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...

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.<...

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 iden...

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. ...

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...

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 mo...

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...

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 En...

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 c...

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...

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...

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 pro...

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 place...

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...

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...

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 N...

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 – howev...

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. Shabb...

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...

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, a...