Superurbanism – Details, episodes & analysis

Kengo Kuma is a mercurial architect, who works with natural forms and historical structures with an avant-garde sensibility. Tim talks to the usually taciturn Japanese maestro about the horrors of Metabolism, what he calls the philosophy of the detail and the affinities between Portugal and Japan.

To celebrate the London Festival of Architecture’s 20th anniversary Tim met Edwin Heathcote, the Financial Times architecture critic, in a small podcast booth built underneath the Lloyd’s building in London. Designed by Urban Radicals, the booth was the perfect place to talk about public space in London and Eddy’s book, On the Street: In-Between Architecture published by HENI.

For the last ten years, collector and curator Niall Hobhouse has run the charity Drawing Matter from a converted farm in Somerset. This year he has taken the decision to bring his amazing collection of architectural drawings to London, Tim takes a look through work by Le Corbusier, Aldo Rossi, Alvaro Siza, plus many more and asks Niall what the plan is for the next decade.

Amin Taha founded his practice, now called Groupwork, in London in 2003. Despite the controversy around his signature project 15 Clerkenwell Close, built with structural stone, he is a much sought-after architect. He takes host Tim Abrahams around his latest project 8 Bleeding Heart Yard in London and talks construction techniques, planning politics and the meaning of history.

Laure Mériaud and Cécilia Gross came together when colleagues recommended that their practices Atelier 2/3/4 and VenhoevenCS bid to design the one new building that is being constructed for the Paris 2024 Olympics. They take our host Tim Abrahams around the Aquatic Centre in Saint-Denis, a département outside the city proper that has long suffered.

Shane De Blacam has just received the Royal Academy Prize, for his work with the late John Meagher, who he entered into practice in 1976. His greatest works include the Samuel Beckett Theatre in Dublin and Munster Technological University Cork. Before forming his practice with Meagher, de Blacam worked in London for Chamberlain, Powell and Bon and with Louis I. Khan in Philadelphia.

Together with his colleagues Christopher Watson and Stephen Witherford, William Mann is a partner at one of the most consistently brilliant architecture practices in the country; Witherford Watson Mann. Recently he took Tim on a whistle-stop tour of their latest project; an almshouse in South London, explaining how history acts as a rich source of ideas for the practice to plunder.

Will Wiles is a brilliant author of several novels and a collection of short stories called The Anechoic Chamber that will be published in August 2024. He’s also a contributor to The Machine Book of Weird, recently published by Machine Books. With Tim, he explores the relationship between architecture and literature and between the exterior world and the interior.

Machine Books recently published Play the Game by Michael Owens and Ralph Ward: a book superbly woven together from interviews of the people who brought the Olympics to East London. To celebrate this event, the authors led a very special tour of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park with several of the key figures, including Eleanor Fawcett, the former Head of Design at the Olympic Delivery Authority.

Man of the moment Peter Barber takes us around his office in Kings Cross, London. Perhaps London's most famous builder of social housing, Barber explains the close details of his craft and his repertoire of design ideas. Less commonly touched on, he also explains the bigger picture; how teaching and utopian thinking moves his practice forward.