A is for Architecture Podcast

By Ambrose GillickArts Design

A is for Architecture Podcast episodes

November 08, 2023 Tom de Paor: City, suburb, desert
Episode 9/3 of A is for Architecture is a conversation with the architect, artist, writer and teacher, Tom de Paor, ‘one of Ireland’s foremost architects’. We speak about a lot of things, but spend most time thinking about his work Desert/ Dysart, documented beautifully in a book with Peter Maybury, published by Gall Editions as part of Maybury and Paul Clarke’s Notations collection, and due for a significant feature in A+U next spring, and also the Pálás Cinema, Galway, which opened in 2018.
Tom’s work is extensive and highly considered, and includes the National Sculpture Factory Cork (1998), Clontarf Pumpstation and landscape (2007), the Druid Theatre, Galway (2009), and a number of submissions to the Venice Architecture Biennale since the inaugural Irish pavilion he designed, the widely celebrated work N3 – ‘a martyrium in peat’. In 2022 dePaor staged the exhibition ‘i see Earth: building and ground: 1991–2021’, curated by Nathalie Weadick, reviewed in The Times here.
You might find Desert for sale via Peter Maybury’s website, although the print run was small, so I doubt it. There’s a good review of it – and the series – on Maybury’s website by Michael McGarry writing in Perspective magazine. Tom’s practice website is here and Dysart’s emergence is documented on Instagram as
dysart_dysert_disert_desert. Keep your eyes peeled for the feature on it in A+U next year. You can hear/ watch Tom speak about Desert/ Dysart as part of the KU Leuven Faculteit Architectuur’s Going Public YouTube lecture series here, with a lecture called ‘House and Garden’ in 2022, and on the Pálás Cinema at Harvard’s GSD, in a talk entitled “previous, next” from 2017, here.
Power springs up, as Hannah Arendt said. So does Tom.
Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.
Thanks for listening.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
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aisforarchitecture.org
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1 hr 7 min
November 02, 2023 Leonard Ma, Helen Runting and Tahl Kaminer: Gentrification, suburbia, cities and finance.
A is for Architecture’s Episode 8, Series 3, is a conversation with a trio of great scholars, Tahl Kaminer, Leonard Ma and Helen Runting, about their recent book, Urbanizing Suburbia: Hyper-Gentrification, the Financialization of Housing and the Remaking of the Outer European City, published by Jovis in July this year.
Addressing the ongoing exodus from the inner city apparent across the world and the appropriation of the suburbs by new communities, the book examines ‘the relationship between three current processes underway in global cities: the hyper-gentrification of inner cities, the financialization of housing, and the structural changes occurring in the suburbs […] using the examples of four key global European cities: Amsterdam, Berlin, London, and Stockholm.’
You can find the book on the Jovis website here. Tahl’s Welsh School of Architecture profile is here, Helen’s Malmö University profile can be found here, and she’s on Insta and X too. Her practice, Secretary Office for Architecture, is worth a look. Leonard can be found at the Estonian Academy of Arts here, and on Drawing Matter here.
Knowledge is power, so listen and learn, and grow in power.
Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.
Thanks for listening.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
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aisforarchitecture.org
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1 hr 11 min
October 25, 2023 Paul Dobraszczyk: Animals and architecture
Episode 7/ 3 of A is for Architecture, is a conversation with writer, photographer and teacher Paul Dobraszczyk, about his book, Animal Architecture: Beasts, Buildings and Us, published by Reaktion Books in March this year.
Animal Architecture ‘considers many different animals, opening up new ways of thinking about architecture and the more-than-human [and] asks what we might require in order to design with animals and become more attuned to the other lifeforms that already use our structures’. That’s what the blurb says, anyway.
You can find Paul on X here, Instagram here and at his website here. The book is on the Reaktion website, and you can watch Paul talk about it with UNSW’s Dr Siobhan O'Sullivan on her Knowing Animals podcast on YouTube. Very recently Paul wrote on The Conversation about another pathological effect of big, shiny glass buildings – bird killing. Ah, modernity, you little wonder.
Worth a sticky beak, I reckon.
Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.
Thanks for listening.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
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aisforarchitecture.org
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52 min
October 18, 2023 Charlotte Skene Catling: From geoarcheology to architecture.
In episode 6/ 3 of A is for Architecture, architect, writer, teacher and researcher, Charlotte Skene Catling talks about her practice Skene Cailtling de la Peña, which she founded in 2003 with Jaime de la Peña. The practice’s work has been widely published and to considerable critical acclaim, blending as it does context, occupation/ use, earth, soil, sedimentation and historic records, in a process they term geoarchaeology. The term has academic connotations, and how this is actualized in Skene Catling de la Peña’s practice is worth hearing told. It particularly fascinating where it touches on Aino and Alvar Aalto’s Toppila silo in Oulu, Finland, which they are turning into a regenerative/ cultural space with the Factum Foundation.
You can find Charlotte all over the internet. She wrote a column for the Architectural Review, Domus and The Burlington Magazine, teaches at the London School of Architecture, Instagrams and LinkedIns. There’s a lovely article at Drawing Matter on The Dairy House, excerpted from Françoise Astorg Bollack’s Material Transfers: Metaphor, Craft, and Place in Contemporary Architecture, published by Monacelli
Press in 2020. Have a look at Flint House, which was the RIBA House of the Year 2015, and is covered most stylishly in this Architectural Review vid.
Deep stuff. Subterranean, even...
Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.
Thanks for listening.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
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aisforarchitecture.org
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1 hr 8 min
October 11, 2023 Liz Postlethwaite: Permaculture and design.
In episode 5/ 3 of A is for Architecture, Liz Postlethwaite talks about her practice as a participatory artist, permaculture designer and Director of Small Things Creative Projects, a social enterprise with a focus on regenerative culture through designing and writing scaled interventions in public.
Permaculture is mimetic, promoting the management of land and habitats by paralleling and replicating natural ecologies. (It’s also more than this, as Liz explains.) It has direct relevance for architecture and practice, reframing the relationship of designers and sites/ context towards greener, more holistic, ethical and slower ways. It also offers a number of simple motifs for understanding the integrated and rhizomatic nature of environments, people, stuff, action and intention. Believe, it’s a good thing, even if you’re not a hippy.
You can find Liz online at the Small Things Creative Projects website, and also on Liz’s personal website. Liz runs training and mentoring workshops which you can read about on the Permaculture Association website. Liz is on Instagram as @mudandculture, and can be found on LinkedIn here.
Liz writes a Substack, Mud and Culture, which you might want to subscribe to.
Listen to the podcast, slowly, repeatedly and thinkily.
Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.
Thanks for listening.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
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aisforarchitecture.org
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49 min
October 04, 2023 Stuart Vokes and Aaron Peters: Architecture, suburbia and Brisbane.
In episode 4/ 3 of A is for Architecture, Stuart Vokes and Aaron Peters speak about their practice, Vokes & Peters, and their elegant domestic and civic buildings in the heart and hinterlands of Brisbane. Our discussion sprung from their recent book, Migrations from Memory, a collection of essays by Stuart Vokes and Aaron Peters reflecting upon twenty years of practice, published by Canalside Press in 2023.
Vokes & Peters’ domestic work is particularly wonderful, and rightly acclaimed, embodying a civility and civicness that is distinct and significant. There is much online about it. A quote from Stuart from the book’s opening illustrates something of their approach: ‘One can be poetic about a house and describe it as a city in miniature – just like the city, one can find a range of rooms, enabling a range of events and behaviours that satisfy the spectrum of human emotions. But I am equally satisfied with the idea that a house might be considered a room of the city – a room where we feel at home, the one place left in the city where we might find real reverie and contentment. A house needn’t be another public place, at least not always.’
Vokes and Peter are all over the internet, but for one, there’s a decent video on their Auchenflower House (pictured on the podcast image) in Brisbane from 2020 on the Architecture AU website, and you might also have a sticky at their recent Blok Stafford Heights, winner of this year’s New House Under 200 Square Metres in the Houses Awards, and covered in the Guardian. Their own website features an excellent selection of written work too. Both Stuart and Aaron are on Instagram.
Migrations from Memory is available on the Canalside Press website and everywhere else that's decent⁠.
Listen to the podcast, and work something out.
Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.
Thanks for listening.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
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aisforarchitecture.org
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1 hr 6 min
September 27, 2023 Mónica Montserrat Degen and Gillian Rose: The New Urban Aesthetic.
In A is for Architecture’s third episode of the series, Monica Degen and Gillian Rose speak about their 2022 book, The New Urban Aesthetic: Digital Experiences of Urban Change. The book ‘explores how cities worldwide are being transformed and reconfigured by the twin forces of digital technologies and 'urban branding' [generating] ‘sensory bodily experiences [which] this book terms the new urban aesthetic.’ Documenting this shift through global examples, the book helps us understand the how and why of the experience of contemporary urban space.
Gillian is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford, and Monica is Professor in Urban Cultural Sociology at Brunel University London. Gillian can be found on X, Monica is also on X and LinkedIn, as well as on the Timescapes of Urban Change website, where you can see her speak about other interests and research. The New Urban Aesthetic is on the Bloomsbury website, where you can – probably should – buy it.
Listen, learn, share, go on now.
Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.
Thanks for listening.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
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aisforarchitecture.org
Apple: podcasts.apple.com
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Amazon: music.amazon.co.uk
52 min
September 20, 2023 Simon Henley: Beneficial building.
In Episode 2, Season (or series) 3 of A is for Architecture, Simon Henley talks about his work as a designer, researcher, maker and teacher, and the work of Henley Halebrown, the practice he founded in 1995. Initially we had agreed to explore a notion Simon suggested of ‘beneficial building’. We never go there precisely, but perhaps in spirit.
Henley Halebrown are increasingly significant players in the production of new urban housing, particularly in London, where their work has grown in stature and reputation. This year, their Taylor & Chatto Courts and Wilmott Court, Frampton Park Estate has been shortlisted for the RIBA Neave Brown Award for Housing, and the Hackney New Primary School and 333 Kingsland Road won the International Architecture Award 2023. Previous work includes a litany of acclaimed schemes, including Chadwick Hall student housing in Roehampton which was nominated for the Stirling Prize in 2018.
A great conversation, for sure.
Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.
Thanks for listening.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
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aisforarchitecture.org
Apple: podcasts.apple.com
Spotify: open.spotify.com
Google: podcasts.google.com
Amazon: music.amazon.co.uk
57 min
September 13, 2023 Denise Scott Brown: Becoming Denise.
In the first episode of A is for Architecture’s third series, the effervescent Denise Scott Brown talks about her journey to and through architecture, as a designer, writer, planner, urbanist, theorist and teacher. It is a wonderful, remarkable story, told with great eloquence and elegance, and one which deserves continued attention.
Denise’s work with her practice Venturi Scott Brown has inspired a great many people, with buildings including Franklin Court, Philadelphia (1976), the Children's Museum, Houston, Texas (1992), the Sainsbury Wing, National Gallery, London (1991), the Seattle Art Museum (1991) and the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego (1996). Her and Robert Venturi’s written work has been hugely impactful too, and includes the totemic Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, (1972, with Robert Venturi and Steven Izenour), Architecture as Signs and Systems: for a Mannerist Time (2004, with Robert Venturi), the significant essay Room at the top? Sexism and the Star System in Architecture (1989), and Studio, Architecture’s offering to academe (2016). Threaded through it all is a genuine belief in the value of ordinary and everyday ways of being and doing the built environment.
There is a huge amount of material online, in libraries (in real books!), in magazines and journals, and to listen to about or featuring Denise. Go find a book, and think about it all. As she said, ‘People have learnt from Las Vegas, but they haven’t learnt the half of it yet’.
It was an extraordinary sensation speaking with Denise, like swimming in very deep waters.
Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.
Thanks for listening.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
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aisforarchitecture.org
Apple: podcasts.apple.com
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Amazon: music.amazon.co.uk
1 hr 26 min
June 22, 2023 Alan Dickson: Authentic vernaculars in rural Scotland.
Episode 37/2 of A is for Architecture is a conversation with Alan Dickson, co-founder and director of Rural Design, an acclaimed and innovative architecture practice based on the Isle of Skye, Scotland. Rural Design’s work is characterised by a reappropriation of vernacular forms and construction traditions, which is both contemporary and contextually embedded.
Have a listen and a look around.
Rural Design’s website is a good one, and they are on Twitter and Instagram. You can see their work on Dezeen, ArchDaily, in the AJ, and a lot of other places too. The Rural House scheme we spoke about can be found here. I first met Alan in 2012 when he came to the Glasgow School of Art to give a lecture, which you can watch on Vimeo here.
Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.
Thanks for listening.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
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aisforarchitecture.org
Apple: podcasts.apple.com
Spotify: open.spotify.com
Google: podcasts.google.com
Amazon: music.amazon.co.uk
57 min

About A is for Architecture Podcast

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Explore the world of architecture with the A is for Architecture Podcast hosted by Ambrose Gillick. Through conversations with designers, scholars and practitioners, Ambrose unpacks the creative and theoretical dimensions of architecture. Whether you're a professional, student, or design enthusiast, the A is for Architecture Podcast offers the best insights into how buildings shape society and society shapes buildings. To keep it free and good, subscribe to the podcast on Patreon.