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.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
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 website. Both Patrick and Kai co-direct the design research practice a.field. The book is linked above.
Much to ponder, so little time. Get to it!
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
Image credit: Pilgrimage to Biete Gabriel-Rufael by Robert Wilson.
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 careful study of the city and its parts, and by designing in concord with the city’s fabric as is, and the people who actually live and work there, architects can, in Hans’ words, ‘develop a sort of reservoir of a priori knowledge which […] lends you a kind of professional integrity.’
Strong medicine indeed.
Hans van der Heijden Architects are to be found here. Hans is on Instagram here.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
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 World for the PDF of the book and images. The book is linked above; Peter can be found on Substack, LinkedIn and X.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
Image credit: Trevor Patt (2015) Creative Commons Licence off Flickr: Robin Hood Gardens, London. Allison and Peter Smithson, 1972
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 future of cities.
As I hear it, running through Stefano’s work is a deep interest in the notion of plurality, networks and coalescence. It’s a transcendental vision, in the final analysis, one which seeks to elevate architecture, to make it important, instrumental and effective.
Beyond the image – and few contemporary architects have captured the zeitgeist as well as Stefano Boeri Architetti – is a deep knowledge, great sensitivity and a fundamental optimism, that through and with architecture, we can make good change happen.
So, worth a listen.
Stefano can be found almost universally online. His practice and academic positions are linked above, and he can be met at Instagram; his practice are on LinkedIn.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
Image credits: 1/ Boeri Studio - Vertical Forest, Photographer: Dimitar Harizanov (2020); 2/ Stefano Boeri, Curator, Photographer: Laila Pozzo ©Michelangelo Foundation
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 Umeå School of Architecture and is on LinkedIn; Derek is Senior Lecturer in Design at The Open University and can be found on LinkedIn. The book is linked above and also on the Studio Properties website, where all the things can be found.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
For the latest episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I spoke to architectural historian, writer and curator, Sir Charles Saumarez Smith CBE about his forthcoming book, John Vanbrugh: The Drama of Architecture, which is due out with Lund Humphries in November this year.
Sir John Vanbrugh (1664–1726) was an English dramatist turned architect, best known for designing Castle Howard and Blenheim Palace, two of the most ambitious Baroque buildings in Britain. A member of the Whig elite and the Kit-Cat Club, Vanbrugh’s work can be read through the social forms of his times but, as Sir John suggests, more importantly in the context of his unique theatrical imagination as it was revealed through his collaborations with professional architects, like Nicholas Hawksmoor. Mocked in his own life, Vanbrugh is now celebrated as one of England’s most original and daring architects.
Sir Charles was chief executive of the Royal Academy of Arts (2007-2018), director of the National Gallery (2002 – 2007) and before that, director of the National Portrait Gallery (1994 – 2002). He can, as such, be found everywhere online. You may seek him on LinkedIn and his personal website. The book is linked above.
In our own time we are #blessed with #Heatherwick.
But back then, they had #Vanbrugh.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
For this week’s episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I spoke to Berlin-based writer, architect and activist Anna Kostreva who, with Alex Head, leads Plural Studio, ‘a studio for critical inquiry, publishing and architectural design’. We met to talk about Anna’s novel, Seeing Fire | Seeing Meadows, which she published in 2023.
Seeing Fire | Seeing Meadows uses architecture – and an architect narrator - as a way to explore the growing digitisation of everyday urban and spatial life. We talk about this, about the book’s imperative but also about writing, [science] fiction and drawing as a routes to a sort-of triangulated and more shrewd understanding of the world around us.
Seeing Fire is linked above. Anna can be found at Plural Studio here, on Instagram here and on LinkedIn here.
Have a listen: see things differently.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
In Episode 167 of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Holly Smith, historian and Research Fellow at/ in St John’s College, University of Cambridge, discuss bits of her forthcoming book, Up in the Air: A History of High Rise Britain, which is out with Verso towards the end of October this year.
In Up in the Air, Holly charts the story of Britain’s multistorey council housing—from the post-war construction of estates like Sheffield’s Park Hill to the modern battles to defend them. In the face of the much-publicised failures of high-rise housing to produce the utopian social logics that underpinned them - and punctuated by disaster and explicit tragedy, as at Grenfell - that defence has seemed largely a forlorn one. But were Britain’s high-rise estates really architectural failures? Or were they rather sites where welfare-state ideals were built, contested, and reimagined, as enduring battlegrounds for housing justice?
Holly can be found at work here, on Instagram and X. The book is linked above.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
Image credit: © Bishopsgate Archive/Tower Blocks UK
In this new episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes spoke with me about her recent book, A Moratorium on New Construction, published by Sternberg Press in 2025 as part of their Critical Spatial Practices series.
If a book starts with, ‘To build is to destroy’, things are liable to get pretty exciting (for an architecture fan). As the bumf puts it – and our chat opens out - Charlotte’s provocation for a moratorium is in pursuit of a reimagined productive building culture: ‘To pause new construction—even if momentarily, creates a radical thinking framework for alternatives to the current regime of space production and its suspect growth imperative.’
Sound good?
Yes. It does.
Charlotte has a personal website, as well as space at EPFL. She’s on Instagram too.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
In this week’s release of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Wayne Hemingway MBE logged on to discuss one of his latest initiatives, The Housing Assembly, a growing movement seek paths out of the housing crisis by amplifying the voices of folk excluded from secure, affordable homes. Aiming to transform lived experiences into influential action and through grassroots initiatives The Housing Assembly is building from the bottom up a collective platform to demand well-built, affordable homes in good places.
For those who don’t know, Wayne is a renowned British designer, co-founder with his wife Gerardine Hemingway of the iconic fashion label Red or Dead which delivered affordable, socially conscious design in the 1980s and 1990s. Wayne and Gerardine later establishing HemingwayDesign, a multi-disciplinary design team dedicated to creating positive social impact through culture-led regeneration, urban design, placemaking, branding, and community collaboration.
In short Wayne is something like a national treasure, but edgier and more purposeful. An icon of mine since I first encountered his work – and bought a pair of Red or Dead shoes to go on a date - this was a genuine privilege to record.
HemingwayDesign can be found here and on Instagram, The Housing Assembly is linked above and is on Instagram and all over SM. Wayne can be found on LinkedIn.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
In the newest episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I spoke to the architect, historian and theorist Dr Marianna Charitonidou about her fairly recent book, Architectural Drawings as Investigating Devices: Architecture’s Changing Scope in the 20th Century, which she published with Routledge in 2023.
In the book, Marianna explores how evolving modes of architectural representation reflect epistemological shifts in architecture and urbanism in the modern period. Treating them as something like texts, Marianna analyses drawings’ (and their architects’) roles in mediating relationships between architects, observers and the inhabitants of built spaces. Touching on the work of all the biggies – from Corb and Mies to Rem and Zaha, Rossi, Tschumi, Eisenman, Hejduk and even (my fave) Ungers, the book argues that these transformations reveal ruptures in architecture's imagination, and its shift from modernist universality to PoMo multiplicity.
Marianna has her own website, she’s on Instagram and LinkedIn. The book is linked above.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
For this summer’s latest episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I spoke to the writer Michael Euade to discuss his 2023 book, Antoni Gaudi, part of Reaktion Books’ Critical Lives series. Gaudi has recently been beatified by the Catholic Church, making him one step short of being declared a saint. But for what? Gaudi is unquestionably a monumental figure in the pantheon of named architects, but saintly? That’s a bit different.
Antoni Gaudí, a revered Art Nouveau architect whose visionary designs reshaped Barcelona’s skyline, was a man of what some see as contrasts—devoutly religious, politically conservative, and boldly innovative. Michael and I discuss this in the context of Gaudi’s home in Catalonia and through his large body of work - including the iconic Sagrada Família - which blended Gothic, Baroque, and Orientalist elements with great sensitivity and style.
From humble beginnings in Reus through transformations in Barcelona, Gaudi’s life was marked by personal trial and artistic evolution and Michael’s book – and our conversation - opens up the architect in new ways: as political, social, cultural and spiritual figure.
Michael can be found on his personal website here, and the book is on the Reaktion website, linked above.
Visca Catalunya lliure!
Well, maybe…
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
In the newest episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I was joined by Piers Gough and Sophie Ryder, both of CZWG. Piers is the original G of CZWG and it is for that we speak, a firm he founded in 1975 with Nick Campbell, Rex Wilkinson and Roger Zogolovich.
CZWG turned 50 years old this year, having become known for bold, characterful designs. Their work was at the vanguard of the postmodern movement in the UK, with notable projects in the 1980 and 1990s instrumental in the urban regeneration game in that period, as public taste moved on from a-historical modernism towards a sort-of playful contextualism, not least at London Docklands, where they played their part in redefining the city’s east including China Wharf and The Circle in Bermondsey, and Cascades on the Isle of Dogs, and where four of their buildings have now been listed for their postmodern significance.
More recent work has built on this legacy, and the practice continues to deliver large scale urban and urbane projects that look back as they go on. We discuss all this, in a hybrid sort of way: Piers and Sophie bookend the practice. But as we know, difference makes for lovely conversation.
CZWG is at work here, on Insta here and LinkedIn here.
Tune in, tune up, tune on.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
In Episode 161 of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Dr Géraldine Borio - Swiss architect and assistant professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Hong Kong - discusses her exquisite, enigmatic and hugely inspiring book, Looking for the Voids: Learning from Asia’s Liminal Urban Spaces as a Foundation to Expand an Architectural Practice, published by Park Books in 2023.
Géraldine’s book explores architectural and urban interventions in residual and liminal spaces across Bangkok, Hong Kong and Seoul, emphasizing what she reads and presents as a philosophy of frugality and spatial economy that is productive, hybrid and amorphous, but definable too. We discuss parts of the five key principles presented —Defining the Void, Interlocking Gaps, Expanding Boundaries, Overlapping Functions, and Being Frugal—consider their meaning and speculate a bit on their wider application in other places.
Geraldine can be found at work here. She is on LinkedIn and Instagram. The book is linked above and is well worth a look: an artefact in its own right.
Happy listening, then happy reading.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
In this, the 160th episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I was joined by Professor Christian Schmid, geographer, sociologist, urban researcher and until recently Professor of Sociology in the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich.
Christian’s scholarship is wide and deep and includes, among many other things, co-authoring the remarkable Switzerland. An Urban Portrait, with Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron among others whilst researcher at ETH Studio Basel in 2006. We met thought to speak about the recent publication in translation of his wonderful book Henri Lefebvre and the Theory of the Production of Space which came out in English with Verso in 2023.
In our discussion, Christian describes his engagement with Henri Lefebvre, the great theorist of everyday life, starting with his own activism – an urban revolt, no less – as a student in Zurich in the 1980s. From this, as he tells, ‘Lefebvre was really this kind of philosopher and theorist that really matched somehow our own experiences on the streets, in the struggles [and] became, then a starting point for our collective theory building, and [and] collective research.’
We go from that through Lefebvre’s concept of urbanization, the production of space and its commodification in modern societies, and the role of the architect in that – either as agent or resistance. We turn in the end to the present and future: where are we now and where should we aim to go.
This is a very excellent episode, believe, because Christian is wonderfully funny, grounded, expert and honest. Pay attention.
Christian can be found at ETH Zurich and on a lot of the internet. The book is linked above.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
In the this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Emirati architect and co-founder of Holesum Studio, Azza Aboualam discusses her curation of Pressure Cooker, the National Pavilion of the United Arab Emirates' 2025 contribution to the 19th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Architecture Biennale.
Pressure Cooker examines the UAE’s evolving relationship with food production, focusing on how architectural interventions that synthesize indigenous and contemporary knowledges can address food security in one of the world’s most arid regions. Azza frames the exhibition as a response to the UAE’s unique environmental, cultural and social challenges, whilst responding to the specific, situated realities of everyday life in the UAE. But, might well you ask, if the spatiality of food is global, should not Pressure Cooker speak beyond borders? Well, spoiler alert, it does.
Azza can be found at work here and on LinkedIn here. The exhibition is linked above.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
In the newest episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Paul Chatterton, Professor of Urban Futures at the University of Leeds, discusses parts of his quite recent book Unlocking Sustainable Cities: A Manifesto for Real Change (2019), published by Pluto Press.
In the book, Paul argues against the contemporary city as is, suggesting instead that whilst they are presented as ever-improving hybrid spaces of choice and identity, of the authentic self, lived independently of the strictures of family, tradition, culture and obligation – after all, aren’t we all moving there now? –in fact foster individualism, status anxiety and an erosion of compassion.
In contrast to this, Paul proposes a transformative approach to urban sustainability through four key city systems—transport, energy, nature, and community—framed by five themes: compassion, imagination, experimentation, co-production and transformation. These counter-measures, Paul suggests, will get us closer to the sustainable, social city.
Paul can be found at work and on LinkedIn. The book is linked above.
#UnlockingSustainableCities #PaulChatterton #UrbanFutures #SustainableCities #RealUrbanChange #JustTransition #EcoUrbanism #RightToTheCity #PostCapitalistCity #ArchitecturePodcast #AisforArchitecture
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Gerard Reinmuth and Scot Balmforth, co-founders and directors of Terroir, speak about their practice in this, its 25th year of operation.
Terroir are a collective of architects and urban designers based in Tasmania, Australia and Denmark, with a large portfolio of work that includes significant civic, recreation, health, education, housing and commercial work, such as the Penguin Parade, Philip Island, Victoria, the extension to the World Maritime University, in Malmö, Sweden (with Kim Utzon) and the Bernie Maker’s Workshop in Tasmania, among many award-winning schemes.
Gerard and Scott ably describe parts of Terroir’s particular, situated and global approach to architecture, urban design and research, guided by four core principles: Contextual Engagement, Civic Generosity, Material and Spatial Experimentation and Collaborative Practice. These they articulate not only in their built work, but luckily for us, in a series of three books – Instruments (2019), Third Spaces (2019) and Territories (forthcoming 2025), all published with Uro Publications.
Terroir is a terrific practice and Scott and Gerard are the best ambassadors for it, of course, but more generally for a new type of design practice rooted in place, conscious of people, time, ethics and obligation, wrestling with the significant problems of being a Good Architect in the uneven terrain of contemporary society.
Have a sticky and find out how.
There’s a link to Terroir above. Otherwise, they can be found on Instagram, and on LinkedIn. The books can be found here.
#AustralianArchitecture #TERROIRArchitects #GerardReinmuth #ScottBamforth #ContemporaryArchitecture #PlaceBasedDesign #CreativePractice #ArchitecturePodcast #AisforArchitecture
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, the University of Edinburgh’s Richard J. Williams discusses The Expressway World, his brand new book with Polity Press. Richard is an old friend of the podcast, having recorded the first episode in the autumn of 2021. Back then, we spoke about Richard’s book on that bearded provocateur Reyner Banham who, among things, was known for his 1971 book, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. I guess Expressway World naturally springs from this…
While often associated with destruction, severance and car-centric modernity, urban expressways are complex, multifaceted spaces, not merely engineering structures. Richard argues that we would be better served to read expressways as cultural, political, and social landscapes shaped by their design, use and resistance. And rather than demolition of what are increasingly moribund artefacts of a bygone age, he advocates for a nuanced approach to living with these infrastructures. Drawing on global case studies in cities as diverse as New York, London, São Paulo, Madrid, Seoul and Glasgow (and of course, LA), Richard demonstrates how communities, activists and planners have creatively repurposed expressways into public spaces, parks, or cultural hubs.
Another banger from a great scholar. Listen, then drive out to buy his book.
Richard can be found here at work, on Instagram and on his personal website. The book is linked above.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
