steet here, as part of the Open House Festival. There’s a good essay in AR on her dining table here. SWA’s Twitter is good too, as is their Instagram. There’s lots more online, not least SWA’s own online repository, which contains many articles by and on her and her practice’s work.

Happy listening!

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In Episode 5 of 2022/23 #aisforarchitecture, I speak with architect-scholars Sofie Pelsmakers and Elizabeth Donovan, about their book Designing for the Climate Emergency: A Guide for Architecture Students, co-written with Urszula Kozminska and Aidan Hoggard, and published by RIBA Books this year.  Sofie is associate professor at Tampere University, Finland and Liz is associate professor at Aarhus School of Architecture, Denmark. We speak about #ecology and #sustainability and the ways students of architecture can (and must) begin to reimagine how we #design, outlining the book’s strategies for formulating new approaches to #practice, #space, #materials, #technology and #climate.

Designing for the Climate Emergency: A Guide for Architecture Students, can be found on RIBA Books here. Sofie’s professional profile can be found here, and here personal webpage is here. Liz’s professional profile can be found here. Sofie’s Twitter is here, and her Instagram is here; she co-founded Architecture for Change with Stephen Choi, and has published other very decent books: The Environmental Design Pocketbook, published by RIBA (2012) and edited (with Nick Newman),  Design Studio Vol. 1: Everything Needs to Change - Architecture and the Climate Emergency, again with RIBA Publishing in 2021. 

Iloista kuuntelua!

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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In Episode 4 of 2022/23 A is for Architecture, I speak with Christian Parreno, writer, academic and architect, about his book Boredom, Architecture, and Spatial Experience, published by Bloomsbury this year. Christian is assistant professor of history and theory of architecture at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador and part of the International Society of Boredom Studies research network.

Christian and I speak about some of the themes of his book, not least the condition of boredom as a inherent characteristic of modern urban life, and the ways that modern architecture and cities have established ennui and tedium as characteristics of everyday life.

The book, Boredom, Architecture, and Spatial Experience, can be found here. Christian’s professional profile can be found here and his Instagram profile here. Christian’s talk, Boredom, Suicide and the Architecture of 1 Poultry Street, London can be watched on YouTube here.

Bonne écoute.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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In the third episode of 2022/3's A is for Architecture series, I speak with Professor Juliet Davis, Head of the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University. Juliet is a scholar, architect, writer and educator. We speak about her recent book The Caring City: Ethics of Urban Design, published this year by Bristol University Press. We talk about Juliet’s motivations for the book, guided by her approach to architecture born of her years in practice and education, and the underlying notion of an ethics of care (and carelessness) on which the book is founded, care as it is encountered in urban fabric, and how such an approach might be better embedded in urban design practices.

The Caring City is a great book and you should buy it (link above). You can watch Juliet speak around some of its subjects on the Pakhuis de Zwijger YouTube channel, as part of its (their?) Designing Cities for All series, in an episode called Creating Cultures of Care: The Caring City.

Juliet was previously an RIBA external examiner on the undergraduate programme at the Kent School of Architecture & Planning, University of Kent, which is where I first met her.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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In the second episode of 2022/3's A is for Architecture offer, I speak with architect, writer and educator, Pierre d'Avoine, about his book Dwelling on the Future: Architecture of the Seaside, Middle England and the Metropolis, published by UCL Press in 2020. We talk about Pierre's background and his route into architecture, the focus of his work over the years and the motivations and insights of the book. Pierre is principal of Pierre d’Avoine Architects, and teaches at the Architectural Association, running Unit 14 with the architect Pereen d'Avoine, principal of Russian for Fish.

Dwelling on the Future is available as a free download from the UCL Press website, and Pierre can be watched speaking about it at the London Met open lecture series here. Pierre is on LinkedIn here.

I have known of Pierre's work for as long as I have been involved in architecture, so this conversation was a real treat. I hope you enjoy it. 

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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In the first episode of Year Two (or Season 2?) of A is for Architecture, I speak with Dr Torange Khonsari, course leader for the Design for Cultural Commons courses at London Metropolitan University, and founder and director of Public Works, a London-based architecture, art and urbanism design practice, which focuses on participatory and performative art, architecture, anthropology and politics. We discuss the idea of commons, at once very ancient spatial, political, social and knowledge spaces, but with current pressures to communal resources, are perhaps of even greater value, even as they disappear. Torange talks about how architecture and designerlypractices can make commons, or make them more likely to occur, and how designers can operate through cultural commoning practices to build communities, enrich space[s] and resist social erasure through the articulation of common values.

Torange’s work has been exhibited widely, and includes  The Ministry of Common Land within the The Garden of Privatised Delights, the British Pavilion at the 2021 Venice Biennale, curated by Manijeh Verghese and Madeleine Kessler, and which you can see her speak about here. You can watch Torange give an excellent TEDx talk, Harnessing The Power Of The Civic Commons, in 2019. 

Enjoy!

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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In Episode 32 of A is for Architecture, I speak with architect Craig Hamilton, whose work in the classical tradition, particularly his sacred work, represents another mode of 'doing' architecture in the contemporary period. We speak about his body of buildings, including his Chapel of Christ the Redeemer, at Culham, which Gavin Stamp described as demonstrating that 'classicism today can be resourceful, appropriate, and, in its own terms, truly original. It is a beautiful building.' We speak about the meaning of the classical languages of architecture, their dialogic character, and the possibilities of classical architecture for the contemporary public. Craig speaks about his approach to scared space too, which is embedded within a very old discourse around cult and the numinous, as well as his design method, based on hand drawing and the close study and deep knowledge of historic precedent, realised through very high quality making.

Craig's practice website can be found here, and contains a good selection of downloadable articles on his work. Gavin Stamp's article, Art and Soul is in Architecture Today and can be read here. You can watch Craig discussing his home, Coed Mawr, with the Architecture Foundation, here. There's much else online, so if you fancy, have a sticky. Ellis Woodman's book Temples and Tombs: The Scared and Monumental Work of Craig Hamilton can be found here, published by Lund Humprhies in 2019.  

Enjoy!

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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In Episode 31 of A is for Architecture I speak with Maristella Casciato, Vikramaditya Prakash  & Daniel E. Coslett about the recent volume they edited, Rethinking Global Modernism: Architectural Historiography and the Postcolonial, published by Routledge this year. The book is a collection of essays and studies which critically reflect of 'other moderns', those spaces, places, people and artefacts which are definitively modern but which, for reasons discussed in the podcast, have historically been excluded from established discourse and the canon. It's a recurrent theme for this podcast, reflecting on the peculiar gatekeeping of modernist architecture that has dominated scholarship, architectural education and public perceptions of what modernism is and, by extension, what it is to be modern.   

I was fortunate enough to be introduced to Maristella, Daniel and Vikram by Fran Ford at Routledge, Vikram also hosts a podcast, Architecture Talk, which you should also listen to. We also touch on another recent book which Vikram wrote, One Continuous Line: Art, Architecture and Urbanism of Aditya Prakash, published by Mapin in 2021, and with an introduction by Maristella. 

Enjoy!

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick.

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In Episode 30 of A is for Architecture, I speak with Alastair Parvin, CEO of Open Systems Lab, co-founder of WikiHouse, writer and architect. Open Systems Lab 'believe that if we want to build a successful, sustainable, fair and inclusive digital economy and to navigate the massive changes of the next half-century, we need to design, invest-in and deploy new open systems for everyone'. We discuss the impact of these things and the implications and possibilities they suggest, particularly for the production and management of the built environment - towns and cities, house and homes (and the gaps in between). Alastair and I talk about all this with reference to three pieces he has written: A New Land Contract, Planning for the Future and We need new operating systems. Whose job is that?, all linked here but available on Alastair's Medium page.

I met Alastair At Sheffield School of Architecture, where we both studied. His work, which incorporates stints at RSH+P and Architecture 00, is a wonderful example of the possibilities afforded by engaging with socio-spatial and process thinking. Follow the links above to Al's articles, and watch him TED the roof off here: Architecture for the people by the people. He also gave a talk entitled The Future of Regulations at the Radical Practice Conference 2020, Royal College of Art & Dark Matter Laboratories, which is worth a sticky.

Enjoy!

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick.

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In Episode 29 of A is for Architecture, I speak with Michael Young, founder of Young & Ayata and assistant professor at the The Cooper Union, New York. We speak about Michael's recent book, Reality Modelled After Images: Architecture and Aesthetics after the Digital Image, published this year by Routledge. Its a fine book, very thoughtful, tempered by Michael's dual role as a practitioner-scholar. We speak about aesthetics, and its diminished role in modern architectural practice and discourse, and the way digital images constitute a challenge to current readings of aesthetics, situating them within an historical narrative with roots in the Beaux-Arts architectural tradition.

I was introduced to Michael by Fran Ford, Senior Editor and Publisher (Architecture) at Routledge. We have never met IRL. You can see Michael's The Cooper Union profile here, and his practice, Young & Ayata, here. The book is linked above.

Enjoy!

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick.

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In Episode 28 of A is for Architecture, I speak with Professor Harriet Harriss (RIBA, ARB, Assoc. AIA, Ph.D., PFHEA, FRSA), Dean of the School of Architecture at the Pratt Institute, New York. We talk about Harriet's writing, educational practice and academic advocacy, and discuss two of her recent books, Architects After Architecture: Alternative Pathways for Practice, which she co-edited with Rory Hyde and Roberta Marcaccio, published by Routledge in 2021, and Working at the Intersection: Architecture After the Anthropocene: 2022, Volume 4 in RIBA Publishing's Design Studio series, co-edited with Naomi House and published this year.

I met Harriet as an undergraduate in Manchester. She was impressive then, and remains so, publishing, teaching, researching, speaking and writing on varied subjects. You can follow Harriet on Twitter, and on LinkedIn. You should watch her recorded lectures too, particularly Harriet's discussion with Patrick Schumacher in 2019, as part of Dezeen Day, and In Session: Design Curricula for Climate Crisis for the Royal College of Art in 2020 with Dr. Delfina Fantini van Ditmar. (There's a lot more, believe, so have a look around.)

Enjoy, why don't you.

www.aisforarchitecture.org

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick.

In Episode 27 of A is for Architecture, I got to speak with architect Stefanie Rhodes, founder and director of the London-based practice, Gatti Routh Rhodes. Stephanie's practice collaborates with civic and theatre clients, exhibition design, as well as domestic work. In short, her work is a good model for the everyday life of a young architecture practice, and the story Stefanie tells is interesting, insightful and rather inspiring as a consequence.

You can find out more about Gatti Routh Rhodes at their website here. Stefanie's LinkedIn page is here. The Bethnal Green Mission Church was reviewed on ArchDaily here, on architecture.com here. There's a fantastic review of the church, of GRR and of Stefanie in the Architectural Review here, from February 2020.

Enjoy!

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick.

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In Episode 26 of A is for Architecture, I speak with the Glasgow School of Art's Professor Bruce Peter, about themes, buildings, people and ideas gleaned from his 2020 book, Jet Age Hotels and the International Style 1950-1965. It's a wonderful book, and Bruce is a remarkably knowledgeable, entertaining and insightful conversationalist. The topic might seem niche, and away from the thing A is for Architecture has done so far, but it isn't. Have a listen and you'll see...

I met Bruce at Glasgow when I got to seem him teach enthralled classes with a verve and energy I could only dream of manifesting, born from a real mastery of his subject. Read the book and listen to the fella. He's worth it. You can get Jet Age Hotels and the International Style 1950 - 1965 here.

Bruce can be looked at here, and his Tweets can be read here. You can LinkedIn him here.

Enjoy!

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick.

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In episode 25 of A is for Architecture, I speak with Albena Yaneva, Professor of Architectural Theory at the Manchester School of Architecture, University of Manchester, about her new book, Latour for Architects, published by Routledge at the end of March. In it, we discuss Albena’s reading and application of the work of the great sociologist, Bruno Latour’s and in turn, his reading of society, particularly his important concept of Actor-Network Theory, and his work’s application to the practice and production of architectural thinking. Latour’s work has great influence on contemporary practice, even if often under-played, particularly as practice life waxes networked and complex. Albena’s elegant and enlightening exposition is a timely interjection, then, perhaps helping architects understand themselves a wee bit better.

I was introduced to Albena by Fran Ford, Senior Editor and Publisher (Architecture) for Routledge, who also sent me the book hot off the press. All thanks for that.

Albena’s research/ academic profile can be seen here, and she is also available via Twitter. Latour for Architects can be purchased here, and Albena’s great lecture for McGill University - The New Ecology of Architectural Practice: An ANT Perspective on the Effects of Covid-19 – is definitely worth a butcher’s.

Enjoy!

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick.

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In episode 24 of #aisforarchitecture, I speak with Dean Hawkes, Emeritus Professor of Architectural Design at the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University and emeritus fellow of Darwin College, University of Cambridge, about his 2022 book, The Architect and the Academy: Essays on Research and Environment, published by Routledge, and the second edition of his great work, The Environmental Imagination: Technics and Poetics of the Architectural Environment (2019) also by Routledge. We focus on the latter, naturally, and its thoughtful and quietly radical approach to interpreting the icons of modernism and their socio-environmental intelligence, and reflect on the possibilities and function of the academic architect (or the architect in academia…).

I was introduced to Dean by his publishers, Routledge although I saw him speak at the Glasgow School of Art in 2014 (a talk you can watch here). Tickets for his forthcoming Daylight Talk, The sun never knew how great it is until it struck the side of a building, can be gotten here. You can see his CV here too. Dean is a wonderful communicator and an inspiring thinker and writer, and I know you’ll enjoy this discussion.

Enjoy!

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick.

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In Episode 23 of A is for Architecture, I got to speak with Neil Pinder, Head of Product Design and Architecture at Graveney School, Tooting, London. Elected Honorary Fellow of the RIBA this year, Honorary Professor at the Bartlett, UCL, and (STOP PRESS!), Fellow of the RSA, Neil has spent the last 25 plus years developing programmes for advancing design thinking for secondary school education, expanding the discipline’s reach into underrepresented communities and groups, supporting young learners to develop confidence in design and design thinking, and challenging the profession to promote diverse perspectives and values in its practices, education, communication and ethics.

Neil is wonderfully inspiring, and very funny. His initiative Home Grown Plus+ is worth exploring, and he can be found here on Twitter and LinkedIn, and via the links below, too.

• London's Hidden Hero: Neil Pinder from New London Architecture
• Neil Pinder: Graveney School from Citizen Mag
• Day 37 – Neil Pinder from London Festival of Architecture
• Celebrated teacher Neil Pinder will talk about how to make design education more inclusive at Dezeen Day

Enjoy!

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick.

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In Episode 22 of A is for Architecture, I speak with architect, urban designer and anthropologist, Shira de Bourbon Parme, co-founder of ForeGrounds and member of the London Collective. Shira's background is as an architect, but through doctoral research in social anthropology, now works alongside developers, planners and architects to guide them in the production of sustainable urban spaces that are rooted in a close and sensitive reading of the social and material nature of places.

I was introduced to Shira through another member of the London Collective, Bee Farrell, a food anthropologist, with whom I work. Shira holds a doctorate from the Future of Cities programme at the University of Oxford, for a thesis entitled How do master planners think? A sociomaterial inquiry (2018).

Enjoy!

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick.

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In Episode 21 of A is for Architecture, I speak with Jim Stockard, Lecturer in Urban Planning and Design at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Jim had a long career as a principal with the Cambridge-based Stockard & Engler & Brigham, as well as serving as an housing advisor to the US government’s Department of Public and Assisted Housing, before joining the GSD. Among other things, Jim curated the Loeb Fellowship for sixteen years. We speak about some ideas from the lecture he gave at the end of his tenure of that - Affordable Housing: It's Just (A) Right, as well as a short piece he wrote for the TEDx blog, Why affordable housing needs to be a right, not a privilege.

Enjoy!

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick.

In Episode 20 of A is for Architecture, I speak with historian, writer and professor, Alan Powers, about modernist architecture, any new ways we must view that architectural movement, that embraces its multiplicity of realisations, producers and ideas. In architectural education we tend to fetishize the great figures of modernism, leading to an unfortunate narrowing of what modernism was and is. This has been at the expense of other designers operating during the same period, and responding to the same social, cultural, economic and technological forces, but in ways that diverged from the established identity of the movement.  

Alan teaches at Kent School of Architecture and Planning, at the London School of Architecture and New York University, and is a trustee of the Twentieth Century Society. We spoke about The Lure of the Impure, published in A Magazine for Friends of RIBA Architecture, and 100 Buildings, 100 Years, published by Batsford and the Twentieth Century Society, and written with Tim Brittain-Catlin and Tom Dycoff.

aisforarchitecture.org

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick.

In Episode 19 of A is for Architecture, I speak with Professor Greg Keeffe of the School of Natural and Built Environment, Queens University Belfast, and currently visiting professor at Cornell, about sustainability, ecology and the city as an organism, and architecture as a tool of renewal and political resistance. The conversation builds on two of Greg’s recent pieces of work – Bin Burger, an exhibit displayed as part of the Design Museum’s recent exhibition, Waste Age: What can design do? , and Born, not Made. Designing the Productive City, written with Rob Roggema, a chapter in Designing Sustainable Cities, edited by Rob Roggema. I met Greg as a student when he taught the bioclimatic architecture unit at Manchester School of Architecture. He was a great teacher, and the fire he had then hasn’t dimmed so much. Sustainability in architecture is still a marginal reality, fixed in a consumeristic model, although the rhetoric has mainstreamed. Greg’s approach is radical, perhaps because it needs to be, in the face of a production system that is at best indifferent to the actual price of architecture. Greg’s QUB profile is here and his LinkedIn one is here. You can listen/ watch Greg talk online/ TU Delft on the Born, not Made chapter here. You can watch him do a TED X talk - Accelerating the decarbonisation of neighbourhoods - here. Greg can also be listened to speaking on the Slugger O’Toole podcast about How the pandemic is changing how we live. Happy listening. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick

In Episode 18 of A is for Architecture, I speak with Professor Ola Uduku, Head of the Liverpool School of Architecture, University of Liverpool. We speak about two of her books, Learning Spaces in Africa (Routledge, 2018) and Africa Beyond the Post-Colonial (Routledge 2017), a volume she co-edited with Alfred Zack Williams. We talk about the impact of modernity on indigenous modes of dwelling in Africa and ways architectural modernization been experienced there, colonialism and modern architecture's awkward relationship to it, and the ownership of modernity, as a paradigm, a project and an architectural expression.

I met Ola when she was up in Scotland, our paths crossing on the architectural historiography scene, I think. Her work has become increasingly important to me as an educator, as more of my students investigate the modern architectural heritage and culture of Africa.

The two books we spoke about are linked in the text above. Ola's academic profile can be viewed here and her Twitter profile is here.

Happy listening!

www.aisforarchitecture.org

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick.

In Episode 17 of A is for Architecture, I speak with architect Professor Richard Brook of the Manchester School of Architecture, and creator and curator of the online archive Mainstream Modern. We talk about Manchester, its renewal and redevelopment in the postwar years, and the strategic, cultural and creative visions that underpinned its shift to a postindustrial city.

I met Richard through a mutual friend, Bob Proctor, whilst working as Bob's research assistant on a project about postwar churches. Richard's encyclopaedic knowledge of the context and details of British modernism, particularly in the north of England, opened my eyes to a rich and largely ignored seam of ordinary and everyday architectural modernism, and the hopeful, utopian visions that underpinned it.

Mainstream Modern: mainstreammodern.co.uk

Manchester School of Architecture: rbrook 

Instagram: @mainstream_modern 

Happy listening!

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Music by Bruno Gillick.

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In Episode 16 of A is for Architecture, I speak with Johnny Rodger, Professor of Urban Literature in the Mackintosh School of Architecture at the Glasgow School of Art. We discuss his new book, Key Essays: Mapping the Contemporary in Literature and Culture, published by Routledge in 2021. The written essay has a key role in the education of architects and designers, so understanding its function is a worthwhile endeavour. Johnny addresses this, discussing the essay’s identity as a distinct literary form and its function as a critical practice and academic activity. We also touch on ideas of performativity, the capacity of language to effect change in the world, and the idea of ‘the contemporary’.

I worked alongside Johnny when up in Glasgow at the School of Art, at an inflection point it now seems, in that fine place. It was good to have him there then, to teach me how to teach and to give me a foot up, which he did. He is a prolific writer, so seek out his other works, and see him lecture live if you can.

For more on Johnny:

w. gsa.ac.uk/johnny_rodger

w. thedrouth.org

Cheers.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

In Episode 15 of A is for Architecture, I speak with artists and writer Liam Gillick. We start with concrete, move to St Peter’s Seminary, Cardross by Gillespie Kidd and Coia and then sort of let it run, discussing the architectural qualities - spatial and programmatic and critical - of his work. We touch on three pieces Liam has written - Should Be, We Lived and Thought Like Pigs and Why Work? – and talk about the value of art education as an exercise in learning to see. And a lot of other things.

liamgillick.info

• Should Be – Organizational Pathways Restated (2019)
• We Lived and Thought Like Pigs – Gilles Chatelêt’s Devastating Prescience (2019)
• Why Work? (2010)

Other things:

• Rouse Visiting Artist Lecture: Liam Gillick (Harvard GSD, 2017) on YouTube.
• Bio on artnet.
• +Long And Short Modernities: An Interview With Liam Gillick’ by Allan Gardner (December 1st, 2018) on thequietus.com

Enjoy.

www.aisforarchitecture.org

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick.

In Episode 14 of A is for Architecture, I spoke with Scottish Architect, Malcolm Fraser, founder and director of Fraser/ Livingstone Architects, based in Edinburgh. We talk about sustainability in the context of culture and place, an important nuance in the face of the bulldozer of one-size-fits-all eco-technic sustainability agendas, elegantly expressed by the nonsense of jet-fuelled COP26. We discuss Malcolm's pieces, Architecture and the Wee Blue Ball and Green Virtues, Green Shoots, and discuss an alternative approach to sustainability which foregrounds people, history and tradition and the accommodation of, or even the promotion of, the intricacies of everyday life, through careful engagement with reality, and judicious uses of good materials.

I first met Malcolm when he came to give a lecture at the Glasgow School of Art, one of the last I saw in the old Mackintosh Lecture Theatre there. Sat on the narrow wooden pews in that amazing room, Malcolm, in a kilt, was a bit of a special presence to a sassenach like me. You can watch that here. Another video worth a sticky is A Wee Nation and an Architecture of Belonging.

For more on Malcolm's practice:

• t. @f_l_architects
• i. @fraser_livingstone_architects/

Enjoy.

www.aisforarchitecture.org

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick.

In Episode 13 of A is for Architecture, I speak with John Letherland, urbanist, masterplanner and director of John Letherland Ltd. John was a founding partner of Farrells, having worked alongside Sir Terry Farrell for 35 years, before setting up his own firm. I work alongside John at the Kent School of Architecture & Planning, where until recently, John ran the urban design Masters programme, MAUD.

In this episode, we speak about the nature and character of urban design and masterplanning as distinct disciplines, related to – and obviously complimentary to - but fundamentally different from architecture. We touch on urban design’s core functions and how it is enacted, discuss its relationship to community, and the natural, organic processes of development common to non-formal and less formal urban spaces. Of course, we also talk about how it should – but isn’t often – taught.

John’s KSAP profile can be seen here and his LinkedIn profile is here. Our conversation was informed by two particular documents, the first an article by David Rudlin called ‘What is it about architects and urbanism?’ which attempts to explain to architects the difference between architecture and urbanism; and the second, the Canterbury Campus Masterplan (‘The Framework Masterplan for the Canterbury campus’) for the University of Kent which John wrote for the University in April 2019, finalised in Oct 2019, particularly Chapter 5.

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Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/3va6a6b3

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick.

In this, the twelfth episode of A is for Architecture, I speak with Hana Loftus, co-director of HAT Projects, architect and town planner and Engagement and Communications Lead at the Greater Cambridge Shared Planning Service and Chair of Creative Colchester. HAT Projects are an Essex-based architecture, design and strategy practice. Hana’s role as planner-architect is rare and valuable, offering specific insights into a process often seen as opaque and arbitrary for design professionals. We speak about this, the whys and wherefores of planning as it intersects with the practice of architecture, and ways the discipline might (or should) open up to enable fairer and more just outcomes.

I met Hana many years ago, when we were both students (at rather different schools…) and have been ever impressed by the varied career in architecture, making, building, teaching, speaking, writing, theatre, and now planning she has carved out.

Hana’s writing can be read at virtualhana.blogspot and her Twitter is here. Follow this, to hear Hana speak at the Glasgow School of Art in 2014, as part of the Mackintosh School of Architecture’s Friday Lecture series.

Happy listening!

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Music by Bruno Gillick.

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In Episode 11 of A is for Architecture, I speak with Anne Marie Galmstrup, director of Galmstrup Architects, London, about local identity, the social practice of architectural design, and the tangible and intangible, which should be at the heart of the processes and outputs of the design of good places.

I met Anne Marie at the 2018 Venice architecture biennale. I was still director of Baxendale with Lee Ivett at the time, so was either helping make the Scottish collateral project or drinking *coffee*. Anne Marie and I spoke about it all - Freespace, community, identity and participation - themes close to both of our practice - and kept in touch. 

Watch Anne Marie's residency 'Time for play' with the V&A , and her project Imaginations Cross Cultures, a non-profit which seeks to foster cross cultural understanding between young people through co-creation. 

As ever, thanks for listening. Like, subscribe, follow and share, of course. Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Facebook too.

Happy listening.

www.aisforarchitecture.org

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

In Episode 10 of A is for Architecture, I speak with the architects and educators Maggie Ma, assistant professor of Architecture at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Mark Kingsley, who collectively run the Hong Kong-based not-for-profit architecture practice, Domat. We discuss their work in detail, focusing on the social production of community spaces, particularly for lower-incomed and informal people. 

I first met Mark at Sheffield School of Architecture when we both studied in Doina Petrescu's Unit 2, an educational moment which has had a lasting impact on both our careers, orientating us (I think) towards the social capacity and identity of architecture and its production. Through Mark I got to meet Maggie and have watched as their expertise has moved from paper to the real world of practice and enactment. 

Domat can be found here: https://www.domat.hk/; Maggie's academic profile is here: http://www.arch.cuhk.edu.hk/person/ma-kit-yi-maggie/

Happy listening.

www.aisforarchitecture.org

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

In Episode 9 of A is for Architecture, I speak with Robert Adam, architect, urban designer, author, and visiting professor of urban design at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, about his work in the fields of classical and traditional design. We discuss his mode of practice, outputs and built work in relation to accepted ideas of architectural and spatial modernism, the value of tradition for architecture and urbanism, and the problem of authenticity in the twenty-first century.

I first met Robert in Glasgow, when he came to give a talk for the students. We went to a restaurant beforehand, where the menu was, appropriately, written in a sort-of hybrid neo vernacular Scots patois, which we didn’t understand. I think we both got fried egg on rice.

Robert’s practice can be found here and his former one here. He’s on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/classical_man?lang=en-gb. His book, Time for Architecture: On Modernity, Memory and Time in Architecture and Urban Design is available via the publishers; his discussion piece ‘Modernism has become a tradition’, was published in the RIBA Journal (13 February 2020).

Enjoy.

www.aisforarchitecture.org

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

In Episode 8 of A is for Architecture, I speak with Geraldine Dening, an architect and senior lecturer at Leicester School of Architecture, De Montfort University. Geraldine runs her own practice, Geraldine Dening Architects, and also co-founded Architects for Social Housing, a CIC that grew out of engagement with the housing crisis in London, and which advocates for the maintenance of social housing, the communities that make them, and live in them.

I was put onto Geraldine by another podcast guest, and so wrote out of the blue to ask if she’d be interested in speaking about the social significance and political character of housing. Gladly, she was both willing and a wonderfully engaging interlocutrice. You can see more about Geraldine and her work via the links above and on LinkedIn.

Listen on Apple Podcasts of Spotify.

Music by Bruno Gillick, voice by Julian. 

Episode image from ASH.

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In Episode 7 of A is for Architecture I speak with Siraaj Mitha, an architect and head of Open City's Accelerate, a programme designed to invite the engagement of a wider public in and with the profession of architecture. Open City's programme is designed to increase engagement in the architecture and city-making. I met Siraaj from Open City's head honcho. I'm glad we did. It was a nice chat. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Music by Bruno Gillick, voice by Julian. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ i. ais4architecture t. AisArchitecture w. aisforarchitecture.org

In Episode 6 of A is for Architecture, I speak with Lee Ivett, course leader at the Grenfell Baines Institute of Architecture, University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN), as well as director of Baxendale, a practice based in Glasgow and Preston.

Lee’s critically acclaimed body of work includes small and medium-scale projects in a very broad range of places and contexts across Europe, and addresses themes relating to the social role of architecture-as-programme, rather than as (just) stuff and space.

I met Lee through work at the art school in Glasgow, eventually joining him as a director of Baxendale between 2015 and 2018, working with him on The Happenstance, Scotland’s collaborative architecture, art and design installation at the 2018 Venice architecture biennale.

w. baxendale-dco.com

t. twitter.com/baxendalestudio

i. www.instagram.com/_baxendale

In Episode 5 of A is for Architecture, I speak with Dr Tahl Kaminer of the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University, about his research on ideas of political identity, agency and practice in architecture, and how architects have addressed (and sometimes still do!) their social role. We talk around and about his 2016 book, The Efficacy of Architecture: Political contestation and agency (Routledge) and his 2011 book Architecture, crisis and resuscitation: The reproduction of post-Fordism in late-twentieth-century architecture (Routledge).

I met Tahl when I worked in Glasgow, at an interview, then later in Cardiff. I use his books in my teaching, and was involved briefly in one of the schemes he describes, the Atelier d'architecture autogérée in Paris, France.  

Tahl's academic profile can be found here: www.cardiff.ac.uk/people

In this, the fourth episode of A is for Architecture, I speak with Amica Dall of the design collective Assemble, about themes and ideas in her talk Are Words Good Enough, delivered as a keynote at the Future Architecture platform's 2021 Creative Exchange: Landscapes of Care conference. I met Amica through Baxendale, a practice I co-directed for a while in Glasgow, seeing her in action via her teaching but particularly her role as a co-founder and trustee of Baltic Street Adventure Playground in the East End of Glasgow. 

The conversation is wide-ranging, but comes out of a discussion on the role of language in architecture and for architects, and its importance if architecture is to be a tool for coproducing the common good.

 Enjoy!

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

In Episode 3 of A is for Architecture, I speak with Professor Bob Brown, of the University of Plymouth. Bob is an architect and educator with many years’ experience in socially-engaged and community-orientated practice and research, in the Global South and far east, but also in the UK and USA. In our conversation, Bob and I speak about vernacular and indigenous architecture, its relationship to and possibilities for the profession of architecture – both in practice, but also in architecture schools – and the value and meaning of ‘the other’ for practitioners.

I met Bob through his role as an RIBA external examiner for the school of architecture I work at. Bob pointed out that he had contributed a chapter - Concepts of Vernacular Architecture - to The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory (2013, Sage Publishing), the principal textbook for my MArch course, Cultural Context.

Follow the link in my bio to my website, for Bob and my conversation, or seek it out *A is for Architecture* on Spotify, Apple and Anchor.

Enjoy!

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick.

In the second episode of A is for Architecture, I speak with Professor Kathleen James-Chakraborty about her research and writing on twentieth century modernist architecture and design, looking at the nature and impact of the Bauhaus. Fronted by totemic modernists, the Bauhaus only lasted 24 years and yet its influence on everyday culture, even now, has been enormous. Unpacking that, Kathleen and I discuss the ways the Bauhaus was intentionally curated, towards an image of progressive liberalism which perhaps it didn't entirely deserve, particularly in its relationship to the women who were essential to its success and influence. 

Kathleen's academic profile can be seen here: https://people.ucd.ie/kathleen.jameschakraborty. Her book Bauhaus Culture: From Weimar to the Cold War can be gotten here: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/bauhaus-culture. Kathleen was recently awarded a European Research Council grant on a project entitled Expanding Agency: Women, Race and the Global Dissemination of Modern Architecture, which you can read about here: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101019419

www.aisforarchitecture.org

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick.

In this, the first episode of A is for Architecture, I speak with Professor Richard Williams about his new book, Reyner Banham Revisited, published by Reaktion Books in May 2021. Here's a link: www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

The Professor of Contemporary Visual Cultures at the University of Edinburgh, I first met Richard when he came to give a lecture at the Glasgow School of Art in October 2013, in the Mackintosh Lecture Theatre, before the first fire, after the publication of his book, Sex and Buildings (Reaktion Books 2013). It was a wonderful, rye, candid and witty talk, and the theatre was packed out, the aisles and floor at the front occupied, as well as the awkward, hard benches, with students (mostly) emitting a strange energy, wordlessly: this is what university is supposed to feel like. 

Richard's on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/rjwilliams44

Enjoy.

www.aisforarchitecture.org

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick.