AirAA – Details, episodes & analysis

Join us On the Steps of 36: a question-and-answer conversation that crosses thresholds into our guests’ histories, lives, influences and stories, shedding light on the person behind the work.

In this episode, Ryan Dillon is joined by Ella Adu, an architect and writer whose research considers changing modes of grassroots cultural production in Britain. Adu was also the assistant curator of the AA exhibition As Hardly Found in the Art of Tropical Architecture in 2023.

AirAA podcasts are conceived, recorded, mixed, edited and distributed from the Architectural Association School of Architecture, which is based in Bedford Square in London. Special thanks to Thomas Parkes and Dainius Kacinskas for their contribution to the production of our episodes. To view the show notes and find more episodes, visit air.aaschool.ac.uk.

The opinions expressed in AirAA podcasts are solely those of the participants and do not represent the opinions of the Architectural Association as a whole.

Join us On the Steps of 36: a question-and-answer conversation that crosses thresholds into our guests’ histories, lives, influences and stories, shedding light on the person behind the work.

In this episode, Manijeh Verghese is joined by Ellie Sampson, a model maker, paper cut artist and lecturer. Sampson also participated in the AA event Warburg Models: Buildings as Bilderfahrzeuge earlier this year – you can watch a recording of the event here.

AirAA podcasts are conceived, recorded, mixed, edited and distributed from the Architectural Association School of Architecture, which is based in Bedford Square in London. Special thanks to Thomas Parkes for his contribution to the production of our episodes. To view the show notes and find more episodes, visit air.aaschool.ac.uk.

The opinions expressed in AirAA podcasts are solely those of the participants and do not represent the opinions of the Architectural Association as a whole.

Join us On the Steps of 36: a question-and-answer conversation that crosses thresholds into our guests’ histories, lives, influences and stories, shedding light on the person behind the work.

In this episode, Manijeh Verghese is joined by Emma Dent Coad, an architectural historian and councillor in Kensington and Chelsea since 2006. Dent Coad participated in the symposium The Cladding Crisis at the AA in 2023 – you can watch a recording of the event here.

AirAA podcasts are conceived, recorded, mixed, edited and distributed from the Architectural Association School of Architecture, which is based in Bedford Square in London. Special thanks to Thomas Parkes for his contribution to the production of our episodes. To view the show notes and find more episodes, visit air.aaschool.ac.uk.

The opinions expressed in AirAA podcasts are solely those of the participants and do not represent the opinions of the Architectural Association as a whole.

Files on Air is a podcast series in which contributors from AA Files read their work. In this episode, you will hear Brendon Carlin – an architect, critic, researcher, and AA School tutor – read his text ‘No-House: Shameless Architecture in 21st-Century Japan'. In this piece, Carlin examines the legacy of Japan’s ‘lost decade’, Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima’s Atelier Bow-Wow and the ‘shameless architecture’ that illuminates the reality of certain conditions in Tokyo. You can read the piece in AA Files 79.

AA Files is the Architectural Association’s journal of record, which promotes original and engaging writing on architecture and its related fields.

AirAA podcasts are recorded, mixed, edited and distributed from the Architectural Association School of Architecture, which is based in Bedford Square in London. Special thanks to Thomas Parkes for his contribution to the production of our episodes. To view the show notes and find more episodes, visit air.aaschool.ac.uk.

The opinions expressed in AirAA podcasts are solely those of the participants and do not represent the opinions of the Architectural Association as a whole.

Join us On the Steps of 36: a question-and-answer conversation that crosses thresholds into our guests’ histories, lives, influences and stories, shedding light on the person behind the work. In this episode, Manijeh Verghese is joined by architect and writer Marianna Janowicz, who participated in the Feminist Practice event at the AA in 2023. Janowicz is a member of Edit, a feminist design collective focusing on the enduring biases and hierarchies embedded into the environments that surround us.

AirAA podcasts are conceived, recorded, mixed, edited and distributed from the Architectural Association School of Architecture, which is based in Bedford Square in London. Special thanks to Thomas Parkes for his contribution to the production of our episodes. To view the show notes and find more episodes, visit air.aaschool.ac.uk.

The opinions expressed in AirAA podcasts are solely those of the participants and do not represent the opinions of the Architectural Association as a whole.

For this last episode of How to Be Good Ancestors we are changing tides. Together with artist and academic Janice Cheddie, our aim is to expand the conversation into territories of resistance to the systems unpacked in the previous episodes. What mechanisms exist to rid oneself of debt without going through the painful processes of unfair repayment?

 We will explore modes of resistance, focusing on the tools and the precedents which each of us and our guest value and rely on to imagine a common future. The conversation revolves around a series of artefacts including text, video, family heirlooms and memorabilia, reading into these objects’ histories as a method for imagining their future. In doing so, we are positioned both as inheritors of these stories and as forebears for the next generations. How do we become good ancestors for the world to come? 

Show Notes:

-      For an extended interview with Janice Cheddie: https://www.tate.org.uk/research/panchayat-collection-research-resource/an-interview-with-janice-cheddie

-      For more information on the Panchayyat Collection: https://www.tate.org.uk/research/panchayat-collection-research-resource

-      For further information on Afford: https://www.afford-uk.org/

-      For Janice Cheddie’s writing on her mother: http://smallaxe.net/sxsalon/discussions/windrush-notes-my-younger-self

-      Tate Solidarity Conference, 2019: https://www.tate.org.uk/research/research-centres/hyundai-tate-research-centre-transnational/event-report-axis-solidarity

Recordings:

-      Bandung Conference Introduction by Sukarno: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRIch247vb8

-      The Black Panthers in Algeria: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVDvh4KDH_A (see minute 28:00 for the segment discussing in the podcast)

-      Audre Lorde Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diHzbQNyO2k

About A Line Traced:

As our society continues to unveil fractures within its social and political systems, A Line Traced aims to examine topics that are immediate, prescient and impact the build environment in ways that require urgent architectural responses. An AirAA podcast recorded, mixed, edited and distributed from the Architectural Association School of Architecture, which is based in Bedford Square in London. Special thanks to Thomas Parkes for his contribution to the production of our episodes. Visit air.aaschool.ac.uk to find out more.

The opinions expressed in AirAA podcasts are solely those of the participants and do not represent the opinions of

Join us On the Steps of 36: a question-and-answer conversation that crosses thresholds into our guests’ histories, lives, influences and stories, shedding light on the person behind the work. In this episode, Ryan Dillon is joined by architect and scholar Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, who participated in the Stop Building! event for the Stories about Sustainability series at the AA in 2022. Malterre-Barthes conducts research on urgent aspects of contemporary urbanisation, material extraction, climate emergency and social justice.

AirAA podcasts are conceived, recorded, mixed, edited and distributed from the Architectural Association School of Architecture, which is based in Bedford Square in London. Special thanks to Thomas Parkes for his contribution to the production of our episodes. To view the show notes and find more episodes, visit air.aaschool.ac.uk.

The opinions expressed in AirAA podcasts are solely those of the participants and do not represent the opinions of the Architectural Association as a whole.

This third episode of How to be Good Ancestors on Indonesia will zoom into the architectural scale to look at another form of debt: the act of disseminating building knowledge as a form of epistemic imposition. We will be revisiting Indonesian colonial history with architectural historian David Hutama Setiadi focusing on design pedagogy. Together we will unpack the ways in which systems of knowledge were imposed through new ways of building generated by capitalist ideology, revealing the complicity of drawing methods and classification systems in marginalising the Metis, an unstructured type of knowledge learned through embodied experience. We will also be discussing the possibilities of reversing the logics of the episteme. 

How to be Good Ancestors means rereading our past to disentangle future possibilities from systems of oppression. In this podcast series, hosts and AA students Ferial Massoud, Maria Putri and Aude Tollo retrace the common histories of three nominally decolonised states – Burkina Faso, Egypt and Indonesia – through the systems of debt servitude to which they were condemned in the wake of their independence, and which they remain subject to today. We ask: what are the spatial and material consequences of these systems and how can we begin to undo them?

Show Notes:

-       David Hutama Setiadi, Building Practice in the Dutch East Indies: Epistemic Imposition at the Beginning of the 20th Century, 2023

-       Summarised version of David’s book: https://ar.fa.uni-lj.si/2020/re-drawing-javanese-building-practice

-       James C Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 2020

-       Richard Sennett, The Craftsmen, 2008

-       Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, ed, The Invention of Tradition, 2012

-       Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays by Clifford Geertz, 1973

-       Jean Couteau, Tubuh, Moral dan Jiwa Zaman, 2019 

About A Line Traced:

As our society continues to unveil fractures within its social and political systems, A Line Traced aims to examine topics that are immediate, prescient and impact the build environment in ways that require urgent architectural responses. An AirAA podcast recorded, mixed, edited and distributed from the Architectural Association School of Architecture, which is based in Bedford Square in London. Special thanks to Thomas Parkes for his contribution to the production of our episodes. Visit air.aaschool.ac.uk to find out more.

The opinions expressed in AirAA podcasts are solely those of the participants and do not represent the opinions of the Architectural Association as a whole.

Join us On the Steps of 36: a question-and-answer conversation that crosses thresholds into our guests’ histories, lives, influences and stories, shedding light on the person behind the work.  In this episode, Ryan Dillon is joined by Francisco Adriasola, an architect and graduate of the AA's Design and Make programme who curated the AA Gallery exhibition Observation, Act and Form in autumn 2022. Francisco participated in the Education and the Architectural Act event in Hooke Park in November 2022 – you can watch a recording of the event here.

AirAA podcasts are conceived, recorded, mixed, edited and distributed from the Architectural Association School of Architecture, which is based in Bedford Square in London. Special thanks to Thomas Parkes for his contribution to the production of our episodes. To view the show notes and find more episodes, visit air.aaschool.ac.uk.

The opinions expressed in AirAA podcasts are solely those of the participants and do not represent the opinions of the Architectural Association as a whole.

This second episode of How to be Good Ancestors focuses on Burkina Faso, in a conversation with the multidisciplinary designer Richard Aina. We will travel to Lobi land in the South Western region of Burkina Faso. to look at how the artefacts produced there are held hostage by colonial power structures and modern infrastructures. Through this episode we attempt to generate a framework to shift dominant paradigms and generate a sensible architecture for the repatriation of those artefacts.

How to be Good Ancestors means rereading our past to disentangle future possibilities from systems of oppression. In this podcast series, hosts and AA students Ferial Massoud, Maria Putri and Aude Tollo retrace the common histories of three nominally decolonised states – Burkina Faso, Egypt and Indonesia – through the systems of debt servitude to which they were condemned in the wake of their independence, and which they remain subject to today. We ask: what are the spatial and material consequences of these systems and how can we begin to undo them?

Show Notes:

-      Richard Aina’s website: https://www.richard-aina.com

-      Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums, 2020

-      Felwine Sarr, Afrotopia, 2019

-      Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage, 2018

About A Line Traced:

As our society continues to unveil fractures within its social and political systems, A Line Traced aims to examine topics that are immediate, prescient and impact the build environment in ways that require urgent architectural responses. An AirAA podcast recorded, mixed, edited and distributed from the Architectural Association School of Architecture, which is based in Bedford Square in London. Special thanks to Thomas Parkes for his contribution to the production of our episodes. Visit air.aaschool.ac.uk to find out more.

The opinions expressed in AirAA podcasts are solely those of the participants and do not represent the opinions of the Architectural Association as a whole.