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.

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.

www.aisforarchitecture.org

Apple Podcasts: https://tinyurl.com/2p8d9t7p

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

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

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!

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

Music by Bruno Gillick.

www.aisforarchitecture.org/ Instagram/ twitter/ facebook

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

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

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.

+ 

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

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

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

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

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.

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

i. ais4architecture

t. AisArchitecture

w. aisforarchitecture.org

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!

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

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!

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

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

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

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

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 

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.

+ 

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.

+ 

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.

+ 

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.

+ 

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.

+ 

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.

+ 

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.

+ 

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.

+ 

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.

+ 

Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick

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.

+ 

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.

+ 

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.

+ 

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.

+ 

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.

+ 

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.

+ 

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.

+ 

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.

+ 

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.

+ 

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.

+ 

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.

+ 

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.

+

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.

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

Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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

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.

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

Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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

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.

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

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.

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

Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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

aisforarchitecture.org

Apple: podcasts.apple.com

Spotify: open.spotify.com

Google: podcasts.google.com

Amazon: music.amazon.co.uk

YouTube: youtube/channel

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