A is for Architecture Podcast

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 LinkedIn and Instagram. + 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. + Music credits: Bruno Gillick Image credit: Image 1: Matthew Blunderfield: Shumi Bose/ Space Popular - Fables for Our Time; Image 2: Special Thanks…

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 work here. The book is linked above. If you want and can, please support the A is for Architecture Podcast by listening in…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 Patreon or making a…

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…

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…

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 Grokipedia though. The book…

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…

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?…

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…

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…

Bellerophon, son of Poseidon and Eurynome, slew the Chimera and, full of hubris, believed he had a rightful place on Mount Olympus among the gods and set off there on his winged horse, Pegasus. Zeus did not like this and sent a gadfly to sting Pegasus, which threw Bellerophon, who fell back to Earth and died. The story of modernism has maybe been a little tinged by hubris too. We have defeated all the monsters, presented an architecture and urbanism which proclaims it will do away with social and pathological ills, if only we would let it, and thus deserves a place among the deities. But perhaps, as covid showed, modernism has somewhat over-played its hand. The monsters got amongst us again. In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast - the 200th - I spoke to the great architectural historian and theorist, Beatriz Colomina, Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture at Princeton University, about some small parts of the recently published book, Sick Architecture, which she edited…

If one were to be the sort of inelegant person to point such things out, one might point out that despite all the egalitarian rhetoric, we still live in an architectural culture that cultivates dominance, not in the sense of dominion as rooted in domus, home, but in the dual senses of control and territory. The star architects we are assured we must look to, the big, bold, challenging buildings they erect, condition folk to see a casual way of acting act relative to ecologies, economies, cultures and justice as normative, ideal, something to believe in. In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I spoke to Professor Hilde Heynen professor of architectural theory at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and Professor Lucia Pérez-Moreno, Professor of History and Theory of Architecture at the University of Zaragoza in Spain. Together, Hilde and Lucia have gathered together a number of Hilde’s most significant essays in a new book, Architecture & Feminist Critical Theory: Selected Writings by Hilde…

Despite the fact that theorists probably live in one, homes are rather poorly theorized. Why is this so? Perhaps it is the ascent of the domestic in capitalist bourgeois culture – the world within a world – that makes them the seat of late modernity’s subjective turn which, in its turn, made home personal, and therefore ungeneralisable. Who knows. What I do know is that architect, writer and associate professor in the Department of Urban Policy and Planning at Hunter College, New York, Stefan Al has written a new book on them, Dwelling on Earth: The Past and Future of the Places We Call Home, published with W. W. Norton but nine days ago on April 14th 2026, and which makes for the subject of this newest episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast. Dwelling on Earth is a good book beautifully illustrated by David M. Dugas spanning two million years, from the caves and huts of our forebears to high-rises to 3D-printed houses of… tomorrow? Structured around the four major transformations that we use to…

Nine out of ten architectural practices in Europe are involved in designing private housing, according to the Architects Council of Europe, with the work generating 54% of the average practice’s turnover. But according to RIBA, in 2018 in the UK only 6% of housing was designed by architects. So housing is incredibly important to the economy of a profession which is very marginal to the production of housing in general. How did we get here? In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast I spoke to an architect and their client, or a client and their architect, about a project which perhaps illustrates another way of doing things. Working together, architect and Lecturer in Architecture Technology at Newcastle University, John Kinsley, and client (and Director at StorytellingPR) Miriam Attwood discuss their scheme for a collective custom build home in Leith, Scotland. It’s a good story well told of another image of housing, one which adopts a typology, form, material and technology - and a process of…

Close study of singular aspects of building culture remains the mainstay of good architectural scholarship. Through detail, universals can be revealed. This is the case with Tim Altenhof’s Breathing Space: The Architecture of Pneumatic Beings, published by Zone Books in March this year (distributed by Princeton University Press), the subject of the latest A is for Architecture Podcast episode. Breathing Space is an elegant exploration of the role of breath – breathing – in the development of buildings, and the way consciousness of the human lung has shaped architectural design, not least in the emergence of analogies between buildings and bodies. Our discussion of a little of Tim’s book focuses on the concept of ‘respiratory modernism’, examining how architecture engaged with the body, air and atmosphere in response to wider social, scientific and political concerns around health and the modern city. How were these ideas communicated to the public? And how does this thinking around breathing, bodies,…

With warfare seemingly creeping up on us – because governments keep starting them – it seemed like a good idea to speak to Ed Wall, Professor of Cities and Landscapes at the University of Greenwich, about his book Architecture for Warfare: How Corporations Profit from Destruction and Reconstruction, published by Jovis in December last year. It’s difficult to know what to say about this, beyond what Professor Wall describes in the book: there is a seam of architectural practice which makes the infrastructure of war and reconstruction, and makes a good deal of good business whilst doing it. Isn’t it better, one might ask, that architects, with their designerly imaginations, their theories and lovely drafting skills, and their spatial-technical and ecological competencies, are involved in this sort of stuff? At least then it’ll have passive ventilation. Jeremy Bentham – not an architect – drew the panopticon in the Eighteenth Century and in so doing arguably more-or-less defined the modernist city. The great…

In Episode 194 of the A is for Architecture Podcast, architect and writer and Andreas Lechner, Associate Professor of Design and Building Theory at TU Graz in Austria and founder of Studio Andreas Lechner, also based in Graz. We connected off the back of my previous conversation with Hans van der Heijden – with whom he had spoken on Drawing Matters last summer. Specifically, Andreas and I spoke about his book, Thinking Design: Blueprint for an Architecture of Typology (Park Books 2021), a book which combines theoretical reflection on architectural teaching with an illustrated visual atlas of 144 projects – all drawn orthographically and with no photographs – which serves as invitation to explore architectural design through the lens of typology – somewhat maligned in an age of humanised fun, grandiosity, pomp and intellectual frilliness - arguing as I read it for something a bit more normal - the primacy of form as the core of the discipline. Andreas’s practice can be found here, and he is on LinkedIn and…

In the 193rd episode of this here A is for Architecture Podcast, Lee Ivett joined me for a second time, 1591 days since his last appearance here. Now a Professor and Head of the London School of Architecture, and still an active architect, I wanted to speak to Lee to discuss architectural education and practice life. As architecture’s professional bodies push for recognition and reform, whilst governments – or their financial backers – who knows - seemingly push back, it appears like the profession is at an inflection point. Lee argues for a radical shift in how we train the next generation and, with style, describes the urgent need for a more responsive, integrated education. Stuck in a world of materials, flows, logistics, finance, risk and policy, architecture is a cumbersome beast. But, I think Lee would suggest, it’s also too important to abandon in favour of neoliberal indifference and a ‘trust the market’ fundamentalism if we are to retain or remake good urban space. Instead, in a world of rapid…

In Episode 192 of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Itohan Osayimwese, Professor of the History of Art & Architecture and Urban Studies and Department Chair at Brown University, discusses small parts of her big book, Africa's Buildings: Architecture and the Displacement of Cultural Heritage, published with Princeton University Press in October last year. In our conversation, Itohan argues that during the age of European empire, colonizers not only expropriated African art and artifacts but systematically – strategically - dismembered buildings, removing them piece-by-piece. In doing so, structural and ornamental components became, in the alienating setting of European and North American museums, reduced to craft artefacts, denuded of weight and depth of cultural knowledge and meaning. This fragmentation, Itohan argues, has contributed to scholarly and popular silences about African architectural histories, erasing built environments as sites of cultural expression, social life and technological innovation.…

The A is for Architecture Podcast’s 191st episode is a conversation with two professors, Ellen Braae & Thordis Arrhenius, about their and Guttorm Ruud’s publication, Architecture and Welfare: Scandinavian Perspectives, which came out with Birkhäuser in 2025. To summarise the book is hard, composed as it is of twenty essays by different authors exploring aspects of postwar Scandinavian architecture and the role it played in materialising welfare state ideals, giving spatial form to principles of equality, collectivism and democracy. Today, as the political consensus around universal welfare has been weakened from within and without, the book asks us to think again of that peculiar and in some ways utopian architectural legacy, examining its contested past and uncertain future, and positioning it as a subject not just for historians, but as a model that still challenges and instructs. Ellen is Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Copenhagen and is there and on LinkedIn; Thordis is professor…

For Episode 190 of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Alexander Josephson, architect, lecturer at the University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, and in 2012, co-founder of PARTISANS, a Toronto-based collective of architects, designers and thinkers that, among other things, is currently collaborating on the renewal of the Hearn Generating Station, a massive decommissioned power plant on Toronto’s waterfront, projected to hold the largest gallery space in North America as part of its transformation into 'a city in a building'. The practice’s works are regularly featured in global design publications. Alex also founded Cumulus, a tech start-up that provides ‘an immersive digital archive of photos, videos and files in a memory cloud that clients can share with loved ones’, a sort-of archive of the virtual, a digital ossuary, if you will. For an architect, this is the ultimate Latourian-turn, I guess. Alex can be found on PARTISANS’ website, on LinkedIn and Instagram. Cumulus is here. + Music…

For this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Amica Dall, co-founder of Assemble, writer and researcher, and Frances Northrop, head of community economic power at the New Economics Foundation and a director of Totnes Community Development Society discuss Common Treasures (Vol. 1 & 2), published by Little Toller Books in 2025. Common Treasures was founded in 2025 by members & collaborators of Assemble to explore challenges in rural communities through practical, grassroots responses. Its aim is to enable rural communities, landowners, housing providers, and local authorities to achieve better shared outcomes for the people living and working there, and the land they live on. The books documents emerging conversations exploring alternative approaches to rural housing, land, food systems, and livelihoods. It’s spatial, programmatic, projective, social and organisational, and as such it’s designerly. So we talk about some of that. Socially, Amica can be gotten on LinkedIn and via Assemble. Frances is…

For Episode 188 of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Nele De Raedt and Maarten Delbeke discuss some small parts of the 2025 book, Beauty in Architecture: Perspectives from Theory and Practice, which they edited and published with Bloomsbury. Beauty in Architecture connects ideas from across practice and theory that consider how beauty might again become central to architectural discourse. Beauty has re-emerged in public debate, but sadly it remains contested in critical discussions, often treated with suspicion – as an issue of politics, more or less. But, as we discuss, perhaps by taking beauty seriously, architecture might permit of – and articulate - broader reflections on values, identity, class, ecology and the notion of a shared cultural life. Nele is Associate Professor in History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and is on LinkedIn and can be found on Instagram at her research group super_positions. Maarten is Professor in the History and Theory…

In Episode 187 of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Fernando Lara, professor of architecture at the Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, discusses his book, Spatial Theories for the Americas: Counterweights to Five Centuries of Eurocentrism, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2024. Spatial Theories for the Americas critiques the dominance of Eurocentric, cartesian and elitist frameworks in architectural and urban studies, imposed through the colonial-modernist project, particularly as they impinge upon the articulation of indigenous practices, spatial knowledges and cultural forms. Fernando argues that these perspectives failed to reflect the unique realities of the American built world as it was when first encountered by Europeans in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the legacy of which persists to this day. To address this, the book proposes new theories from multiple disciplines forming a fresh - self-determined – Amerindian vision. Fernando can be found at…

In Episode 186 of the A is for Architecture Podcast, neoclassical architect Francis Terry, founder of Francis Terry and Associates, discusses his upbringing, education, drawing, work, practice and the imposed politics of it all. In our binary times, it seems strange to think of traditional classical design -still so popular among the public - as somehow controversial, and yet here we are. The institutional profession certainly preferences contemporary modernism – look at all the prize winner – but perhaps this is hardly surprising given widespread disinterest in- and lack of practical knowledge of – the techniques and patterns of traditional design in architectural education. Classicism is of course tainted by its association to a certain politics; modernism by contrast remains rhetorically linked to emancipatory social movements. Even so, whilst classicism retains its hold on the public imagination as rooted, reassuring and legible, architects like Francis - versed in the Doric and the Tuscan, in fluted…

In the latest episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, recorded at the end of last year, Fatina Abreek-Zubiedat spoke to me about her new book, A Territory in Conflict: Eras of Development and Urban Architecture in Gaza, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. The Gaza Strip was formed after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and served to accommodate fleeing refugees. Until 1967 Administered by Egypt, Israel's occupation of the region after the Six Day War saw settlement building and military governance, till in 2005 it withdrew and Hamas took control. But the story of Gaza’s form – it’s spatial and material history - isn’t just one of conflict, but really an interplay of competing forces, ideas and identities. Fatina’s is an extraordinary book, really, and quite other as a piece of history writing, made more pertinent now that so much of the material history of this strange and embattled place needs making again. The book is linked above. Fatina is Assistant Professor and Head of the…

For the first episode of 2026 for the A is for Architecture Podcast, we’re starting slow and steady – but rather inspiringly I think - with Patrick Hutchison, a builder. Patrick’s very recent book, Cabin: Into the Woods with a Clueless Craftsman, which he published with Harper Collins in November 2025, tells the story of his journey from copywriter to carpenter and now, bestselling author and carpenter, via the renovation – the discovery, in a manner - of a small cabin in the woods. It’s an elegant story indeed, which beyond a sort-of practical how-to for other itchy-footed office-jockeys, is one tangentially rooted in an American romance and myth – from indigenous peoples, Thoreau, pioneers and non-conformists. Through the cabin and through the book, Patrick describes his journey of discovery, at once a DIY adventure story and a meditation on how to find meaning, community and identity through making, through building and through acts of ordinary creation. Architecture has long been allured by the idea of…

It’s Christmas, and just past Hanukkah, and in recognition of that, Episode 183 of the A is for Architecture Podcast, is a conversation with architect, photographer and writer Gili Merin, about her extraordinary and exquisite book, Analogous Jerusalem, which came out with Humboldt Books earlier this year. In Analogous Jerusalem, Gili explores how the sacred topography of the Jerusalem of the pilgrim—particularly the Via Crucis or Stations of the Cross —has been analogically recreated across Europe. Combining essays and a photographic travelogue Gili argues that these "analogous" Jerusalems often surpass the original in their materialisation because, freed from the geopolitical conflicts and material constraints of the "real" city, they permit of a spiritual purity that connects the pilgrims more deeply to the Jerusalem of their imaginations, the Jerusalem that should be. We discuss a little of this, and how Christianity displaced Jerusalem's holiness to distant landscapes, creating sites that foster…

In the 182nd episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Andreea Mihalache joined me to discuss her new book, Boredom and the Architectural Imagination: Rudofsky, Venturi, Scott Brown, and Steinberg, which she published with the University of Virginia Press in 2024. Exploring the boundaries of boredom, Andreea and I discuss Bernard Rudofsky, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown and Saul Steinberg, the four thinker-makers of the twentieth century explored in her excellent book, whose writing and design challenged boredom’s pervasive, creeping grip on the modern imagination. Looking at our orderly, crisp and glassy, financialised cities now, it’s perhaps difficult to see how their critique of modernity and the city changed anything. But by proposing modes of operation to counter it, each of these folk gave us ways of thinking, engaging and acting through design which remain elegant, generative and – I think – rather inspiring. Andreea is Co-Director of the Architecture Graduate Programs and Associate…

For Episode 181 of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I was joined by the Berlin-based artist, Larissa Fassler whose work explores through imagery and sculpture - aesthetic, layered, ambiguous maps, models and interventions - the social and political spatialites of cities and their everyday encounter by people there. Larissa’s work has intrigued and delighted me for quite a long time, so it was a real prize to finally get to meander with her through a very little of her thinking, experiences, background and motivations. As I understand it, Larissa’s work derives from deep engagement in places, documenting them through a host of means and rendering them as something like palimpsests, which in turn demand close and slow encounter by their public, producing a sort-of double coded knowledge of cities and the people who live with them, pointing thus towards space’s meaning and possibilities. It’s all very architectural, or at least, I think, towards that which we in architectural education might in our better…

For Episode 180 of the A is for Architecture Podcast, the extraordinary Australian architect, Peter Stutchbury, joined me to speak about a little of his work, his origins, his purpose and his ethic. It’s an extraordinary story, beautifully told by a wonderful man, a worthy addition for this, a jubilee episode. Peter’s work is deeply rooted in the land and culture of his homeland, and all the complexity that implies. There are histories, cosmologies, manners and methods, which are drawn together in places and through this, in Peter’s telling, ‘the work becomes a means of connection, so that as you find the work, you also find yourself becoming of the work, not in a way that you copy it […] or that necessarily makes sense to you, but in a way that allows you to relax and perhaps even not be judgemental, perhaps even to take it with you, as part of your entourage.’ That’s quite a way of putting it. Peter Stutchbury Architecture can be found here, are on Instagram and more or less everywhere that’s anywhere…

Episode 179 of the A is for Architecture Podcast is a fascinating, expansive discussion with scholar, planner and architect, Dr Shiben Banerji, associate professor in the Department of the History of Art at UC Berkley, about some small parts of his sprawling and wonderful Lineages of the Global City: Occult Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy, which he published with the University of Texas Press in July this year. In the shadow of empire-collapsing wars and revolutions, Shiben explains, occult modernists of the early-twentieth-century saw not just chaos, but a rare chance to forge a spiritually united humanity. Across the world, from Argentina to India to America, occultist architects and planners dreamed up radical cities, suburbs and communes designed to awaken a new global subject who would feel bound to all humankind, transcending the impulse for wretched violence. Shiben and I talk all this, and how these new world builders tried to use architecture to engineer souls. Visionary? Indeed. But…

In Episode 178 of this incessant podcast, Adam Sharr, Professor of Architecture at Newcastle University, discusses his 2007 book, Heidegger for Architects, published by Routledge. Heidegger’s ideas haunt architectural discourse, practice and education, which remain inwardly wedded to concepts like dwelling, place, authenticity, world and building, ideas that are rooted in his work. Arguably, his ideas remain foundational in debates on sustainability and human-centred design too. Yet despite this influence, Heidegger’s writing’s opacity and his philosophical entanglements—intellectual, political, and ethical—make him a challenging figure to approach. So we deal with this, including Heidegger’s Nazi associations, some key concepts – dwelling, the Fourfold, the Thing – how Heidegger suggested buildings participate in the unfolding of place and meaning, and what it means to think of architecture not just as the production of objects but as a way of revealing—or concealing—our relationship to the world around us.…

In this new episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, writer and organiser, Alva Gotby, discusses her recent latest book, Feeling at Home: Transforming the Politics of Housing, published by Verso in January this year. Feeling at Home is rooted in Marxist feminism, and approaches housing as more-than-shelter, but rather as a key site for reproducing labour power under capitalism, perpetuating all the inequalities. Alva extends this critique, proposing what is called family abolitionism, arguing for the collectivisation of domestic life the better to dismantle the nuclear family as a capitalist institution. But Alva isn’t also pleading for nostalgia and a return to the paternalistic state but proposes instead collective alternatives that prioritize marginalised people and ecological sustainability. How’d you like them apples? Alva is on (but not much on) Instagram and X, and the book is linked above. Alva is in various places online discussing this book, and her previous one, They Call It Love: The…

The A is for Architecture Podcast’s latest episode is a discussion with the architect, writer, teacher and broadcaster, Piers Taylor. It is Piers’ second time on the show, but rather than his practice, this time we discuss his freshly minted book, Learning from the Local: Designing responsively for people, climate and culture, published by RIBA Publishing last month. In Learning from the Local, Piers presents global examples of low-carbon, context-responsive architecture. In arguing for a post-global architecture, examining geology, waste, ecology, self-build and community engagement, the book proposes a sort-of vernacular. We talk this, Oz, practice, good practice and a very elegant proposal for what Piers calls restless innovation. Quieten down why don’t you and have a solid listen. Piers is Professor of Knowledge Exchange in Architecture at UWE and director of Invisible Studio, (which posts on Instagram), and he’s so all over the internet he literally has a Wikipedia page. The book is linked above. +…

In the latest episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast Jeana Ripple, Chair and Vincent & Eleanor Shea Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia, joined me to discuss her recent book, Type V City: Codifying Material Inequity in Urban America, published by the University of Texas Press in August this year. In Type V city, Jeana describes how building codes or regulations in the USA have shaped urban landscapes. Specifically, Jeana explores how the construction of light, combustible wood-frame buildings – known as Type V construction - have codified inequities in social, economic, environmental and health outcomes for residents. We discuss this idea – the entrenchment of ethics in the materials of building making – but also that where the technology is restricted, in the exacerbation of labour inequalities. Materials, huh? Who’d have thought it? Well, you will, if you listen to (and read) Jeana. The book is linked above. Jenna can be found at work and on LinkedIn. + Music…

The A is for Architecture Podcast’s newest episode is a conversation with North American scholars, social scientist Patrick Lynn Rivers and design historian Kai Wood Mah, about their book, Situated Practices in Architecture and Politics, published by Dalhousie Architectural Press in 2024. In our conversation, Patrick and Kai speak of the importance of situated learning and practice, which involves architects engaging with communities to co-create knowledge as a mode not just of transforming spaces and making things, but as an ethnographic means of seeing things through the eyes of communities. Situated practices, they argue, force a necessary politicisation of design thinking, and are as such essential for architects to adapt to post-colonial challenges and contribute to global change. Patrick is professor at SAIC in Chicago, has a personal website here, and can be found on LinkedIn and Insta. Kai is Associate Professor in the McEwan School of Architecture at the Laurentian University, Canada and also has a…

In the latest episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast Amsterdam-based architect Hans van der Heijden discuss themes of his design work and writing. Founder of Hans van der Heijden Architects, a practice which track context through deep research realised in, as I see it, a sort-of fitting architecture. Hans and I connected over a mutual interest in the pursuit of the/ a common city. Our conversation centres on Hans’ book, The Residential Palazzo (Het woonpalazzo) in Design Research, Education and Practice, published this year by HvdHA which, along with the built work Hans speaks of, raises important questions. How must we build, given all the things, to accommodate the lineage of a common culture and place? And why do we still, even after all, fail to do so? What drives contemporary urban incoherence? And how might we arrest this? The answer, of course, is study, observation, seeing and hearing. It’s an architecture Hans proposes that is ground in attentiveness and, I would say, generosity. Through the…

In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast the journalist, writer and Deputy Editor at Inside Housing, Peter Apps discusses his very recent book, Homesick: How Housing Broke London and How to Fix It, published by One World Publications in September this year. Peter became something of a big noise when he won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2023 for his book, Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen, also published with Oneworld. In that, Peter’s account exposed the systemic failures, negligence and cost-cutting in construction and regulation that led to the preventable 2017 Grenfell Tower fire. In Homesick, and sort-of by extension, Peter examines London's housing crisis, details how skyrocketing costs, inequality, and policy failures have made homes unaffordable, and proposes solutions to address another systemic issues towards housing justice. Listen to Peter, read his books and think on’t. It’s time. Thanks to Peter for the time, effort and conversation. Thanks to Margot at One…

In the A is for Architecture Podcast’s latest episode, Stefano Boeri - architect, urban planner, Professor of Urban Planning at Milan Polytechnic, President of the Future of the City Foundation and former editor of Domus (among some other things…) - joined to speak about his upbringing and education in Milan and Venice, his influences, mentors and inspirations, and the development of his design thinking and practice, Stefano Boeri Architetti. Now a leading voice in European – and more recently global – architecture, Professor Boeri’s work presents us with a new and beguiling vision, one that combines modern urban lifestyles with a genuine concern for nature, habitat and the co-living of species in the contemporary city. Stefano Boeri Architetti are perhaps best known for their pioneering work integrating vegetation and sustainability into urban architecture, most famously in the Bosco Verticale in Milan (2009-14) —as well as visionary research, writing and planning on biodiversity, urban forestry and the…

In the newest episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I got to speak to Derek Jones and James Benedict Brown, two of five scholars responsible for the very recently published Studio Properties: A Field Guide to Design Education, published by Bloomsbury this year and also available as an open access publication on the Bloomsbury website. Alongside Elizabeth Boling, James Corazzo, Colin M. Gray and Nicole Lotz, James and Derek have written a book to help clarify the operation of the design studio in education. Repositioning ‘studio’ not as a monolithic entity but as a landscape made up of many interlocking properties, each of which has a character that can be encouraged or diminished to build better design thinking and culture. James, Derek and I discuss a few of these properties, where they can be seen, how they operate, how educators might interpret them and intervene in them to build better designers. Clever chaps, clever book. Have a sticky and see. James is Associate Professor of Architecture at…