A is for Architecture Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

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.

+ 

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.

+ 

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.

+ 

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

++++++++++++++

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

++++++++++++++

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!

+++++++++++++++++

Music by Bruno Gillick.

www.aisforarchitecture.org/ instagram/ twitter/ facebook

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.

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

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

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

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

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

Music credits: Bruno Gillick.