In episode 18, season 2 of A is for Architecture, I met (on Zoom…) with Ed Parham, Director of Design & innovation at Space Syntax, to talk about its origins, objectives, methods and motivations. Space Syntax, the brainchild of Bill Hiller, formed as the Space Syntax Laboratory at The Bartlett, University College London, and now led by Tim Stonor, is ubiquitous in architectural thinking, almost a shorthand for any form of data-led complex spatial analysis. I wanted to understand it better, and Ed, as an architect, seemed like the ideal person to unpack it for a naïf like me.

Space Syntax describe their work as providing ‘a science-based and human-focused approach to the urban planning and design process. We help people to see, in clear and straightforward terms, how buildings and urban places can be designed to optimise their functional performance.’

Ed and I spoke about Space Syntax’s work at Astana/Nur-Sultan work, which you can watch on YouTube here, and the AD article, Urban Futures: Designing the Digitalised City.

You can read Bill Hiller’s seminal text, Space is the Machine, at spaceisthemachine.com, and here’s a lovely essay, A Tribute to Bill Hillier, given at the 13th Space Syntax Symposium, in 2020, by Margarita Greene, Tao Yang, Vinicius Netto, Ruth Conroy Dalton, Sophia Psarra and Frederico De Holanda.

Ed’s professional profile is here, and his LinkedIn is here. Space Syntax’s Instagram is here, their Twitter is here, YouTube here, LinkedIn here and Facebook here.

Listen ‘n’ learn.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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In this the seventeenth episode of A is for Architecture’s second series, I speak with Sally Stone, Reader and Programme Leader for the MA Architecture and Adaptive Reuse programme and Director of the Continuity in Architecture Atelier at the Manchester School of Architecture. Among other things, Sally writes a lot, and we spoke about one recent book of hers, Inside Information: The Defining Concepts of Interior Design, co-written with Ed Hollis (Edinburgh College of Art) and published by RIBA Books in 2022.

Inside Information deals with interiors, which is an under-interrogated part of Capital-A Architecture, focused as it is so often on exterior conditions, formal aesthetics and urban presence. Sally, and the book, unpack this quite a bit. As the blurb puts it: ‘We spend most of our time inside buildings [so] [m]astering the language, thinking and history of the interior is critical to understanding and designing spaces. This essential primer transcends the boundaries and genres that often define interiors, providing a comprehensive view of the concepts and vocabulary of interior design.’ The book (and Sally) do this indeed.

Sally’s professional profile is here, Instagram here, and Twitter (even) here. You can get the book via the link above. It’s graphically well lush and full of ideas, information and insight.

Listen around, and find out.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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In Episode 16 of Season 2 of A is for Architecture, I speak with Gevork Hartoonian, Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture at the University of Canberra, Australia, about his 2012 book, Architecture and Spectacle: A Critique, published by Routledge. The issue of the architectural spectacle has perhaps been the dominant idea in urban and architectural thinking for the last two or three decades, most explicitly seen in Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum at Bilbao, a model of design that has been replicated globally since that building’s opening, but permeating design education and practice almost everywhere, in the near universal pursuit of spectacular solutions to the postmodern urban condition. Gevork’s book discusses this phenomenon, ‘[f]ocusing on six leading contemporary architects: Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Bernard Tschumi, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas and Steven Holl’ and putting forward ‘a unique and insightful analysis of "neo-avant-garde" architecture [and] discusses the spectacle and excess which permeates contemporary architecture in reference to the present aesthetic tendency for image making, but [also] by applying the tectonic of theatricality discussed by the 19th-century German architect Gottfried Semper. In doing so, it breaks new ground by opening up a dialogue between the study of the past and the design of the present.’

Gevork’s professional profile is linked above, he’s on LinkedIn here too, and his Instagram can be found here. There’s a great wee critique by Gevork on Zaha Hadid on The Charnel House here. There’s a serious academic piece by Gevork in the Journal of Architecture (v7/ 2 2002), on the merits of Gehry too: Frank Gehry: roofing, wrapping, and wrapping the roof.

Happy listening!

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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aisforarchitecture.org

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In Season 2, Episode 15 A is for Architecture, I speak with architect and writer, Jonathan Hale, Professor of Architectural Theory at the University of Nottingham, about his 2017 book, Merleau-Ponty for Architects, published by Routledge as part of their Thinkers for Architects series. Merleau-Ponty was a leading phenomenologist, whose work ‘has influenced the design work of architects as diverse as Steven Holl and Peter Zumthor, as well as […] architectural theory, notably […] Dalibor Vesely at Cambridge, Kenneth Frampton, David Leatherbarrow and Alberto Pérez-Gómez in North America and Juhani Pallasmaa in Finland. Merleau-Ponty suggested that the value of people’s experience of the world gained through their immediate bodily engagement with it remains greater than the value of understanding gleaned through abstract mathematical, scientific or technological systems’ and gives us tools to think about other ways of understanding ‘space, movement, materiality and creativity’ in architecture. Phenomenology was very front-and-centre when I was a student, but has sort-of become implicit in design thinking now, and (apparently) barely needs explaining. Jonathan does explain it though, which I am grateful for, through Merleau-Ponty’s work.

Jonathan’s professional profile is here on the University of Nottingham website, and he can be found on LinkedIn here too. Jonathan tweets on Twitter, so have a follow if that’s your thing, and have a read of Merleau-Ponty’s ‘Body Schema’ on the Body of Theory website, an article Jonathan originally wrote and published in Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism, edited by Ariane Mildenberg, and published by Bloomsbury in 2019.

Happy listening!

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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In Episode 14 of the second season of A is for Architecture, I speak with architect and scholar (and personal hero), Henry Sanoff, professor emeritus at the North Carolina State University. Henry has a remarkable story to tell, starting in the office of Frank Lloyd Wright (on the Guggenheim!) and then on to Edward Durrell Stone, before heading off to Jamaica to test his mettle as an architect and to develop a programmatic, ethnographic approach to design. This led to a long career in community participation design, and we discuss three texts he produced through this: Community Participation Methods in Design and Planning (Wiley, 2000), Participatory Environmental Design (CreateSpace, 2018) and also Visual Research Methods in Design (Routledge, 2018).

Henry has produced an abundance of academic outputs over his long career, but this pales in comparison to his very broad and deep community projects, which are the basis for his writing. All his texts are filled with cases and examples of how stuff can get done with communities to make better architecture. You can hear him speak about it in this informative Lockdown Era online lecture ‘Henry Sanoff - Community Participation Methods in Design and Planning’ for North Carolina State University College of Design. Henry is on LinkedIn here and his ResearchGate profile contains links to downloadable versions of most of his works.

Happy listening!

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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In Episode 13 of Season 2 of A is for Architecture, I speak with architect, writer, teacher and television presenter, Piers Taylor about his journey to architecture, and the development of his practice, Invisible Studio. We speak about the way he works, his approach to design-as-making and making-as-design, the problems of professionalism, and touch on his 2020 doctoral thesis, Developing a Framework for Describing, Planning and Evaluating Empowerment in Architectural Making Projects, which he undertook at the University of Reading, supervised by Flora Samuel.

Piers has produced a huge amount - written, spoken and designed - and there’s much online to see of his and Invisible Studio’s work. Some recent highlights include a rammed earth yoga studio, a shelter from ‘timber sourced within the Westonbirt arboretum in Gloucestershire, England’, and a mixed-use performing arts centre in Watchet, England. Invisible Studio was featured in a lovely wee movie, made by Laura Mark and Jim Stephenson, as part of their Practice series, in 2020.

Invisible Studio’s website includes a blog, documenting the practice’s thinking and work, as well as other media matters. Piers is on the socials, too, and you can find him on Twitter here (Invisible Studio is here), and on Instagram here.

Happy listening!

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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aisforarchitecture.org

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In the 12th episode of the 2nd season of A is for Architecture, I speak with architect, curator, scholar and teacher, Dr Ruth Lang, about her recent book, Building for Change: The Architecture of Creative Reuse, published by gestalten in August this year. Ruth wears many hats, working for Mae as a writer, editor and researcher, at the Design Museum as Research Lead for the Future Observatory, as well as being lead on the Critical Practice module at the LSA and lead on the Radical Practice MA module at the RCA.

Building for Change asks: ‘How can we build a sustainable future in a time of climate change and dwindling resources?’ and goes on to document a number of global projects by leading architects which have embraced creative/ adaptive reuse as a means of enhancing existing fabric, reducing waste and maintaining cultural and historical identity in places where the normative option may have otherwise been the knock down/ rebuild model.

You can see Ruth’s LinkedIn profile here, and she tweets here.

I met Ruth through her publishers, a guest suggestion by my boss, Chloe Street Tarbatt.  Alongside being generally polymathic, Ruth is great to hear speak, believe.

Happy listening!

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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aisforarchitecture.org

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In episode 11 of A is for Architecture’s second season, I speak with architect, scholar, teacher and activist, Dr. Jos Boys, about her long term project, The DisOrdinary Architecture Project. Jos was a founding member of the ground-breaking feminist architecture practice, Matrix, a ‘radical, […] women-led platform […] integrating new interdisciplinary and intersectional ways of working across theory and practice’, and whose work was recently featured in a retrospective exhibition – How We Live Now: Reimagining Spaces with Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative - at the Barbican. Jos has also written widely on her approach to space, design and research, including Doing Disability Differently: An Alternative Handbook on Architecture, Dis/Ability and Designing for Everyday Life (2014) and as editor, Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader (2017), both published by Routledge.

The Handy Guide: The DisOrdinary Architecture Project infographic sheet can be downloaded here, and is on Issuu here. You can hear Jos speak on some of the ideas we cover here at the Arizona State University - DisOrdinary Architecture: A Virtual Lecture by Dr. Jos Boys; at the Architectural Association- Doing Dis/ability and Architecture Differently?; and for A+DS, where Jos gave the Andy MacMillan Lecture 2021 - The DisOrdinary Architecture Project. There is much else online, so have a good look.

I met Jos through Kathy Li at the Glasgow School of Art, when after Fire 1, and teaching out of a rather dour spec office on Sauchiehall Street, Jos came up and gave us all a dose of hope. She’s really quite wonderful, so have a listen, do.

Happy listening!

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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aisforarchitecture.org

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In episode ten of season two of A is for Architecture, I speak with Beatriz Colomina and Evangelos Kotsioris, about their book Radical Pedagogies, co-edited with Ignacio G. Galán and Anna-Maria Meister and published by MIT Press in 2022. Beatriz is Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture at Princeton University and Evangelos Kotsioris, Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Radical Pedagogies documents and analyses the long history of experimental architecture education programs that ‘sought to upend disciplinary foundations and conventional assumptions about the nature of architecture […] challenged modernist and colonial norms, decentered building, imagined new roles for the architect, and envisioned participatory forms of practice’ in favour of greater diversity, insight, democratic voice and justice, and away from top-down educational - and practice -models.

You can get the book via MIT Press’ website here; it’s certainly worth a look. You can also find out more about Beatriz Colomina here,  and listen to her lecture on similar themes to the book for the Strelka Institute here, in a lecture she gave in 2019, entitled Radical Pedagogies. Evangelos can be found at MoMA here, on Instagram here, on LinkedIn here and watched speaking about the façade of the UN Secretariat Building as part of MoMA’s ArtSpeaks program here.

As any of us in it, or who’ve gone through it might attest, architectural education seems to trend to the centre, and its base form remains remarkably resilient to change, even in the face of the great technical, social and cultural shifts that have transformed the contemporary world. Radical Pedagogies documents the visions – hopes, I suppose – of folk who tried, and in many cases succeeded, in testing new forms of learning practice in the face of this shifting landscape.

Happy listening!

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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aisforarchitecture.org

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In the ninth episode of A is for Architecture’s second season, I speak with Paul Dobraszczyk, architectural writer, teacher, photographer and artist, about his book Architecture and Anarchism: Building Without Authority, published by Paul Holberton in 2021. The book documents sixty examples of what it defines as anarchist projects, which ‘key into a libertarian ethos and desire for diverse self-organised ways of building […] that embrace the core values of traditional anarchist political theory since its divergence from the mainstream of socialist politics in the 19th century.’

You can get the book via Paul Homberton’s website here. You can also find out more about Paul Dobraszczyk on his personal website, including his portfolio of photography, writing and art, as well as an ace blog and links to his socials (under construction…). His Instagram is here, anyway, and his Twitter is here.

I’ve always been intrigued by the possibilities of anarchism, although I’ve been too disorganised to sign up to any particular group. Paul does a decent job at explaining it, and its role and potential in and for the contemporary city.

Happy listening!

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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aisforarchitecture.org

Apple: podcasts.apple.com

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