In the 13th episode of  A is for Architecture’s third series, I spoke with the remarkable architect and writer, Juhani Pallasmaa, former professor of architecture and dean at the Helsinki University of Technology, now incorporated as Aalto University. Pallasmaa’s work has been of huge importance to architects now active in the transformation of our towns and cities, with his description of a tactile, material and immanent embodiment visible in the work of almost all good, urban work now being built. His written work particularly stands, in a way, in counterpoint to the superficial and the visual, that occularcentric tendency born of late capitalist starcitecture, and the preferencing of the image over depth and the experiential. Central to our discussion were two of Pallasmaa’s great works – The Eyes of the Skin (John Wiley & Sons, 1996) and The Thinking Hand (John Wiley & Sons, 2009), both of which are worthy of continued study. You can listen to Jonathan Hale speak about Juhani’s inspiration, the phenomenologist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, on A is for Architecture here. Before he and I recorded this episode, Juhani had received a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Paimio Sanatorium Foundation, at the Sanitorium itself, where he also gave a talk entitled "The Ethical Meaning of Architecture: The relational and existential essence of art". A joy and an undeserved privilege, getting to speak to a hero like this. 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

In Series 3’s 12th episode of  A is for Architecture I spoke with architect, writer, and thinker Keller Easterling, Enid Storm Dwyer Professor and Director of the MED Program at Yale University, about her 2021 book, Medium Design: Knowing How to Work on the World, published by Verso. To quote James Graham in the Journal of Architectural Education, ‘Medium Design emerged into a world marked by […] a growing desire for change within the architectural profession. […] Is Medium Design the closing bracket of the 2010s in architectural theory, or a hinge between the “before” and the “after”’. It’s a good question, which Easterling’s book begins to dissect, recognising the language on which the discipline has grown dependent, proposing action in its stead. Medium Design: Knowing How to Work on the World is available on the Verso website – it’s quite affordable. Keller’s Yale profile is here, and her personal website here. You can watch Keller talk about the work at ETH Zurich in a lecture from a year ago here. Words, words, words, said sharp Hamlet. Well listen, and find out. 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

In episode 11, series 3 of A is for Architecture I spoke with architect Chris Dyson, principal of Chris Dyson Architects, and Dominic Bradbury, about his (their) new book, Chris Dyson Architects: Tradition and Modernity, published by Lund Humphries this year. Chris Dyson Architects’ practice has a reputation for sensitive modern work in historic contexts, which the book documents, describing in text and lovely images what the blurb says is the practice’s works’ ‘overriding sense of different elements – be they material, temporal or cultural – coming together into coherent wholes [making] architecture that feels old and new at the same time.’ Chris Dyson Architects: Tradition and Modernity is available on the Lund Humphries website here. Chris’ practice website is here, Instagram here, X here and LinkedIn here. There are a few nice bits online with Chris, such as this profile in Building Design here, and a couple of videos on YouTube - Architects at Home  and one on preserving and enhancing the heritage of The Goodsyard here. Dominic’s website is here; he has written a huge number of books on material culture, which are certainly worth a look. His Instagram is here, LinkedIn here, and X here. Old-new. What a fusion, as Jacques Lu Cont almost put it. 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

In A is for Architecture’s Episode 10/3 Katrin Bohn and André Viljoen – architects, academics and activists – speak about their work on urban agriculture, specifically the idea’s they developed in CPULs Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes: Designing Urban Agriculture for Sustainable Cities, published by Elsiever in 2005, developed and represented in Second Nature Urban Agriculture: Designing Productive Cities, published by Routledge in 2014, and which won the 2015 RIBA President's Award for Outstanding University-located Research. CPULs are part of Bohn and Viljoen’s proposal for ‘a resilient urban entity […] that enables sustainable urban food systems for the pleasure of its individual citizens and the benefits of environment, economy, culture and society as a whole.’ It’s pretty wild as an idea, and a provocation (perhaps), but it might also be the future, one of universal rights to good food, clean air, open space and healthy, collective, vigorous physical labour in the metropolis. And that’s before you even get to work. You can find Bohn & Viljoen’s practice website here where there are links to many useful resources, and links to CPULs is here and Second Nature is here. Andre’s profile at University of Brighton is here, and Katrin’s here. They also linger marginally in the socialmediasphere: you can find Andre on LinkedIn, and Katrin on LinkedIn, too. Yummy cities for the win. 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

Episode 9/3 of A is for Architecture is a conversation with the architect, artist, writer and teacher, Tom de Paor, ‘one of Ireland’s foremost architects’. We speak about a lot of things, but spend most time thinking about his work Desert/ Dysart, documented beautifully in a book with Peter Maybury, published by Gall Editions as part of Maybury and Paul Clarke’s Notations collection, and due for a significant feature in A+U next spring, and also the Pálás Cinema, Galway, which opened in 2018. Tom’s work is extensive and highly considered, and includes the National Sculpture Factory Cork (1998), Clontarf Pumpstation and landscape (2007), the Druid Theatre, Galway (2009), and a number of submissions to the Venice Architecture Biennale since the inaugural Irish pavilion he designed, the widely celebrated work N3 – ‘a martyrium in peat’. In 2022 dePaor staged the exhibition ‘i see Earth: building and ground: 1991–2021’, curated by Nathalie Weadick, reviewed in The Times here. You might find Desert for sale via Peter Maybury’s website, although the print run was small, so I doubt it. There’s a good review of it – and the series – on Maybury’s website by Michael McGarry writing in Perspective magazine. Tom’s practice website is here and Dysart’s emergence is documented on Instagram as dysart_dysert_disert_desert. Keep your eyes peeled for the feature on it in A+U next year. You can hear/ watch Tom speak about Desert/ Dysart as part of the KU Leuven Faculteit Architectuur’s Going Public YouTube lecture series here, with a lecture called ‘House and Garden’ in 2022, and on the Pálás Cinema at Harvard’s GSD, in a talk entitled “previous, next” from 2017, here. Power springs up, as Hannah Arendt said. So does Tom. 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

A is for Architecture’s Episode 8, Series 3, is a conversation with a trio of great scholars, Tahl Kaminer, Leonard Ma and Helen Runting, about their recent book, Urbanizing Suburbia: Hyper-Gentrification, the Financialization of Housing and the Remaking of the Outer European City, published by Jovis in July this year. Addressing the ongoing exodus from the inner city apparent across the world and the appropriation of the suburbs by new communities, the book examines ‘the relationship between three current processes underway in global cities: the hyper-gentrification of inner cities, the financialization of housing, and the structural changes occurring in the suburbs […] using the examples of four key global European cities: Amsterdam, Berlin, London, and Stockholm.’ You can find the book on the Jovis website here. Tahl’s Welsh School of Architecture profile is here, Helen’s Malmö University profile can be found here, and she’s on Insta and X too. Her practice, Secretary Office for Architecture, is worth a look. Leonard can be found at the Estonian Academy of Arts here, and on Drawing Matter here. Knowledge is power, so listen and learn, and grow in power. 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

Episode 7/ 3 of A is for Architecture, is a conversation with writer, photographer and teacher Paul Dobraszczyk, about his book, Animal Architecture: Beasts, Buildings and Us, published by Reaktion Books in March this year. Animal Architecture ‘considers many different animals, opening up new ways of thinking about architecture and the more-than-human [and] asks what we might require in order to design with animals and become more attuned to the other lifeforms that already use our structures’. That’s what the blurb says, anyway. You can find Paul on X here, Instagram here and at his website here. The book is on the Reaktion website, and you can watch Paul talk about it with UNSW’s Dr Siobhan O'Sullivan on her Knowing Animals podcast on YouTube. Very recently Paul wrote on The Conversation about another pathological effect of big, shiny glass buildings – bird killing. Ah, modernity, you little wonder. Worth a sticky beak, I reckon. 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

In episode 6/ 3 of A is for Architecture, architect, writer, teacher and researcher, Charlotte Skene Catling talks about her practice Skene Cailtling de la Peña, which she founded in 2003 with Jaime de la Peña. The practice’s work has been widely published and to considerable critical acclaim, blending as it does context, occupation/ use, earth, soil, sedimentation and historic records, in a process they term geoarchaeology. The term has academic connotations, and how this is actualized in Skene Catling de la Peña’s practice is worth hearing told. It particularly fascinating where it touches on Aino and Alvar Aalto’s Toppila silo in Oulu, Finland, which they are turning into a regenerative/ cultural space with the Factum Foundation. You can find Charlotte all over the internet. She wrote a column for the Architectural Review, Domus and The Burlington Magazine, teaches at the London School of Architecture, Instagrams and LinkedIns. There’s a lovely article at Drawing Matter on The Dairy House, excerpted from Françoise Astorg Bollack’s Material Transfers: Metaphor, Craft, and Place in Contemporary Architecture, published by  Monacelli Press in 2020. Have a look at Flint House, which was the RIBA House of the Year 2015, and is covered most stylishly in this Architectural Review vid. Deep stuff. Subterranean, even... 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

In episode 5/ 3 of A is for Architecture, Liz Postlethwaite talks about her practice as a participatory artist, permaculture designer and Director of Small Things Creative Projects, a social enterprise with a focus on regenerative culture through designing and writing scaled interventions in public. Permaculture is mimetic, promoting the management of land and habitats by paralleling and replicating natural ecologies. (It’s also more than this, as Liz explains.) It has direct relevance for architecture and practice, reframing the relationship of designers and sites/ context towards greener, more holistic, ethical and slower ways. It also offers a number of simple motifs for understanding the integrated and rhizomatic nature of environments, people, stuff, action and intention. Believe, it’s a good thing, even if you’re not a hippy. You can find Liz online at the Small Things Creative Projects website, and also on Liz’s personal website. Liz runs training and mentoring workshops which you can read about on the Permaculture Association website. Liz is on Instagram as @mudandculture, and can be found on LinkedIn here. Liz writes a Substack, Mud and Culture, which you might want to subscribe to. Listen to the podcast, slowly, repeatedly and thinkily. 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

In episode 4/ 3 of A is for Architecture, Stuart Vokes and Aaron Peters speak about their practice, Vokes & Peters, and their elegant domestic and civic buildings in the heart and hinterlands of Brisbane. Our discussion sprung from their recent book, Migrations from Memory, a collection of essays by Stuart Vokes and Aaron Peters reflecting upon twenty years of practice, published by Canalside Press in 2023. Vokes & Peters’ domestic work is particularly wonderful, and rightly acclaimed, embodying a civility and civicness that is distinct and significant. There is much online about it. A quote from Stuart from the book’s opening illustrates something of their approach: ‘One can be poetic about a house and describe it as a city in miniature – just like the city, one can find a range of rooms, enabling a range of events and behaviours that satisfy the spectrum of human emotions. But I am equally satisfied with the idea that a house might be considered a room of the city – a room where we feel at home, the one place left in the city where we might find real reverie and contentment. A house needn’t be another public place, at least not always.’ Vokes and Peter are all over the internet, but for one, there’s a decent video on their Auchenflower House (pictured on the podcast image) in Brisbane from 2020 on the Architecture AU website, and you might also have a sticky at their recent Blok Stafford Heights, winner of this year’s New House Under 200 Square Metres in the Houses Awards, and covered in the Guardian. Their own website features an excellent selection of written work too. Both Stuart and Aaron are on Instagram. Migrations from Memory is available on the Canalside Press website and everywhere else that's decent⁠. Listen to the podcast, and work something out. 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

In A is for Architecture’s third episode of the series, Monica Degen and Gillian Rose speak about their 2022 book, The New Urban Aesthetic: Digital Experiences of Urban Change. The book ‘explores how cities worldwide are being transformed and reconfigured by the twin forces of digital technologies and 'urban branding' [generating] ‘sensory bodily experiences [which] this book terms the new urban aesthetic.’ Documenting this shift through global examples, the book helps us understand the how and why of the experience of contemporary urban space.   Gillian is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford, and Monica is Professor in Urban Cultural Sociology at Brunel University London. Gillian can be found on X, Monica is also on X and LinkedIn, as well as on the Timescapes of Urban Change website, where you can see her speak about other interests and research.  The New Urban Aesthetic is on the Bloomsbury website, where you can – probably should – buy it. Listen, learn, share, go on now. 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

In Episode 2, Season (or series) 3 of A is for Architecture, Simon Henley talks about his work as a designer, researcher, maker and teacher, and the work of Henley Halebrown, the practice he founded in 1995. Initially we had agreed to explore a notion Simon suggested of ‘beneficial building’. We never go there precisely, but perhaps in spirit. Henley Halebrown are increasingly significant players in the production of new urban housing, particularly in London, where their work has grown in stature and reputation. This year, their Taylor & Chatto Courts and Wilmott Court, Frampton Park Estate has been shortlisted for the RIBA Neave Brown Award for Housing, and the Hackney New Primary School and 333 Kingsland Road won the International Architecture Award 2023. Previous work  includes a litany of acclaimed schemes, including Chadwick Hall student housing in Roehampton which was nominated for the Stirling Prize in 2018. A great conversation, for sure. 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

In the first episode of A is for Architecture’s third series, the effervescent Denise Scott Brown talks about her journey to and through architecture, as a designer, writer, planner, urbanist, theorist and teacher. It is a wonderful, remarkable story, told with great eloquence and elegance, and one which deserves continued attention. Denise’s work with her practice Venturi Scott Brown has inspired a great many people, with buildings including Franklin Court, Philadelphia (1976), the Children's Museum, Houston, Texas (1992), the Sainsbury Wing, National Gallery, London (1991), the Seattle Art Museum (1991) and the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego (1996). Her and Robert Venturi’s written work has been hugely impactful too, and includes the totemic Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, (1972, with Robert Venturi and Steven Izenour), Architecture as Signs and Systems: for a Mannerist Time (2004, with Robert Venturi), the significant essay Room at the top? Sexism and the Star System in Architecture (1989), and Studio, Architecture’s offering to academe (2016). Threaded through it all is a genuine belief in the value of ordinary and everyday ways of being and doing the built environment. There is a huge amount of material online, in libraries (in real books!), in magazines and journals, and to listen to about or featuring Denise. Go find a book, and think about it all. As she said, ‘People have learnt from Las Vegas, but they haven’t learnt the half of it yet’. It was an extraordinary sensation speaking with Denise, like swimming in very deep waters. 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

Episode 37/2 of A is for Architecture is a conversation with Alan Dickson,  co-founder and director of Rural Design, an acclaimed and innovative architecture practice based on the Isle of Skye, Scotland. Rural Design’s work is characterised by a reappropriation of vernacular forms and construction traditions, which is both contemporary and contextually embedded. Have a listen and a look around. Rural Design’s website is a good one, and they are on Twitter and Instagram. You can see their work on Dezeen, ArchDaily, in the AJ, and a lot of other places too.  The Rural House scheme we spoke about can be found here. I first met Alan in 2012 when he came to the Glasgow School of Art to give a lecture, which you can watch on Vimeo here. 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

In Episode 36, Season 2 of A is for Architecture, Eleanor Jolliffe and Paul Crosby speak about their book, Architect: The Evolving Story of a Profession, published by RIBA Publishing in March this year. Eleanor is an architect with Allies and Morrison and writes regularly for the architectural press, including a column for Building Design. Paul, also an architect, now leads the professional practice/ Part 3 course at the Architectural Association. Thematically a chronology of the emergence of a very particular discipline, Architect looks at ‘the key questions of where the architectural profession originated in the Western tradition, why it is, how it is today and where it might be going next [and] postulate that architects' ability to adapt and reinvent themselves in the past will stand them in good stead for the uncertainties of the future.’ We shall see, shan’t we? In the meantime, listen to these two fine folk, and find out. Eleanor is professionally here, at BD here, on LinkedIn here and tweets here. Paul’s AA profile is here, and LinkedIn-able here. The book is on the RIBA website here, where you can buy it. 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

Episode 35/2 of A is for Architecture features Charles Holland, principal of Charles Holland Architects, and Professor of Architecture at the University of the Creative Arts, Canterbury. We speak about Charles’ work and research, focusing on his 2022 Davidson Prize-winning proposal, Co-Living in the Countryside, ‘a proposal for new rural housing […] developed as a collaboration with artist  Verity-Jane Keefe, urban designer Joseph Zeal-Henry and the Quality of Life Foundation. ‘Co-living in the Countryside responds to the brief for co-living and proposes a new rural housing typology [allowing for] shared spaces, flexible and adaptable house types and an approach based on mutual, cooperative governance’ on a site in Sussex. There’s much online about Charles’ work, both recent and in his previous iteration as founder-director of FAT, a design practice with a remarkable body of work that challenged the pieties of much late modern architecture. You can have a look at it here. You can find Charles on Twitter, Insta and LinkedIn. Co-Living has been covered in Dezeen, Architecture Today and the AJ (£), among others. 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

In Episode 34/2 of A is for Architecture, Andrew Beharrell and Rory Olcayto talk about their book, The Deck Access Housing Design Guide: A Return to Streets in the Sky, published by Routledge this year. Andrew is a Senior Advisor for the London-based architects, Pollard Thomas Edwards, where he was formerly director and senior partner. Rory is  writer and critic at PTE, and formerly  editor of the Architects’ Journal and chief executive of Open City.   ‘Despite a chequered history that saw it linked with urban decay and social malaise in the 1970s and 80s, deck access housing […] is fast becoming the default solution for mid-rise housing in the UK, and London in particular. This is in part down to architects’ renewed interest in post-war Modernist typologies, but also due to specific planning standards that favour the qualities – dual-aspect plans, ‘public’ front doors – of deck access design.’ It features work from architects such as AHMM, DO Architecture, Henley Halebrown, Mæ, Maison Edouard François and Waechter + Waechter, among others. The book has been covered in the press, including on Dezeen, the Architects’ Journal and Architecture Today. Then head to the Routledge website, where you might consider buying it. 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

Episode 33/2 of A is for Architecture’s features Ben Derbyshire, Chair of HTA Design LLP and  Immediate Past President of RIBA. We talk about Home Truths, Ben’s 2022 book, published with Hatch Editions. The book, so it states, is ‘a manifesto for professional practice in an era of multiple crises – in social, economic and racial disparity, in housing supply and affordability, in climate change, in our emptying high streets and homelessness in our town centres.  […] setting out the essential ideas and likely future developments that aspiring planners and designers of homes and places need to know about and bear in mind for their work, [reflecting on] the foundations for contemporary practice.’ You can watch Ben give it some on the NLA website here. Great chat, lovely chap: listen, learn and share. 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

In Episode 32 of A is for Architecture’s second season, Susannah Hagan talks about her book Revolution? Architecture and the Anthropocene, published by Lund Humphries in 2022.  Susannah is an emeritus professor of architecture at the University of Westminster, founder of R_E_D (Research into Environment + Design) at the Royal College of Art, and has been a leading light in the establishment of environmental design as a serious, measured discipline within architecture. Revolution? is the fourth book in a series Susannah has written, documenting the relationship of architecture to the natural environment, including Taking Shape: A New Contract Between Architecture and Nature (Routledge, 2000), Digitalia: Architecture and the Environmental, the Digital and the Avant-Garde (Routledge, 2008), and Ecological Urbanism: The Nature of the City (Routledge, 2015). The book deals with a peculiar difference – that of the wild success modernism in the twentieth century, contrasted to ecological architecture’s remarkable failure to impress upon the public its argument or ethics. For the publication, Susannah wrote ‘the particularities of [sustainable] architecture’s problem […] lie in its 20th century history and its self-perpetuating self-aggrandisement. What use is a profession of self-styled leaders who in the main have been, and still are, loitering at the back?’ That’s a good question, always. Have a sticky, see what you think. And share like you give a damn. Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.   More on Susannah here (on Wikipedia!), on Research Gate here, and on R_E_D here. There’s a good article in the AR from 2015 called Ecological Urbanism, which she also penned. You can get the book at the link above off the Lund Humphries website.   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

In Episode 31/2 of A is for Architecture, Torsten Schmiedeknecht and Jill Rudd discusses their recent book, Building Children’s Worlds: The Representation of Architecture and Modernity in Picturebooks, a collection of essays by various scholars, co-edited with Emma Hayward, and which was published by Routledge this year. Jill is Professor of English at the University of Liverpool and Torsten is Reader in Architecture at the Liverpool School of Architecture, University of Liverpool. (Emma is a secondary school English teacher and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Liverpool). ‘The kinds of architectural worlds [children] are exposed to in picturebooks during their formative years may be assumed to influence how they regard such architecture as adults.’ How, then, has children’s literature sought to socialise young readers to the nature, values and stories of the modern epoch? In Building Children’s Worlds ‘scholars address questions such as: Is modern architecture used to construct specific narratives of childhood? Is it taken to support ‘negative’ narratives of alienation on the one hand and ‘positive’ narratives of happiness on the other? Do images of modern architecture support ideas of ‘community’? Reinforce ‘family values’? If so, what kinds of architecture, community and family? […] This book reveals what stories are told about modern architecture and shows how those stories affect future attitudes towards and expectations of the built environment.’ Big questions demand clever answers, so have a listen to the imaginative duo and see what you think. Sharing is caring, so do that too. Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.   More on Jill and her work is on the University of Liverpool website here. Torsten is here and his LinkedIn is here. (Emma is on LinkedIn here.) You can get the book from Routledge here. 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

In Episode 30, Season 2 of A is for Architecture, Professor Albena Yaneva discusses her very recent book, Architecture After Covid, published by Bloomsbury this year. Albena is Professor of Architectural Theory at the Manchester School of Architecture and Director of the Manchester Architecture Research Group at the Manchester Urban Institute, University of Manchester. ‘Architecture After COVID is the first book to explore the pandemic's transformative impacts upon the architectural profession. It raises new questions about the intertwined natures of architectural production, science, society, and spatial practice [exploring] how the pandemic modified the spatial conventions of everyday life in the city, […] transformed building typologies [and] leads us to rethink the social dimension of architecture and urban design; and ultimately proposes a radical re-evaluation of the conditions of architectural practice’. Well, that’s what the blurb says, anyway. ‘Listen to Albena and see if it’s right. Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.   Albena can be found on the Manchester School of Architecture website here, and she Twitters here; her LinkedIn is here. You can get the book here. Our previous conversation, Bruno Latour, ANT and Architecture can be gotten on Spotify and iTunes. 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

In Episode 29/2 of A is for Architecture, Professor Gary Boyd speaks on his book, Architecture and the Face of Coal: Mining and Modern Britain, published by Lund Humphries in December 2022. Gary is Professor of Architecture in the School of Natural and Built Environment, Queen’s University Belfast. Mining and the Face of Coal is one output of a Major Research Fellowship Gary got from the Leverhulme Trust in 2018, and it describes a powerful story of heavy industry and the life of coal and coal miners in the development of modern Britain, including the emancipation of working class communities through collective action, politics and representation, as well as via policy, public debate and corporate enterprise. Mining, as Gary says, occupied a pivotal position in society, which ‘meant that miners were treated seriously […] all industry was completely influenced by mining or completely dependent upon it, so mining became this thing [which had] leverage. And this leverage meant obviously that they demanded at times bigger wages, but it also meant they became recipients, sometimes after actively canvassing for it, of goods and services, and especially services to do with their lifestyle, and that includes ideas of hygiene, ideas, ultimately, of housing, and also caught cultural and social pursuits. This generates a series of architectural interventions.’ The story of the coal industry is a fascinating and, for all of us of a certain heritage, retained history, the decline of which marked a significant portion of our personal histories. Its architecture has vanished, more or less, so this is an important study, describing a recent archaeology, in a way, of an epoch-defining practice. Thus, this podcast and Gary’s book are worth a sticky, believe. Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.   Gary can be found on the QUB website here. You can get the book here. 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

In Season 2, Episode 28 of A is for Architecture, Gordana Fontana Giusti discusses her 2013 book, Foucault for Architects, published by Routledge, as part of the Thinkers for Architects series. Gordana is Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at Kent School of Architecture & Planning, University of Kent, where she also serves as Deputy Head of School. Foucault for Architects ‘concentrates on a number of historical and theoretical issues often addressed by Foucault […] in order to examine and demonstrate their relevancy for architectural knowledge, its history and its practice’. In an AA Files 26 essay from 1993, Paul Hirst suggested Foucualt’s relevance to architecture lay in his breaking down ‘the barrier between the common-sense category of objects and that of discourse: words, explanations, programmes, etc., which are held to be about objects. In architecture this yields the stubborn and conclusive distinction between buildings as objects, and architectural theories, programmes and teaching that are about buildings. This installs a split between architecture and architectural discourse. The building is an object or non-discursive entity around which float the words of discourse.’ Listen to Prof Gordana, and get some answers. Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.   Gordana is presenting her thinking on Foucault at an event titled Dialogue 1: Foucault/Merleau-Ponty/Latour as part of a Thinkers for Architecture programme run by the AHRA, on 24 to 27 April 2023 at Manchester, UK, alongside previous podcast guests Jonathan Hale and Albena Yaneva. You can get the book here (20% off in April, apparently), and find Gordana professionally here, on LinkedIn here, on Instagram here, and on Twitter here. 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

In Episode 27/ 2 of A is for Architecture Bryan Cantley speaks about his very extraordinary body of work, beautifully documented in Speculative Coolness: Architecture, Media, the Real, and the Virtual, published by Routledge earlier this month. Bryan is Professor of 3-Dimensional Design at the Department of Visual Arts at California State University, Fullerton, and founder/ director of Form:uLA, an experimental architecture, design, and graphic communication studio. As the blurb has it, ‘Cantley’s work offers a unique and critical insight into the emergence of a liminal territory that exists between the real and the virtual that mainstream architecture has yet to exploit.’  Speculative Coolness documents Bryan’s extraordinary, imaginative and alluring architectures, with essays by other leading theorists and writers discussing it import and impact. Aaron Betsky said eight years ago, ‘experimental architecture is a marginal phenomenon, pursued by a few brilliant, but isolated figures: Perry Kulper or Bryan Cantley come to mind’. No so marginal now, is it? Listen, share and subscribe to the show on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.   Speculative Coolness is available on the Routledge website here. Bryan is to be found on the CSUF website here and on Instagram as both bcantl3y and speculativecoolness. His own website, bryancantley.com, features a 20% discount code for the book you’d be wise to use (till 30/4/23). Bryan’s previous book, Mechudzu: New Rhetorics for Architecture, published by Springer Verlag GmbH in 2011. Bryan will be speaking on Speculative Coolness at UCLA in May this year. 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

Episode 26 of A is for Architecture’s second season is a conversation with architect, urbbanist and writer Reinier de Graaf, partner at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), about his recent book, architect, verb: The New Language of Building, published by Verso in February this year. In ten chapters, architect, verb covers much ground, from sustainability and beauty, to starchitecture and gentrification, and aims ‘to debunk myths projected onto architecture by the outside world’ […] Once a profession known for its manifestos, architecture finds itself increasingly forced to adopt ever-more extreme postures of virtue, held accountable by the world of finance, the social sciences or the medical sector.’ It’s a funny book, and provocative too, but fundamentally, as Reiner says in this episode, his passion and criticality is born out of a love for architecture and ‘a sincere love for the profession.’ Have a listen and share, and subscribe to the show.   You can find architect, verb: The New Language of Building on Verso’s website here, and Reinier on OMA’s website here. There’s a gloss on the book on OMA’s website here. I have long read Reinier’s work, and you might too: start with his previous book, Four Walls and a Roof: The Complex Nature of a Simple Profession, published by Harvard University Press in 2017. There’s an article on Dezeen from February that you might read too. 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

In Episode 25/2 of A is for Architecture I spoke with Head of School and Chief Executive of the London School of Architecture, Neal Shasore and Jessica Kelly, Reader in Architectural & Design History at University of the Creative Arts (UCA) and (also) teacher at London Metropolitan University, about their edited anthology, Reconstruction: Architecture, Society and the Aftermath of the First World War, published by Bloomsbury in February this year. Our conversation addresses some of the overarching themes in the book, which features ‘[s]ixteen essays written by leading and emerging scholars [about] a period of reconstruction, fraught with the challenges of modernity and democratisation’, revealing ‘how the architectural developments of this period not only provided important foundations for what happened after 1945’, but also saw the emergence of new typologies, styles and practices responsive to a damaged but renewed - and global - society. Critical but ever sophisticated, this is a much needed shot of Edwardian elegance in the rippling Po-PoMo arm of this series. You can find Reconstruction of Bloomsbury’s website here, ready for your coin or plastic. Neal’s LSA profile is here, and his LinkedIn and Twitter are here and here and his Insta is here. There’s a video of Neal giving a lecture for the Architecture Foundation on his previous book, Designs on Democracy: Architecture & The Public In Interwar London on the YouTube here. Jessica’ UCA profile is here, here LinkedIn is here and her Twitter is here. 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

A is for Architecture’s Episode 24, Season 2, is a conversation with Patrick Lynch, founder and director of Lynch Architects, writer, scholar and guv’nor (with Claudia Lynch) of Canalside Press.  We spoke about a few of Patrick’s written works, and some of Lynch Architect’s recent built projects too, focusing the discussion around Patrick’s discussions of the ground of architecture.   Being-With/A Tacit Alliance: Architecture, Publishing, and the Poetic Reciprocity of Civic Culture in The Hybrid Practitioner Building, Teaching, Researching Architecture (2022), eds. C. Voet, E. Schreurs and H. Thomas, published by Leuven University Press. Situated Praxis, Prudence, and the Anonymity of Beauty: On Tension and Metaphor in the Civic Art of Neave Brown in Part of a City: The Work of Neave Brown Architect, (2022) eds. P. Lynch, C. Lynch and D. Porter, published by Canalside Press. Progress is a Myth, Change is the Reality: The Fossil Poetics of Robin Walker (2018) in Change is the Reality: The Work of Robin Walker Architect (2018), eds. P. Lynch and S. Walker, published by Canalside Press. Civic Ground: Rhythmic Spatiality and the Communicative Movement between Architecture, Sculpture and Site (2017), by Patrick Lynch, published by Artifice Books on Architecture. Our discussion covers a little of Patrick’s multifarious interests and concerns, and includes Neave Brown, urban change, housing, civility, context and theology, as well as The Zig Zag Building, Kings Gate, and n2 & Nova Place, all in London, and all quite recent. It’s all good. Have a sticky. You’ll find the texts we touch on at the links above, where you can buy them, or download them. Lynch Architect’s website is here and their Twitter is here, Patrick’s profile at London Met is here, his LinkedIn is here and his Instagram is here.   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

In episode 23, Season 2 of A is for Architecture, I spoke with UC San Diego professors, Fonna Forman and Teddy Cruz about their two recent books, Spatializing Justice: Building Blocks and Socializing Architecture: Top-Down / Bottom-Up, published by MIT Press in August 2022 and March 2023 respectively. Fonna and Teddy run Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, a ‘a research-based political and architectural practice in San Diego, who investigate ‘issues of informal urbanization, civic infrastructure and public culture […] Blurring conventional boundaries between theory and practice, and merging the fields of architecture and urbanism, political theory and urban policy, visual arts and public culture’ [leading] urban research agendas and civic/public interventions in the San Diego-Tijuana border region and beyond’. Fonna is Professor of Political Science and Teddy is Professor of Public Culture and Urbanism at UC San Diego, where they also co-direct the Centre on Global Justice and the X-Border Lab. Both books are well worth a read, and are full of thoughtful, practice-based insights and provocations, drawing on a rich, political interpretation of the spatial conditions of exclusion found in a very extreme condition. Spatializing Justice is ‘a practical handbook for confronting social and economic inequality and uneven urban growth in architectural and planning practice’. Socializing Architecture follows this, urging architects and urbanists ‘to design political and civic processes that mediate top-down and bottom-up urban resources, and to mobilize a new public imagination toward a more just and equitable urbanization.’ Big, important stuff, so be a diamond and have a listen. You’ll find Spatializing Justice and Socializing Architecture on the MIT Press website, linked above, where you can buy them. Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman’s website is here, with more information on their work and practice to be found all over the internet; their Instagram is here, Fonna’s LinkedIn is here, Teddy’s UC San Diego profile is here, Fonna’s is here. 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

Season Two’s twenty-second episode features Kim Dovey, Professor and Chair of Architecture and Urban Design, Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne, speaking about his very wonderful body of work on informality, informal urbanism, place and placemaking. We discuss his forthcoming Atlas of Informal Settlement: Understanding Self-Organized Urban Design (Bloomsbury 2023, with, Matthijs van Oostrum, Tanzil Shafique, Ishita Chatterjee and Elek Pafka), Mapping Urbanities: Morphologies, Flows, Possibilities (Routledge 2018), and Becoming Places: Urbanism / Architecture / Identity / Power (Routledge 2010), and just one of his marvellous papers, Towards a morphogenesis of informal settlements (2020, Habitat International, with van Oostrum, Shafique, Chatterjee and Pafka). Kim is fantastic, of course, at describing the most common form of urban form and housing type of all: ‘In a formal urban design and planning process, the urban design and planning comes first, and then the architecture follows. In an informal process, in the most informal of informal settlements, the architecture comes first, or tends to come first. So the people just build buildings. And if you like the, the street network is then an emergent phenomenon that comes out of the whatever's whatever spaces are left after the buildings are produced. But then, there's a lot of processes, which are much more mixed on that as well.’ For more like that, listen and learn. You can get Mapping Urbanities andBecoming Places from the Routledge website here and here, and bookmark this link to the Bloomsbury website for August, when the Atlasdrops. Kim’s can be found on the Melbourne School of Design here, and on ResearchGate here. Kim co-leads the Informal Urbanism Research Hubtoo. 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

In Episode 21, Season 2 of A is for Architecture I spoke with Maurice Mitchell and Bo Tang, respectively Professor and Reader of/ in Architecture, within the School of Art, Architecture and Design at London Metropolitan University, and together directors of Architecture of Rapid Change and Scarce Resources [A R C S R], an ‘an emergent, studio based, teaching and research area within the practice and academic discipline of architecture’. I got to hear about their 2017 book, Loose Fit City: The Contribution of Bottom-Up Architecture to Urban Design and Planning, published by Routledge, which is ‘about the ways in which city residents can learn through making to engage with the dynamic process of creating their own city. It looks at the nature and processes involved in loosely fitting together’. The idea of loose in the sense of [a] loose fit city, Bo suggests in our conversation, may be defined as ‘bringing together different intentions, or allowing them to come together in a way that more than one party is able to contribute to the conversation, to the decision making process, to have a voice across scale, across time to try and come to an understanding of shared matters of concern that may then lead to a civic assembly’. As before, lovely guests, a wonderful, inspiring book and proper, easy conversation. Listen, share, want, get. You can get Loose Fit City off the Routledge website here but also elsewhere online. Bo can be found on the London Met website here, and Maurice here. Bo is here on Twitter, and here on LinkedIn. There's a boss video of Maurice giving an online lecture for the Architecture Foundation on Laurie Baker and Balkrishna Doshi here.   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

In Episode 20, Season 2 of A is for Architecture’s I spoke with Flora Samuel, Professor of Architecture at the University of Cambridge, holding the professorial chair and until recently, professor at and founding member of Reading School of Architecture, University of Reading about Housing for Hope and Wellbeing, published by Routledge this year which, Flora said, is ‘the best one I ever wrote, I think, & certainly the cheapest.’. Flora was elected the first RIBA Vice President for Research in 2018 and has been instrumental in the development of the Urban Room movement in Britain, through her CCQOL research project on community consultation through mapping. She co-authored Public Participation in Planning in the UK for the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Excellence and also wrote the very well received Why Architects Matter in 2018, also by Routledge.  Housing, Flora says is ‘really a very slippery subject, isn't it? It's the one about which we all intimately know a lot from our own lived experience, but has been very poorly studied […] because it's very difficult to make comparisons, you can never compare one bit of housing over the other because everything is different. So it's not a tidy like hospital or something like that’.  Tidy, like a hospital. So is this episode, so enjoy it.  Flora is a significant voice in the British architecture scene and there’s much on and by her online and in paper. Have a look around, for sure. There’s a good video – The Social Value of Design - of Flora and Peter Murray speaking for New London Architecture here.  Flora is lively on Twitter here, and her LinkedIn is here.  Thanks for listening.  + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +  Music credits: Bruno Gillick  + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +  aisforarchitecture.org  Available on iTunes/ Apple, Spotify, Google and Amazon.

Episode Nineteen of A is for Architecture’s second season is a conversation with Mae’s founding director, Alex Ely, talking about his practice’s recent book, Towards a Resilient Architecture, published by Quart in 2022. Mae’s work has an increasing focus on sustainability integrated into the whole life of the scheme. As Alex put it when we spoke, ‘I suppose reflecting on 21 years of practice, I suddenly sort of recognise that, in every project we've done, there's been an element of inquiry or hunting for alternative ways of doing things that might lend themselves to more sustainable solutions. That's not to say that environmental architecture has always been at the forefront of our mind. But the point about the book was actually saying: Right, now it needs to be, and we need as a practice to step up. But then so does the industry.’ You can get Towards a Resilient Architecture off the Quart website here but also elsewhere online. You can have a look at Mae’s built work on their website and all the online magazines too, but of particular pertinence to our discussion are their Sands End Arts & Community Centre, Fulham, their proposal for the Oxford to Cambridge Corridor and the John Morden Centre, Blackheath. Alex’s professional profile is here, and his LinkedIn is here; Mae’s is here. Mae’s Instagram is here, their Twitter is here, and Pinterest is here. Cheers! + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + aisforarchitecture.org Apple: podcasts.apple.com Spotify: open.spotify.com Google: podcasts.google.com Amazon: music.amazon.co.uk

In episode 18, season 2 of A is for Architecture, I met (on Zoom…) with Ed Parham, Director of Design & innovation at Space Syntax, to talk about its origins, objectives, methods and motivations. Space Syntax, the brainchild of Bill Hiller, formed as the Space Syntax Laboratory at The Bartlett, University College London, and now led by Tim Stonor, is ubiquitous in architectural thinking, almost a shorthand for any form of data-led complex spatial analysis. I wanted to understand it better, and Ed, as an architect, seemed like the ideal person to unpack it for a naïf like me. Space Syntax describe their work as providing ‘a science-based and human-focused approach to the urban planning and design process. We help people to see, in clear and straightforward terms, how buildings and urban places can be designed to optimise their functional performance.’ Ed and I spoke about Space Syntax’s work at Astana/Nur-Sultan work, which you can watch on YouTube here, and the AD article, Urban Futures: Designing the Digitalised City. You can read Bill Hiller’s seminal text, Space is the Machine, at spaceisthemachine.com, and here’s a lovely essay, A Tribute to Bill Hillier, given at the 13th Space Syntax Symposium, in 2020, by Margarita Greene, Tao Yang, Vinicius Netto, Ruth Conroy Dalton, Sophia Psarra and Frederico De Holanda. Ed’s professional profile is here, and his LinkedIn is here. Space Syntax’s Instagram is here, their Twitter is here, YouTube here, LinkedIn here and Facebook here. Listen ‘n’ learn. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + aisforarchitecture.org Apple: podcasts.apple.com Spotify: open.spotify.com Google: podcasts.google.com Amazon: music.amazon.co.uk

In this the seventeenth episode of A is for Architecture’s second series, I speak with Sally Stone, Reader and Programme Leader for the MA Architecture and Adaptive Reuse programme and Director of the Continuity in Architecture Atelier at the Manchester School of Architecture. Among other things, Sally writes a lot, and we spoke about one recent book of hers, Inside Information: The Defining Concepts of Interior Design, co-written with Ed Hollis (Edinburgh College of Art) and published by RIBA Books in 2022. Inside Information deals with interiors, which is an under-interrogated part of Capital-A Architecture, focused as it is so often on exterior conditions, formal aesthetics and urban presence. Sally, and the book, unpack this quite a bit. As the blurb puts it: ‘We spend most of our time inside buildings [so] [m]astering the language, thinking and history of the interior is critical to understanding and designing spaces. This essential primer transcends the boundaries and genres that often define interiors, providing a comprehensive view of the concepts and vocabulary of interior design.’ The book (and Sally) do this indeed. Sally’s professional profile is here, Instagram here, and Twitter (even) here. You can get the book via the link above. It’s graphically well lush and full of ideas, information and insight. Listen around, and find out. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + aisforarchitecture.org Apple: podcasts.apple.com Spotify: open.spotify.com Google: podcasts.google.com Amazon: music.amazon.co.uk

In Episode 16 of Season 2 of A is for Architecture, I speak with Gevork Hartoonian, Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture at the University of Canberra, Australia, about his 2012 book, Architecture and Spectacle: A Critique, published by Routledge. The issue of the architectural spectacle has perhaps been the dominant idea in urban and architectural thinking for the last two or three decades, most explicitly seen in Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum at Bilbao, a model of design that has been replicated globally since that building’s opening, but permeating design education and practice almost everywhere, in the near universal pursuit of spectacular solutions to the postmodern urban condition. Gevork’s book discusses this phenomenon, ‘[f]ocusing on six leading contemporary architects: Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Bernard Tschumi, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas and Steven Holl’ and putting forward ‘a unique and insightful analysis of "neo-avant-garde" architecture [and] discusses the spectacle and excess which permeates contemporary architecture in reference to the present aesthetic tendency for image making, but [also] by applying the tectonic of theatricality discussed by the 19th-century German architect Gottfried Semper. In doing so, it breaks new ground by opening up a dialogue between the study of the past and the design of the present.’ Gevork’s professional profile is linked above, he’s on LinkedIn here too, and his Instagram can be found here. There’s a great wee critique by Gevork on Zaha Hadid on The Charnel House here. There’s a serious academic piece by Gevork in the Journal of Architecture (v7/ 2 2002), on the merits of Gehry too: Frank Gehry: roofing, wrapping, and wrapping the roof. Happy listening! + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + aisforarchitecture.org Apple: podcasts.apple.com Spotify: open.spotify.com Google: podcasts.google.com Amazon: music.amazon.co.uk

In Season 2, Episode 15 A is for Architecture, I speak with architect and writer, Jonathan Hale, Professor of Architectural Theory at the University of Nottingham, about his 2017 book, Merleau-Ponty for Architects, published by Routledge as part of their Thinkers for Architects series. Merleau-Ponty was a leading phenomenologist, whose work ‘has influenced the design work of architects as diverse as Steven Holl and Peter Zumthor, as well as […] architectural theory, notably […] Dalibor Vesely at Cambridge, Kenneth Frampton, David Leatherbarrow and Alberto Pérez-Gómez in North America and Juhani Pallasmaa in Finland. Merleau-Ponty suggested that the value of people’s experience of the world gained through their immediate bodily engagement with it remains greater than the value of understanding gleaned through abstract mathematical, scientific or technological systems’ and gives us tools to think about other ways of understanding ‘space, movement, materiality and creativity’ in architecture. Phenomenology was very front-and-centre when I was a student, but has sort-of become implicit in design thinking now, and (apparently) barely needs explaining. Jonathan does explain it though, which I am grateful for, through Merleau-Ponty’s work. Jonathan’s professional profile is here on the University of Nottingham website, and he can be found on LinkedIn here too. Jonathan tweets on Twitter, so have a follow if that’s your thing, and have a read of Merleau-Ponty’s ‘Body Schema’ on the Body of Theory website, an article Jonathan originally wrote and published in Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism, edited by Ariane Mildenberg, and published by Bloomsbury in 2019. Happy listening! + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + aisforarchitecture.org Apple: podcasts.apple.com Spotify: open.spotify.com Google: podcasts.google.com Amazon: music.amazon.co.uk

In Episode 14 of the second season of A is for Architecture, I speak with architect and scholar (and personal hero), Henry Sanoff, professor emeritus at the North Carolina State University. Henry has a remarkable story to tell, starting in the office of Frank Lloyd Wright (on the Guggenheim!) and then on to Edward Durrell Stone, before heading off to Jamaica to test his mettle as an architect and to develop a programmatic, ethnographic approach to design. This led to a long career in community participation design, and we discuss three texts he produced through this: Community Participation Methods in Design and Planning (Wiley, 2000), Participatory Environmental Design (CreateSpace, 2018) and also Visual Research Methods in Design (Routledge, 2018). Henry has produced an abundance of academic outputs over his long career, but this pales in comparison to his very broad and deep community projects, which are the basis for his writing. All his texts are filled with cases and examples of how stuff can get done with communities to make better architecture. You can hear him speak about it in this informative Lockdown Era online lecture ‘Henry Sanoff - Community Participation Methods in Design and Planning’ for North Carolina State University College of Design. Henry is on LinkedIn here and his ResearchGate profile contains links to downloadable versions of most of his works. Happy listening! + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + aisforarchitecture.org Apple: podcasts.apple.com Spotify: open.spotify.com Google: podcasts.google.com Amazon: music.amazon.co.uk

In Episode 13 of Season 2 of A is for Architecture, I speak with architect, writer, teacher and television presenter, Piers Taylor about his journey to architecture, and the development of his practice, Invisible Studio. We speak about the way he works, his approach to design-as-making and making-as-design, the problems of professionalism, and touch on his 2020 doctoral thesis, Developing a Framework for Describing, Planning and Evaluating Empowerment in Architectural Making Projects, which he undertook at the University of Reading, supervised by Flora Samuel. Piers has produced a huge amount - written, spoken and designed - and there’s much online to see of his and Invisible Studio’s work. Some recent highlights include a rammed earth yoga studio, a shelter from ‘timber sourced within the Westonbirt arboretum in Gloucestershire, England’, and a mixed-use performing arts centre in Watchet, England. Invisible Studio was featured in a lovely wee movie, made by Laura Mark and Jim Stephenson, as part of their Practice series, in 2020. Invisible Studio’s website includes a blog, documenting the practice’s thinking and work, as well as other media matters. Piers is on the socials, too, and you can find him on Twitter here (Invisible Studio is here), and on Instagram here. Happy listening! + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + aisforarchitecture.org Apple: podcasts.apple.com Spotify: open.spotify.com Google: podcasts.google.com Amazon: music.amazon.co.uk

In the 12th episode of the 2nd season of A is for Architecture, I speak with architect, curator, scholar and teacher, Dr Ruth Lang, about her recent book, Building for Change: The Architecture of Creative Reuse, published by gestalten in August this year. Ruth wears many hats, working for Mae as a writer, editor and researcher, at the Design Museum as Research Lead for the Future Observatory, as well as being lead on the Critical Practice module at the LSA and lead on the Radical Practice MA module at the RCA. Building for Change asks: ‘How can we build a sustainable future in a time of climate change and dwindling resources?’ and goes on to document a number of global projects by leading architects which have embraced creative/ adaptive reuse as a means of enhancing existing fabric, reducing waste and maintaining cultural and historical identity in places where the normative option may have otherwise been the knock down/ rebuild model. You can see Ruth’s LinkedIn profile here, and she tweets here. I met Ruth through her publishers, a guest suggestion by my boss, Chloe Street Tarbatt.  Alongside being generally polymathic, Ruth is great to hear speak, believe. Happy listening! + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + aisforarchitecture.org Apple: podcasts.apple.com Spotify: open.spotify.com Google: podcasts.google.com Amazon: music.amazon.co.uk

In episode 11 of A is for Architecture’s second season, I speak with architect, scholar, teacher and activist, Dr. Jos Boys, about her long term project, The DisOrdinary Architecture Project. Jos was a founding member of the ground-breaking feminist architecture practice, Matrix, a ‘radical, […] women-led platform […] integrating new interdisciplinary and intersectional ways of working across theory and practice’, and whose work was recently featured in a retrospective exhibition – How We Live Now: Reimagining Spaces with Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative - at the Barbican. Jos has also written widely on her approach to space, design and research, including Doing Disability Differently: An Alternative Handbook on Architecture, Dis/Ability and Designing for Everyday Life (2014) and as editor, Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader (2017), both published by Routledge. The Handy Guide: The DisOrdinary Architecture Project infographic sheet can be downloaded here, and is on Issuu here. You can hear Jos speak on some of the ideas we cover here at the Arizona State University - DisOrdinary Architecture: A Virtual Lecture by Dr. Jos Boys; at the Architectural Association- Doing Dis/ability and Architecture Differently?; and for A+DS, where Jos gave the Andy MacMillan Lecture 2021 - The DisOrdinary Architecture Project. There is much else online, so have a good look. I met Jos through Kathy Li at the Glasgow School of Art, when after Fire 1, and teaching out of a rather dour spec office on Sauchiehall Street, Jos came up and gave us all a dose of hope. She’s really quite wonderful, so have a listen, do. Happy listening! + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + aisforarchitecture.org Apple: podcasts.apple.com Spotify: open.spotify.com Google: podcasts.google.com Amazon: music.amazon.co.uk

In episode ten of season two of A is for Architecture, I speak with Beatriz Colomina and Evangelos Kotsioris, about their book Radical Pedagogies, co-edited with Ignacio G. Galán and Anna-Maria Meister and published by MIT Press in 2022. Beatriz is Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture at Princeton University and Evangelos Kotsioris, Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Radical Pedagogies documents and analyses the long history of experimental architecture education programs that ‘sought to upend disciplinary foundations and conventional assumptions about the nature of architecture […] challenged modernist and colonial norms, decentered building, imagined new roles for the architect, and envisioned participatory forms of practice’ in favour of greater diversity, insight, democratic voice and justice, and away from top-down educational - and practice -models. You can get the book via MIT Press’ website here; it’s certainly worth a look. You can also find out more about Beatriz Colomina here,  and listen to her lecture on similar themes to the book for the Strelka Institute here, in a lecture she gave in 2019, entitled Radical Pedagogies. Evangelos can be found at MoMA here, on Instagram here, on LinkedIn here and watched speaking about the façade of the UN Secretariat Building as part of MoMA’s ArtSpeaks program here. As any of us in it, or who’ve gone through it might attest, architectural education seems to trend to the centre, and its base form remains remarkably resilient to change, even in the face of the great technical, social and cultural shifts that have transformed the contemporary world. Radical Pedagogies documents the visions – hopes, I suppose – of folk who tried, and in many cases succeeded, in testing new forms of learning practice in the face of this shifting landscape. Happy listening! + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + aisforarchitecture.org Apple: podcasts.apple.com Spotify: open.spotify.com Google: podcasts.google.com Amazon: music.amazon.co.uk

In the ninth episode of A is for Architecture’s second season, I speak with Paul Dobraszczyk, architectural writer, teacher, photographer and artist, about his book Architecture and Anarchism: Building Without Authority, published by Paul Holberton in 2021. The book documents sixty examples of what it defines as anarchist projects, which ‘key into a libertarian ethos and desire for diverse self-organised ways of building […] that embrace the core values of traditional anarchist political theory since its divergence from the mainstream of socialist politics in the 19th century.’ You can get the book via Paul Homberton’s website here. You can also find out more about Paul Dobraszczyk on his personal website, including his portfolio of photography, writing and art, as well as an ace blog and links to his socials (under construction…). His Instagram is here, anyway, and his Twitter is here. I’ve always been intrigued by the possibilities of anarchism, although I’ve been too disorganised to sign up to any particular group. Paul does a decent job at explaining it, and its role and potential in and for the contemporary city. Happy listening! + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + aisforarchitecture.org Apple: podcasts.apple.com Spotify: open.spotify.com Google: podcasts.google.com Amazon: music.amazon.co.uk

In the eight episode of this year’s A is for Architecture’s, I speak with Professor Erika Doss of the University of Notre Dame’s Department of American Studies, Indiana. We discuss her book Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2010 which describes and analyses the ‘thousands of new memorials to executed witches, victims of terrorism, and dead astronauts, along with those that pay tribute to civil rights, organ donors, and the end of Communism [which] have dotted the American landscape’ as well as those ‘spontaneous offerings of flowers and candles that materialize at sites of tragic and traumatic death.’ Pitched around the sticky territory of history versus memory and the rights the them, the podcast reflects on the role of memory culture as a cultural, spatial and material instrument in urban culture. You can get the book via The University of Chicago Press’ website here. You can also hear Erika talk on The Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History at The University of Texas at Dallas’ podcast here, and also give a talk – Public Art, Public Feelings: Creativity and Controversy in Public Culture Today- at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design in 2010. You can watch Erika speak at the Minneapolis Institute of Art here, with a talk entitled Monumental Troubles: Reckoning with Problematic Public Art in America. The tension between history and memory for architects is a significant one, and the rise of memory-culture is a huge cultural shift off which architecture increasingly depends, so Erika’s insights are meaningful and valuable. Happy listening! + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + aisforarchitecture.org Apple: podcasts.apple.com Spotify: open.spotify.com Google: podcasts.google.com Amazon: music.amazon.co.uk

In A is for Architecture’s seventh episode in 2022/3's offer, I speak with Professor Gwendolyn Wright of Colombia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation (GSAPP), New York and presenter of PBS’ History Detectives. We met on Zoom to talk about her 2008 book, USA, part of Reaktion Book’s Modern Architectures in History series, a book which ‘traces a history that spans from early skyscrapers and suburbs in the aftermath of the American Civil War up to the museums, schools and ‘green architecture’ of today [describing] diverse interests that affected design, ranging from politicians and developers to ambitious immigrants and middle-class citizens […] Wright reframes the history of American architecture as one of constantly evolving and volatile sensibilities, engaged with commerce, attuned to new media, exploring multiple concepts of freedom.’ You can get the book via The University of Chicago Press’ website here. You can also hear Gwen talk at GSAPP with Michael Kimmelman about architecture’s public, in a presentation entitled Who's Listening? Also, here she is speaking when accepting the Society of Architectural Historian’s Award for Excellence in Architectural Media in 2012, and here  about History Detectives as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival. Gwen’s website is here; her LinkedIn is here. Gwen is an amazing communicator, a seriously insightful analyser of modern architecture and a delightful person to listen to. The book is marvellous, of course, as you shall hear… Happy listening! + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + aisforarchitecture.org Apple: podcasts.apple.com Spotify: open.spotify.com Google: podcasts.google.com

In the sixth episode of 2022/3's A is for Architecture series, I speak with Sarah Wigglesworth, director and founder of Sarah Wigglesworth Architects. Sarah is a writer and educator, as well as one of Britain’s most celebrated architects, with a body of work stretching back over two decades encompassing participation, community and public buildings, housing, masterplanning and urban design work, all of which is (as I read it) shot-through with a conscientiousness about the social potential and obligation of architecture as a discipline and practice, in favour of social, ecological and spatial margins. We speak about Sarah’s practice, her background in practice and education, and some of the myriad motivations which underpin her work, including her recent renovations to her home, 9-10 Stock Orchard Street, school design schemes and [a few threads of] the rich tapestry of influences that inform her approach to design. Sarah Wigglesworth Architects can be gotten to here; you can hear Sarah speak about the scheme here for Dezeen, and with New London Architecture here. There’s info on Stock Orchard Steet here, as part of the Open House Festival. There’s a good essay in AR on her dining table here. SWA’s Twitter is good too, as is their Instagram. There’s lots more online, not least SWA’s own online repository, which contains many articles by and on her and her practice’s work. Happy listening! + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + aisforarchitecture.org Apple: podcasts.apple.com Spotify: open.spotify.com Google: podcasts.google.com

In Episode 5 of 2022/23 #aisforarchitecture, I speak with architect-scholars Sofie Pelsmakers and Elizabeth Donovan, about their book Designing for the Climate Emergency: A Guide for Architecture Students, co-written with Urszula Kozminska and Aidan Hoggard, and published by RIBA Books this year.  Sofie is associate professor at Tampere University, Finland and Liz is associate professor at Aarhus School of Architecture, Denmark. We speak about #ecology and #sustainability and the ways students of architecture can (and must) begin to reimagine how we #design, outlining the book’s strategies for formulating new approaches to #practice, #space, #materials, #technology and #climate. Designing for the Climate Emergency: A Guide for Architecture Students, can be found on RIBA Books here. Sofie’s professional profile can be found here, and here personal webpage is here. Liz’s professional profile can be found here. Sofie’s Twitter is here, and her Instagram is here; she co-founded Architecture for Change with Stephen Choi, and has published other very decent books: The Environmental Design Pocketbook, published by RIBA (2012) and edited (with Nick Newman),  Design Studio Vol. 1: Everything Needs to Change - Architecture and the Climate Emergency, again with RIBA Publishing in 2021.  Iloista kuuntelua! + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + w. aisforarchitecture.org Apple: podcasts.apple.com Spotify: open.spotify.com Google: podcasts.google.com Amazon: podcasters.amazon.com

In Episode 4 of 2022/23 A is for Architecture, I speak with Christian Parreno, writer, academic and architect, about his book Boredom, Architecture, and Spatial Experience, published by Bloomsbury this year. Christian is assistant professor of history and theory of architecture at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador and part of the International Society of Boredom Studies research network. Christian and I speak about some of the themes of his book, not least the condition of boredom as a inherent characteristic of modern urban life, and the ways that modern architecture and cities have established ennui and tedium as characteristics of everyday life. The book, Boredom, Architecture, and Spatial Experience, can be found here. Christian’s professional profile can be found here and his Instagram profile here. Christian’s talk, Boredom, Suicide and the Architecture of 1 Poultry Street, London can be watched on YouTube here. Bonne écoute. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + aisforarchitecture.org Apple: podcasts.apple.com Spotify: open.spotify.com Google: podcasts.google.com Amazon: podcasters.amazon.com

In the third episode of 2022/3's A is for Architecture series, I speak with Professor Juliet Davis, Head of the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University. Juliet is a scholar, architect, writer and educator. We speak about her recent book The Caring City: Ethics of Urban Design, published this year by Bristol University Press. We talk about Juliet’s motivations for the book, guided by her approach to architecture born of her years in practice and education, and the underlying notion of an ethics of care (and carelessness) on which the book is founded, care as it is encountered in urban fabric, and how such an approach might be better embedded in urban design practices. The Caring City is a great book and you should buy it (link above). You can watch Juliet speak around some of its subjects on the Pakhuis de Zwijger YouTube channel, as part of its (their?) Designing Cities for All series, in an episode called Creating Cultures of Care: The Caring City. Juliet was previously an RIBA external examiner on the undergraduate programme at the Kent School of Architecture & Planning, University of Kent, which is where I first met her. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + aisforarchitecture.org Apple: podcasts.apple.com Spotify: open.spotify.com Google: podcasts.google.com