Today we are joined by Gregg Colburn who co-wrote “Homelessness is a Housing Problem”. Colburn also shares with us his findings about causes of homelessness, his views on the situation, and some solutions that could remove the problem.

Today we are joined by SB Divya who wrote the science fiction novel Meru and helps us think about potential futures on Earth. Meru as we discuss in this episode is a future in which tech is developed based on imaginations of current technology and science and possibilities unknown but conceivable.

This week we are joined by Mindy Seu who published The Cyberfeminism Index electronically and physically. What we focus on is how the index is gathered, organized, and shared and how it could be applicable in the built environment.

Here in the United States, we just celebrated Thanksgiving, and in the midst of all the feasting, we were not able to release a new episode. But we would love for you to revisit one of our favorite episodes from last season, Transversality: Klee, Kahn and the Persian Imagination with Shima Mohajeri. 

This week, we discuss the booming industry that is Indian Cinema, the Cinema House and Bollywood with Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Washington, Sudhir Mahadevan.

This week, we are joined by architect and artist, Anthony Pellecchia, as he shares with us his perspective on the profession of architecture, and his path from Hoboken, New Jersey, through the office of Louis Kahn, to a love of conceptual practice.

Image: "Skyline", Anthony Pellecchia 

This week, we discuss thin shell concrete and the work of Jack Christiansen as "Sculpture On a Grand Scale" with structural engineer and University of Washington, Professor of architecture, Tyler Sprague.

Finding your place in the field of architecture, particularly as a woman of color, can be complicated. This week, Renée Cheng, Dean of the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington,  helps us unpack how she found herself becoming a leading architecture educator, forging new paths for diversity and interdisciplinary thinking in an increasingly challenging and hierarchic world.

This week, we invite Architect, Historian and Educator, Peter Scriver to share with us his story of uncovering a love of Architecture History through Indian Modernism. Peter Scriver is an associate professor at the University of Adelaide in the school of architecture and built environment.

Image: After The Masters, Vikram Bhatt and Peter Scriver, Mapin Pub. 1990 

This week, we conclude our editor’s choice series with an episode to inspire new possibilities in how we can approach issues of, and futures within our changing climate. We will hear two approaches to how we might re-imagine our relationship with climate. From Daniel Barber we will hear a conversation that focuses on contemporary issues in how we envision sustainability as a movement and culture. And our second conversation, with Dilip da Cunha re-imagines, not how we relate to climate necessarily, but how we define, culturally and physically, what our environment is.

This week, in honor of our 50th episode, we will be hearing from two incredible architects as they describe their pursuits of the indescribable. This special editors choice edition combines our conversation with Javier Sanchez as well as our conversation with Pritzker Prize winning architect, B.V. Doshi.

THIS WEEK, as the second episode in our Editor’s Choice Edition, we revisit conversations with Nicole Huber and Yomi Braester as we investigate the art of storytelling through architecture and film.

This week, we kick off our summer long Editor's Choice series! This week, we re-visit our conversations with Jeff Hou and Manish Chalana as well as Rahul Mehrotra to see if we can start to unpack what it is that makes a city vibrant! 

This week we are joined by Phillip Thurtle, who is the director of the Comparitive History of Ideas (CHID) program at the University of Washington Seattle. Thurtle talks to us about the gothic, what it is and what it means to him and what he researches. 

For the season finale of ArchitectureTalk, we put our esteemed host, Vikram Prakash in the hot seat in a special edition conversation lead by ArchitectureTalk veteran, Ayad Rahmani! 

This week, we discuss augmentation, artificial intelligence and architecture of the mind with Rajesh Rao. Rajesh is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington where he also directs the Neural Systems Laboratory.

Image: Brain-Computer Interfacing: An Introduction, Rajesh P. N. Rao (Cambridge University Press, 2013)

This week we speak with Sonal Khullar, Associate Professor Art History, on modern Indian art, nationalism, feminism and interdisciplinarity, based on her book Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity and Modernism in India, 1930-1990.(University of California Press, 2015)

This week, we discuss nomadism, connection and intercultural dialogue with architect and urbanist, Kunlé Adeyemi. Kunlé is founding Principal at NLÉ Works.

This week we discuss inter-species relationships, and inter-species thinking, and its consequences for architecture, with Radhika Govindrajan. Radhika is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington who has recently published her book, Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas. 

Today we discuss Michael Pollen's How to Change Your Mind, and the recent resurgence of interest in psychedelics in terms of its implications for architectural thinking. Discussion topics include design studio pedagogy, creativity, the art of the podcast and the relationship between practice and the design studio. Sean Lally is the host of the Night White Skies podcast.

Today we examine the sketchbooks of Dutch architect and urban designer Frits Palmboom and understand drawing as a kind of quasi spiritual adoration of the landscape. We also discuss the role of tracing and errors in design thinking, as also the differences between the Indian, European and American city.

Today we speak with activist designer Sergio Palleroni, who has been taking students around the world to work with disadvantaged communities to make a difference, to build with them and to teach students how they can learn from building with them. We discuss the politics of design-build activism, and what that implies in terms of asking the brick what it wants to be!

“All of those natural materials - stone, wood - we’ve always seen ourselves in them, in some way.”

Today we engage in a broad-ranging discussion on the contemporary and future applications of what are considered to be vernacular or traditional materials with architect and professor Elizabeth Golden. Besides their structural, economic and political entanglements, our conversation also veers towards the spiritual and intangible ramifications of working with non-modernist materials.

www.architecturetalk.org

“We have to not take things as given, but rather tap into [our] own imaginaries, into [our] own yearnings, and longings, as an alternative world.”

Today we discuss the potential of architecture as the work of the perennially unfinished project, as a site for transgression, as the other to utopia and fundamentalism. Nicole Huber is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Washington. Discussion topics include: Fiction making, post-critical architecture, Tarkovsky and science fiction, surrealism and design thinking.

www.architecturetalk.org

“Isn’t this desire for objectivity a modernist sentiment?” - VP

“Where does one enter, and where does one exit out of the modern?” - MJ

In today's episode, we engage in a far-ranging and open-ended discussion on the question of the global with my longtime collaborator Mark Jarzombek. Circulating around the question of the larger agenda of the global, discussion topics include the modernity and its critiques, the nation-state and its limits, autobiography and its pitfalls, and what are the ways in which global thinking (dis)connects with deconstruction.

2:31 Magdalenian culture and civilization: the caves. The Gravettians.

4:09 A Global History of Architecture textbook + GAHTC: what is this global project?

6:50 Modernism, Postmodernism, and the critical question of the “after the modern”

11:23 Modernism as dualism: the good and the bad in equal doses, continuously, vs a Hegelian dialectic (destruction at the end)

13:30 “How to develop a critique that doesn’t entrap you into being complicit in one side of the game or the other side of the game?” -MJ

‘Isn’t this desire for objectivity a modernist sentiment?’ -VP

14:26 “Where does one enter, and where does one exit out of the modern?” -MJ

17:43 Ethics, rights, powers, and personal agency

19:00 Give money to Greenpeace but not on the boat: individual agency and the social matrix

21:06 “Ethical in a particular way,” haunting to one’s subject-position  

22:26 The shadowy terror of monotheism

23:35 The ‘Global’ as an ethics-opening term

25:04 Parallels and intersections of global histories with the craziness emerging with quantum theory in astrophysics

27:24 Uncertainty, possibility, and knowing (Meeting the Universe Halfway, Karen Barad)

28:04 What the people in Lascaux and Chauvet knew

28:14 “This sounds a little Hindu-ish to me, a little Vishnu,” and the conflicted presence of singular Judaism

34:36 Modernism and a vortex of non-dualities

36:42 Derrida as a “renegade rabbi”: reading from the margins

37:38 Connection between new materialism, French poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, Jewish philosophy and Buddhist thinking?

39:06 No singular global can apply to everything

39:13 Biography as entry? Significance of personal epistemologies in critical thinking of the world.

43:58 “Vishnu-Modernism”

45:35 the Post-Holocaust vs the Post-Colonial Global

1:00:20 Limitations of Derrida’s critiques: ethics and Buddha’s ear to the ground

1:03:19 “Other oralities need to be known.”: this is the global history project

1:05:33 “Writing on writing. Writing on writing on writing.” Iterations.

1:07:37 Writing corrodes oral-communicative structures

This week, we discuss the work, the working style and legacy of the late Catalonian architect, Enric Miralles with our guest Ayad Rahmani. Ayad is a Professor of Architecture at Washington State University.

Image: Floor Plan of Hostalets Civic Center, El Croquis Magazine, 1995

This week, we discuss global history in our conversation with Amit Srivastava, Senior Lecturer at the University of Adelaide, on post-postcolonial history and historiography in the Indian Ocean context. Discussion topics include: history of the modern architecture of India, globalization and contemporary South Asian architecture and infrastructural history versus 'big-name' architectural history.

Today we speculate about life, the purposes of life and architectural thinking with Danish architect Lene Tranberg, founding partner of Lundgaard & Tranberg in Copenhagen, Denmark. Discussion topics include: Phenomenology, the body in space, intuition as embedded knowledge, transcendence, doubt, translation, and striving to understand the interwoven character of material and place.

This week we discuss the GAHTC module on Climate and Global History with Daniel Barber,  Chair of the graduate Architecture group at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design. discussion topics include: ecology in non-modernist cultures, tropical modernism, new narratives of ecological thinking, designing for discomfort, and architecture as the mediation between the infrastructural and the personal. Image: Victor and Aladar Olgyay at the Princeton Architectural Laboratory, c. 1955

A great conversation with Seattle’s great conversation starter, John Boylan. We’ll discuss art and science, engineering, technology, industry and the potential of rigorous inquiry in both scientific and artistic explorations. John is a respected member of Seattle's technology community and instigator of interdisciplinary creative works such as 9e2 Seattle.

We discuss the value and challenges of conceptual architectural practice with Seattle based architect Rob Hutchison. Discussion topics include: death and memory, memory versus intuition, dedication, client relations and the emotional engines of design.

In this conversation with Yomi Breaester, Professor of Comparative Literature and Cinema Studies at the University of Washington, we discuss the many ways in which cinema and new media practices intersection with architecture as aesthetic and political practices. Discussion topics include: the chronotype, Tarkovsky’s Solaris, Peter Greenaway’s The Belly of an Architect, and Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love. 

This week, we are joined by the founder and CEO of Phantom Hands Deepak Srinath. Phantom Hands creates chairs and other various furniture pieces, and also brings attention to Indian craft worldwide.

THIS WEEK, we talk to Richard Williams about sex, Mad Men, James Bond and of course, architecture. Richard is a Professor of Contemporary Visual Cultures at The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh College of Art where he heads the History of Art subject area. Don’t miss this candid discussion of all things sexy in the contemporary built world.

Announcing Season 2, starting September 12, 2018! Upcoming conversation topics include world history, Asian cinema, conceptual practice and sex and architecture. Stay tuned!

We are reissuing one of our seminal conversations with Dominick LaCapra on Transference and Architecture to get you into the mood for our second round of conversations.

In this SPECIAL EDITION we talk with Warren Etheredge, critic, screenwriter, teacher and charismatic co-founder with Tom Skerritt of The Film School. Warren is also the author of TheWarrenReport and host of the podcast, The High Bar. Over a meal in the University of Washington Faculty Club, we discuss his career, screenwriting and the importance of storytelling, emotional vulnerability and honesty in film. We explore the art, craft (and crap) of cinema and design and interrogate issues of practice, celebrity, consumer culture, profit, auteurship and aesthetics in filmmaking and architecture through the work of Kubrick, Tarkovsky and others.

SOURCE: Afroditi Psarra

We talk to multidisciplinary artist, Afroditi Psarra (Professor of Digital Arts at the University of Washington) about her work with electronic textiles, "alienesque" aesthetics, soft circuits and our the new relationships that we have to establish between our bodies and responsive technologies. Discussion topics include: collaborative practice, DIY culture, parametic design, bio-feedback, open-source working and the uncanny. 

 DOA Exhibition Poster

We discuss the "Death of Architecture" with designers Aniket Bhagwat and Riyaz Tayyibji. DOA, the title of their exhibition currently touring in India, examines the state of architectural thinking and practice in India today including grappling with ideas about cities, time, preservation and the public. Bhagwat, a landscape architect, and Tayyibji, an architect, are both based in Ahmedabad, India. Through a series of provocations and storytelling, they engage humor and critical thinking to assess the discourse of contemporary design.

Muqarnas Vault, Masjid-i Shah/Imam, Isfahan. Source: Daniel C. Waugh, Courtesy of Archnet.org

We talk with Architectural historian Christian Hedrick, currently working at the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT as a researcher, visiting lecturer at the School of Architecture at Northeastern University and GAHTC contributor, about the intersection of Islamic architecture with cultures in India, China, North Africa, and Europe. We explore ideas of global exchange, translation and transformation of Islamic forms and materials, such as the pointed arch, as well as brick, stucco, and ornamental ceramic tiles and techniques like haft-rangī. We touch on ideas of Orientalism, and the circulation and representation of Islamic visual material culture in the Abbasid empire and Ummayad dynasty.

Hotel Condessa, Mexico City SOURCE JSa

This week we talk with Javier Sánchez, developer, architect and founder of JSa architectural firm, with offices in Mexico City and in Peru. We interrogate the state of contemporary practice in Mexico, the role of Modernism, and the power of transformation in architecture. We discuss with Javier family legacy, time, and innovation as the son and grandson of architects and forging his own path in the design world. And we examine the role of personal change and the role of running in rethinking architectural practice.

DEAR LISTENERS: You might notice some distortion in the second half of the interview. We had some interference on the recording but it improves.

Camel with Gatling gun SOURCE Smithsonian Magazine 1872

Camels, ships, roads, railways, electricity.....This week we talk with Shundana Yusaf, Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Utah, and discuss the concept and approach to her fascinating co-authored GAHTC module about architecture and the technologies of transportation and communication. Her research has looked at topics as rich and wide ranging as the BBC and Empire in the age of wireless communication as well as Sufi shrines and hyperconnectivity. 

This week, we are joined again with Mariam Issoufou Kamara and AbdouMaliq Simone, where we talk about the “Faada” and “Adda” as hangout spaces, and go in depth of what future Faada and Adda spaces would look like with urban inhabitation.

Based on her recent book, Creating Urban Agricultural Systems: An Integrated Approach to Design, we discuss with University of Washington's Gundula Proksch the myriad implications of re-thinking our food culture. Conversation topics range from community gardens to hydroponics, edible school yards to Mars colonies, the slow-food movement to bio-engineered buildings. 

 
View of kumbh mela. SOURCE Felipe Vera

We discuss kinetic architecture and ephemeral urbanism with Rahul Mehrotra, Professor of Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). Topics include events like the kumbh mela, and its implications about thinking about temporality in contemporary practice; designing for obsolescence; immigration and identity; and India in the 21st century. Rahul is also principal of RMA Architects, Mumbai. 

Mud brick fortification walls from the 10th century at Merv, Turkmenistan SOURCE: Manu Sobti

Dr. Manu P. Sobti, Senior Lecturer in the School of Architecture and Director of the Higher Degree Research Program at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, discusses his co-authored GAHTC module, Peripheries of Contact, which explores the architecture and urbanism created by migrant populations who traversed Central Asia and engaged with 'settled' peoples at the edges of their world. We discuss migration, loss and memory; graphic design, photography and cultural landscapes; the Mongols, Timurs, Uzbeks, Russians, Delhi Sultanates and Islamic identity in the medieval times.

Biography

MANU P. SOBTI is an Islamic architecture and urban historian, specifically focused on examining changing borderlands in the Asia-Pacific. Prior to his recent arrival at the University of Queensland’s School of Architecture as Senior Lecturer and Director of the Higher Degree Research Program, he served as Associate Professor at the School of Architecture & Urban Planning (SARUP), University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee USA, Coordinator of SARUP-UWM’s India Winterim and Uzbekistan Summer Program (2008-15), and directed the Building-Landscapes-Cultures (BLC) Concentration of SARUP-UWM’s Doctoral Program (2011-13) in partnership with the Art History Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Sobti also chaired SARUP's PhD Committee between 2014-16, leading an area of BLC's research consortium titled Urban Histories and Contested Geographies. Mapping urbanity and its scalar geographies feature prominently in his ongoing projects, a vantage determining how future urbanists view the multiplicity of emergent stakeholders within the contentious realms of the historical city and its changing meanings. His recent explorations have focused on the urban histories of early-medieval, Islamic cities along the Silk Road and the Indian Subcontinent, with specific reference to the complex, ‘borderland geographies’ created by riverine landscapes. Within a trans-disciplinary examination of medieval Eurasian landscapes straddling the region’s Amu Darya River, he is completing a project entitled The Sliver of the Oxus Borderland: Medieval Cultural Encounters between the Arabs and Persians – an unprecedented work on the historical, geo-politics of the Amu Darya, collating his extensive fieldwork and employing multiple Arabic, Persian, Russian and Uzbek sources. The Oxus borderland is also the subject of his ongoing filmic project entitled Medieval Riverlogues (intended for Public Television) which captures archival research within a re-drawn map series, state of the art computer-generated renderings and live footage on this cultural crucible, while suggesting provocative connections to enduring questions on cultural ‘indigeneities’ and identities, sustainability and resources. Mapping and the spatial humanities remain central to his work on the fast-changing urbanscapes of Delhi, Chandigarh, Ahmedabad & Bhopal, documented in the completion of two forthcoming book manuscripts - the first titled Space and Collective Identity in South Asia: Migration, Architecture and Urban Development (under contract with I. B. Tauris Press, expected April 2018); the second titled Riverine Landscapes, Urbanity and Conflict: Narratives from East and West (under contract with Routledge Press, expected Dec. 2017). His continuing work on contemporary architecture and urbanism in Asia has resulted in a third publication entitled Chandigarh Rethink (ORO Publishers, published June 2017).