A is for Architecture Podcast

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 t...

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 o...

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 pompo...

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...

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 i...

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...

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,...

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 e...

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 al...

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 th...

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 assoc...

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...

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. ...

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 w...

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 a...

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 g...

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 argu...

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 archite...

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 plan...

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 & co...

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. Bea...

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, cartes...

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 i...

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 Administere...

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 ca...