Avsnitt
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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
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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
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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In this, the 100th 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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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