A is for Architecture Podcast

In the newest episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast Beth Hughes, Head of Architecture at the Royal College of Art, London, spoke with me about, well, all sorts – but mainly how architecture is taught now, what sort of thinkers and doers this produces, and therefore what sort of urbanism and architecture we can expect to get from them.

The financial and social barriers built into how architects are trained shapes who designs cities and buildings, which changes the shape of the places we end up living in.

To this end, Beth and I discuss Britain’s Architects Registration Board’s proposals to widen access to the profession by reforming the way architects are trained, with many schools now promoting a shorter and less architecturish route to qualification. Others, like the Royal College of Art, are maintaining the existing postgraduate model –a two-year programme.

It’s an interesting moment, one which see the marketization of higher education marry with student anxieties and concerns about costs and employability, to deliver into an ever-more pressured professional context more deployable graduates from a more representative cross-section of society.

Ultimately, we speak about Beth’s vision – I guess – of what a future mode of practice built by her graduates might look like.

Beth can be found at workand on LinkedIn.

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Image: RCA students Work In Progress show installation, © RCA

Music credits: Bruno Gillick

In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast architectural totem, Canadian American architect, professor and writer Witold Rybczynski, Professor Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, spoke with me about his forthcoming book, What Architecture Is, published by Yale University Press on October 27th this year. Rather than the perhaps more expected question – what is architecture? – Witold turns it and us around.

What Architecture Is is composed of seven chapters, riffing on John Ruskin’s Seven Lamps – exploring the value of History, Order, Ornament, Meaning, Beauty, Drawing and Place, but answering too to the critics of his 2013 How Architecture Works: A Humanist’s Toolkit, giving us the readers now the framework to judge buildings, and not just explain them. Grappling again with these, perhaps, architecture can find its public and speak to it again, becoming again the home of our collective memory, meaning and experience.

Witold tells his story, which is a good one, and we approach the what and why of his propositions, after a manner, sploshing around in his lovely prose.

Witold can be found at work and on his own website. The book is linked above.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

This episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast features a brace of professors, Cat Rossi and Charles Holland, both of UCA and Charles, Founder director of Charles Holland Architects. We met in the English port town of Dover to discuss Harvest, from the summer to autumn 2025, and Harvest Moon, a round table made from waste harvested within a forty-mile radius of Canterbury, and coproduced since the winter of 2025 with Local Works Studio, in partnership with Steffi Klenz and Stephen Knott of the Crafts Study Centre, Perry Court Farm and Perry Court Farm and Torry Hill Chestnut Fencing.

The Harvest projects are framed by the designer-makers’ awareness of climate and organised around a recurring question — what do we gather, harvest, and give thanks for today? It proposes, after a manner, reconnection through design with growing, seasonality and the harvesting of materials, and the cultures, behaviours and rituals that may descend from them.

Much is said about processes and programming of space as prerequisites for sustaining interventions – it’s not enough to just make a thing without consideration of the activities it sits within and produces. A table needs a meal, needs a crowd, needs grace, needs a drink. The table then is a curatorial format, as Cat puts it. From this particular, can we postulate a universal? Should we?

Cat can be found at work, on LinkedInand Instagram; Charles can be found at work hereand here, and on LinkedInand Instagram. Harvest is linked above.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Professor Antony Wood PhD, Tall Building Expert, Professor of Sustainable Vertical Urbanism at the Illinois Institute of Technology, author, architect and former president and CEO of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, now the Council of Vertical Urbanism, discusses… very tall buildings.

The Council of Vertical Urbanism is the body that oversees the certification of the world’s tallest buildings. Tallness, as our cities now attest, is seemingly the predominant solution to almost all urban problems, from sprawl, to banality to sustainability, new economics, urban identity and branding and even the housing crisis. Nearly ten times as many Supertalls – buildings over 300m, have been built since 2000 than were built in the previous 100 years. But outside their appeal as objects – big isn’t always beautiful, but it is normally very impressive – what are they for and how do they work as bits of a city?

Antony discusses this – where ‘tall’ comes from, what it achieves as a typology, how they’re made, what sorts of places and cities they make, and how they could do it all a lot better.

Anthony can be found through his excellent and popular LinkedIn page and at workwhere he runs the Masters of Tall Buildings and Vertical Urbanism. CVU is linked above.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Mabel O. Wilson - architect, historian, and professor at Columbia University, director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies - speaks about Thinking from Black: A Lexicon, published by FSG Editions this September.

Thinking from Black – a product of the Practicing Refusal Collective, a forum of artists and scholars dedicated to initiating dialogues on blackness, anti-black violence and black futurity in the twenty-first century brings together artists, scholars, poets, architects and activists to build a vibrant, experimental vocabulary for black life, culture and collective imagination.

Through cross-referenced and eclectic entries, the book argues for “thinking from Black” as a creative, plural, and liberatory practice rather than a fixed identity—one that refuses deficit-based frameworks and makes room for contradiction, tension, and possibility.

Mabel’s work includes books, exhibitions, memorials. You can connect to her via her work, and also LinkedInand Instagram. The book is linked above. The Practicing Refusal Collective is here.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

Image credits: Image 1: © J. Meejin Yoon: Detail of Memorial to Enslaved Laborers (2020), University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA.

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If you want and can, please support the A is for Architecture Podcast on Patreon or Buy Me a Coffee.

In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, poet and Creative Projects Manager at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, JL Williams, spoke to me about her recent collection of poetry,Strange Architectures, her fifth book of such with Shearsman Books. In the poems, Jennifer presents visions of architectures dreamed and written, taking us the audience over thresholds and into spaces of her – and perhaps our own – inner worlds.

The relationships between architecture, the psyche – literally ghost or soul in Greek– and dreamworlds is deep in architecture, manifest I’d argue throughout our modes of imagining and expressing the craft of building design. For Carl Jung, architecture was not a metaphor but a means of understanding the human psyche and his dream of a multistorey house helped shape his concept of the collective unconscious. Indeed, the homes he designed gave physical form to his propositions about the relationships between conscious and unconscious life.

In this roomy conversation, Jennifer reads her poems, we discuss them, think about space and buildings, their construction, inner-life, motherhood and Jung and a lot of other stuff. It’s a ride, believe.

Jennifer can be found on her websitehere, at workhere and onLinkedIn.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

Image credit: Image 1: © JL Williams

#StrangeArchitectures #ArchitectureAndPoetry #ArchitectureAndPsyche #JungianArchitecture #AisForArchitecturePodcast

In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I spoke to Shumi Bose, about her work as a curator, chief editor of KoozArch, senior lecturer in architecture at Central Saint Martins in London and, I’d suggest, something like an activist-not-activist. Speaking here, Shumi makes a clear case for the role of critical distance as she has found it – and I’d suggest – used it in her various roles and projects. We speak about Shumi’s journey to architectural teaching and thought, her various initiatives in support of diversified knowledges and justice, and the spaces we can make to model integrity in our work.

Shumi can be found at work here and on LinkedInand Instagram.

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If you want and can, please support the A is for Architecture Podcast via the Patreon or Buy Me a Coffee links in the podcast description, where you will also find links to Shumi online.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

Image credit: Image 1: Matthew Blunderfield: Shumi Bose/ Space Popular - Fables for Our Time; Image 2: Special Thanks Studios - Shumi Bose & Space Popular Collaboration; Image 3: Special Thanks Studios: Shumi Bose

#ArchitecturePodcast # #ShumiBose #ArchitecturalCriticism #ArchitectureAndActivism #CriticalArchitecture

In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Professor Max Sternberg discuss the Bavarian architect Hans Döllgast, the subject of his latest book,Hans Döllgast: Reconstruction and Modernity, which is being published by Lund Humphries in late September this year. Born in 1891 and surviving all Germany’s many troubles to 1974, Döllgast is known chiefly for his postwar reconstruction work in Munich. However, Max argues, in this he has been misread. Rather than an ambivalent light touch ruin architect, his post-war reconstructions in fact grew from a consistent ethos of an anti-dogmatic ‘middle ground’ embracing plurality, revealed in history materialised in accumulated city fabric. As such, his work of retaining the war scars of the Alte Pinakothek, for example, serve as an act of resistance to cultural and political amnesia, to wanting to forget and discard.

Max can be found at workhere. The book is linked above.

If you want and can, please support the A is for Architecture Podcast by listening in and sharing it, or by either subscribing onPatreon or making a gift viaBuy Me a Coffee.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

Image credit: ©Michael Gaenßler (1980).

#ArchitecturePodcast #HansDollgast #ArchitecturalHistory #PostwarArchitecture #ModernArchitecture

Architecture’s conscience – as building, buildings, materials and practices – is a bolt-on at best, but more often a semantic, sophistic trick. Architecture as a profession talks ethically but it’s very difficult to see where this manifests in real life. This is an agency problem but also a discipline problem – at a profession-level individualism resists collective action to solve broad social problems. At a policy level, any attempt by anybody to suggest architects have some social obligation that impinges on “design” gets shot down.

In a May 2026 op-ed for the Journal of Architecture entitled Architecture et Révolution: The Engineered Consent of a Discipline, Ole Bouman, writer, curator, publisher and Professor in the College of Architecture & Urbanism, Tongji University, Shanghai, makes a strong claim: architecture is aligned with delivering the status quo, just as Le Corbusier suggested in it should. Contrary to the general belief that we ask too much of architecture, Bouman suggests perhaps in fact we ask too little.

Ole suggests that the polycrisis upon us requires action at the collective level. To illustrate this, he uses the bicycle: no single bicycle fights climate change but "a culture of cycling can,". No project changes anything but the knowledge of the discipline could.

Ole’s website is linked here. The essay is linked above.

If you want and can, please support the A is for Architecture Podcast by listening in and sharing it, or by either subscribing on Patreonor making a gift via Buy Me a Coffee.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

Image credit: © Ole Bouman via Instagram.

As architects, the nature of buildings is as drawings. Even when on site, a building is read in terms of its relationship to the documents off its legal production, preeminent among which – after the contract - are the plan and elevation. As such, the buildings of architects are abstractions. To use Hayles and Gannon, 'design is a mode of practice that represents a reality, but is not the reality it represents.'

For others - normal people - perhaps buildings are the sum of their stuff – materials, light, tone, smell, thresholds and transitions - bodily things. In any case, for this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I spoke to Maria Fusco, Professor and Chair of Interdisciplinary Writing at the University of Dundee, about her publication, Legend of the Necessary Dreamer, published by Vanguard Editions, which describes her study of the Palacio Pombal, Lisbon, which Maria produced for the Lisbon Architecture Triennial in 2017. We discuss this, her work and practice, and hear Maria read parts of the book too.

It is an elegant example of how buildings might be understood both through and as bodies, textures and histories, and through a thing other than drawing.

Maria’s book is linked above; she can be found on her website, at work, Instagramand LinkedIn.

If you want and can, please support the A is for Architecture Podcast by subscribing on Patreonor making a gift via Buy Me a Coffee.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

Image credit: ‘In-situ courtesy of Maria Fusco'.

What would a failing city look like? Would one be able to tell if, for example, London or New York were a busted flush? What would be the markers? Social discord, unwalkable streets, cultivated inequality and polarization, declining mental and physical health might seem like some measures to test.

Perhaps a better question is what would a growing city look like? This, as I read it, is the question Gabriella Bennett seeks to answer in her book, How to Build a City: Journeys into the Urban Future, which is coming out with Headline Press on the 13 August, and documents both her personal story and her explorations of places – from the Ukraine to Tokyo, from Florida to the Arctic - that have begun to remake themselves fit for us now.

Given urbanisation, the central claim Bennett makes in How to Build a City is simple and insistent: the shape of where you live shapes the life you lead. Because cities both generate their crises and accelerate them, the act of rebuilding is the central moral and creative problem of any urban future.

Gabriella’s book is linked above; she can be found on her website, Instagramand LinkedIn.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

Image credits: © Gabriella Bennett. Main: Isometric Hospital Building, SimCity 4 style, from Sprite AI.

#HowToBuildACity #UrbanFuture #CityPlanning #UrbanDesign #ArchitecturePodcast

As George Berkeley almost almost said, if architecture is built in a city but no one takes its picture, does it make a sound? Photography is intrinsic to architecture, so much so that most of us only know buildings through the images made of them.

What the photographer does then is to manifest architecture in the general imagination; arguably, it makes buildings architecture, elevating it beyond context and into objects: known, identifiable and desired. That means the photograph has in itself meaning, which in turn lends photography ethical content. So it’s an important job. It needs to be done well. To do it well requires skill and craft.

What though is a good photograph? To answer that, I spoke to architectural photographer Tim Soar, about his work, his philosophy, artistry, ethics and the mastery required of his method. Beginning in social photography, Tim’s is a lovely story of pursuing technical precision and emotional depth to convey architects’ visions and buildings’ social life.

Tim can be found on his website, on Instagramand LinkedIn.

If you want and can, please support the A is for Architecture Podcast by listening in and sharing it, or by either subscribing on Patreonor making a gift via Buy Me a Coffee.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

Image credits: © Timothy Soar. Main: Gloucester Services by Glenn Howells Architects, 2016, photographed for Architecture Today.

# #ArchitecturalPhotography #TimSoar #ArchitecturePhotography #VisualCulture #ArchitecturePodcast

After the exhaustion of modernist functionalism and Koolhaasian bigness, architecture should be reconceived within the limits of the earth, as craft, stewardship, locality and bricolage. In short, architecture is just more complicated than that. So suggests Irénée Scalbert, architectural critic and historian, in his recent book, Totems: Selected Essays on Architecture, published by Park Books this year,

The title image of the totem — an object whose power comes from its correct form and from its community's investment in it or that, and not from mere symbolism — seems to me to gather in Irénée’s whole project: architecture as something made, charged with collective life, and irreducible to either pure function or decoded meaning.

Isn’t that architecture itself?

Irénée is everywhere online, not much by his own hand, except on Insta. The book is linked above.

If you want and can, please support the A is for Architecture Podcast by listening in and sharing it, or by either subscribing on Patreonor making a gift via Buy Me a Coffee.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

Image credit: Communal corn bin, Togoland. From A Camera Actress in the Wilds of Togoland, Meg Gherts, 1915.

For Immanuel Kant, an aesthetic experience required four conditions: disinterestedness, universality, purposiveness and necessity. Architecture, as such, has always struggled with this, because its appreciation is fundamentally tied to a sense of its utility – as shelter, symbol, status, want – and its designedness evidence of its adherent beauty relative to its purpose.

Artist made architecture of the sort documented in scholar, author, folklorist and former director and curator of SPACES, Jo Farb Hernández's Architectural Fantasies: Artist-Built Environments, and published by Tra Publishing in April this year, might square the circle. Here we have an extraordinary range of places and spaces that we can approach aesthetically in very Kantian ways. But what are these strange, discrepant heterotopias doing, what brings them about, who are they for and what place do the have in the world of architecture proper?

Jo can be found on her website, with links there to her other online appearances. The book is linked above.

If you want and can, please support the A is for Architecture Podcast by listening in and sharing it, or by either subscribing on Patreonor making a gift via Buy Me a Coffee.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

Image credit: Jo Farb Hernández - The Mindfield Cemetery by William “Billy” Blevins Tripp; edited by AG.

What if buildings could free themselves – or be freed by their architects – of the stricture of type, of discrete identity, of typology? What might happen if, for example, a school and a house - schoolness and houseness – were hybridized? What if building and non-building, even, were wedded? Might this, perhaps, offer a way to negotiate, heal even, the nature-architecture divide?

This is not pompous and pretentious speculation, but the proposal of Winka Dubbeldam, founder-director of Archi-Tectonics and director and CEO of the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), in her recent edited book, Monsters and Mutants: Explorations in the Architecture-Nature Continuum, published by Park Books in 2025, and featuring essays by Winka, Justin Korhammer, Thom Mayne, Carlo Ratti and Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen. It is also the modus operandi of her and Justin Korhammer’s New York, Los Angles and Hangzhou practice, Archi-Tectonics.

Winka and I talk all this, and intriguing and inspiring it is. For new conditions, we probably need new typologies and a taxonomy agile enough to meet a swiftly tilting planet.

Here is Winka at workand university. The book is linked above.

If you want and can, please support the A is for Architecture Podcast by listening in and sharing it, or by either subscribing on Patreonor making a gift via Buy Me a Coffee.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

Image credit: Hybrid Stadium & Concert Hall, by SFAP.

In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I spoke with Paul Knox, University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech, about his 2025 book, Lost London: From Crystal Palace to Heston Airport, a History in 25 Missing Buildings, published by Yale University Press in April this year.

Lost London’s provocative move is to insist that ordinary buildings — a pub in Poplar, a roadhouse on a bypass, a block of council flats in Hackney — deserve the same analytical attention as a Wren church or a Robert Adam terrace. As one perhaps should expect from an urban geographer, this pushes back against the exquisite art-historical approach, which treats buildings as art objects and thereby frames architectural history around consecrated geniuses and great buildings. It is a seductive approach, for sure, but perhaps troubling in a different way. If everything means something to someone, how can we knock anything down at all?

Paul is not much online, the lucky fella. You can find him on Grokipediathough. The book is linked above.

If you want and can, please support the A is for Architecture Podcast by listening in and sharing it, or by either subscribing on Patreonor making a gift via Buy Me ahttps://buymeacoffee.com/aisforarchitectureCoffee.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

Image credit: London Metropolitan Archives – Colombia Road Market.

In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I spoke to architect and historian, Vanessa Grossman, Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design, about her 2024 book, A Concrete Alliance: Communism and Modern Architecture in Postwar France, published by Yale University Press.

Sampling only the most tantalizing soupçon of the book’s ideas, Vanessa and I discuss the relationship between the French Communist Party and postwar modernist architects, and how for them concrete served not just as a symbol of avant-garde taste but also political commitment. Architects like Oscar Niemeyer, Renée Gailhoustet, Paul Chemetov and Patrick Bouchain, and the networks of actors and actants, programs and artefacts that were activated to deliver social housing and cultural and working spaces in communist municipalities across France, as a means of delivering, ultimately, a countersociety of architects that sought to put a new vision of modernism to work towards a better version France’s nascent Fifth Republic.

Vanessa can be found at work here and she’s on the socials too; the book is linked above.

If you want and can, please support the A is for Architecture Podcast by listening in and sharing it, or by either subscribing on Patreonor making a gift via Buy Me a Coffee.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

Image credit: Jean Biaugeaud, showing the hall of the Raspail housing tower by Renée Gailhoustet, 1968.

In the latest episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I spoke to architect and scholar, Asma Mehan, Assistant Professor at the Huckabee College of Architecture, Texas Tech University and director of the Architectural Humanities and Urbanism Lab (AHU_Lab), about her edited volume, After Oil: A Comparative Analysis of Oil Heritage, Urban Transformations, and Resilience Paradigms, published by Springer in 2025.

In our conversation, Asma speaks about the close link between modern architecture, urbanism and the extraction, production and consumption of oil, what Peter Droege, I think, termed Fossil City.

Asama – and the book – however, are concerned now with the next thing: as economies look to shift away from their reliance on oil, what should and can we do with oil’s infrastructure?

So intrinsic to the making of the present human condition, indeed to the social and cultural making of the last 120 years, are we not obliged to consider it a repository of history, like any other significant material culture? And nothing has been more important than oil, for sure, except perhaps the wars for it, so doesn’t it deserve some sort of memorialisation too?

Asma can be found at work here; the book is linked above.

If you want and can, please support the A is for Architecture Podcast by listening in and sharing it, or by either subscribing on Patreonor making a gift via Buy Me a Coffee.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

Image credit: Wikimedia. Pumpjack east of Andrews, TX (2009) by Zorin09.

In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I spoke to scholar, activist, author and feminist totem, Leslie Kern, about Gentrification is Inevitable and Other Lies, which she published with Verso in 2022. In Leslie and my conversation we speak broadly about her work and approach, some themes from the book, and how resistance is not just necessary, but possible too.

in 1964 Ruth Glass, in her introduction to London: Aspects of Change, named the phenomenon: ‘One by one, many of the working class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle classes—upper and lower. Shabby, ‘modest mews and cottages—two rooms up and two down—have been taken over, when their leases have expired, and have become elegant, expensive residences. […] Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts in a district, it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working class occupiers are displaced, and the whole social character of the district is changed […] The invasion has since spread.’

Glass implied that what is presented as urban improvement is in fact a reassertion of class hierarchy in spatial form. In recent years things have moved on, away from what might be seen as an evolutionary process of cultural and economic enrichment , where artists, bohemians, thinkers and web designers find space for their creative praxis. Now the market makes it, and the government spends its taxes to make it more likely to occur.

Leslie can be found on her website, linked above, as is the book.

If you want and can, please support the A is for Architecture Podcast by listening in and sharing it, or by either subscribing via links in the podcast description.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

Image credit: Ambrose Gillick.

Frederick Kiesler was an Austrian-American architect, artist and theorist who, born at the tail end of the nineteenth century, bore witness to the irresistible rise of modernism in architecture and alongside it, the pyrrhic victory of amoral, individuated thinking, revealed so starkly in the mania of colonialism and the horrors of its implosion in the first half of the twentieth century.

In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I spoke with Spyros Papapetros, Associate Professor of Architecture at Princeton University, and Gerd Zillner, Director of the Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna, about the great man, and particularly about his hitherto unpublished opus, Magic Architecture: The Story of Human Housing, compiled between 1944–1946 and now published for the first time by MIT Press.

Conceived as a Neo-Vitruvian treatise, and an implicit rival to Le Corbusier's Vers une Architecture from 1923, at the heart of the book is Kiesler's central concept of magic architecture which rejected the functionalism and efficiency of Corb, Buckminster Fuller, and modern planning. Instead, Kiesler proposed an alternative history of housing grounded in magic, ritual, dream, and the integration of animal instinct with human creativity, arguing that the deepest purpose of architecture is not physical shelter but spiritual and psychological protection — the creation of dwellings that answer humanity's fundamental fears, desires, and sense of the unknown. So, prescient indeed.

If you want and can, please support the A is for Architecture Podcast by listening in and sharing it, or by either subscribing on Patreonor making a gift via Buy Me a Coffee.