A is for Architecture Podcast

In the sixth episode of 2022/3's A is for Architecture series, I speak with Sarah Wigglesworth, director and founder of Sarah Wigglesworth Architects. Sarah is a writer and educator, as well as one of Britain’s most celebrated architects, with a body of work stretching back over two decades encompassing participation, community and public buildings, housing, masterplanning and urban design work, all of which is (as I read it) shot-through with a conscientiousness about the social potential and obligation of architecture as a discipline and practice, in favour of social, ecological and spatial margins. We speak about Sarah’s practice, her background in practice and education, and some of the myriad motivations which underpin her work, including her recent renovations to her home, 9-10 Stock Orchard Street, school design schemes and [a few threads of] the rich tapestry of influences that inform her approach to design.

Sarah Wigglesworth Architects can be gotten to here; you can hear Sarah speak about the scheme here for Dezeen, and with New London Architecture here. There’s info on Stock Orchard Steet here, as part of the Open House Festival. There’s a good essay in AR on her dining table here. SWA’s Twitter is good too, as is their Instagram. There’s lots more online, not least SWA’s own online repository, which contains many articles by and on her and her practice’s work.

Happy listening!

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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In Episode 5 of 2022/23 #aisforarchitecture, I speak with architect-scholars Sofie Pelsmakers and Elizabeth Donovan, about their book Designing for the Climate Emergency: A Guide for Architecture Students, co-written with Urszula Kozminska and Aidan Hoggard, and published by RIBA Books this year.  Sofie is associate professor at Tampere University, Finland and Liz is associate professor at Aarhus School of Architecture, Denmark. We speak about #ecology and #sustainability and the ways students of architecture can (and must) begin to reimagine how we #design, outlining the book’s strategies for formulating new approaches to #practice, #space, #materials, #technology and #climate.

Designing for the Climate Emergency: A Guide for Architecture Students, can be found on RIBA Books here. Sofie’s professional profile can be found here, and here personal webpage is here. Liz’s professional profile can be found here. Sofie’s Twitter is here, and her Instagram is here; she co-founded Architecture for Change with Stephen Choi, and has published other very decent books: The Environmental Design Pocketbook, published by RIBA (2012) and edited (with Nick Newman),  Design Studio Vol. 1: Everything Needs to Change - Architecture and the Climate Emergency, again with RIBA Publishing in 2021. 

Iloista kuuntelua!

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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In Episode 4 of 2022/23 A is for Architecture, I speak with Christian Parreno, writer, academic and architect, about his book Boredom, Architecture, and Spatial Experience, published by Bloomsbury this year. Christian is assistant professor of history and theory of architecture at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador and part of the International Society of Boredom Studies research network.

Christian and I speak about some of the themes of his book, not least the condition of boredom as a inherent characteristic of modern urban life, and the ways that modern architecture and cities have established ennui and tedium as characteristics of everyday life.

The book, Boredom, Architecture, and Spatial Experience, can be found here. Christian’s professional profile can be found here and his Instagram profile here. Christian’s talk, Boredom, Suicide and the Architecture of 1 Poultry Street, London can be watched on YouTube here.

Bonne écoute.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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aisforarchitecture.org

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In the third episode of 2022/3's A is for Architecture series, I speak with Professor Juliet Davis, Head of the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University. Juliet is a scholar, architect, writer and educator. We speak about her recent book The Caring City: Ethics of Urban Design, published this year by Bristol University Press. We talk about Juliet’s motivations for the book, guided by her approach to architecture born of her years in practice and education, and the underlying notion of an ethics of care (and carelessness) on which the book is founded, care as it is encountered in urban fabric, and how such an approach might be better embedded in urban design practices.

The Caring City is a great book and you should buy it (link above). You can watch Juliet speak around some of its subjects on the Pakhuis de Zwijger YouTube channel, as part of its (their?) Designing Cities for All series, in an episode called Creating Cultures of Care: The Caring City.

Juliet was previously an RIBA external examiner on the undergraduate programme at the Kent School of Architecture & Planning, University of Kent, which is where I first met her.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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aisforarchitecture.org

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In the second episode of 2022/3's A is for Architecture offer, I speak with architect, writer and educator, Pierre d'Avoine, about his book Dwelling on the Future: Architecture of the Seaside, Middle England and the Metropolis, published by UCL Press in 2020. We talk about Pierre's background and his route into architecture, the focus of his work over the years and the motivations and insights of the book. Pierre is principal of Pierre d’Avoine Architects, and teaches at the Architectural Association, running Unit 14 with the architect Pereen d'Avoine, principal of Russian for Fish.

Dwelling on the Future is available as a free download from the UCL Press website, and Pierre can be watched speaking about it at the London Met open lecture series here. Pierre is on LinkedIn here.

I have known of Pierre's work for as long as I have been involved in architecture, so this conversation was a real treat. I hope you enjoy it. 

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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aisforarchitecture.org

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In the first episode of Year Two (or Season 2?) of A is for Architecture, I speak with Dr Torange Khonsari, course leader for the Design for Cultural Commons courses at London Metropolitan University, and founder and director of Public Works, a London-based architecture, art and urbanism design practice, which focuses on participatory and performative art, architecture, anthropology and politics. We discuss the idea of commons, at once very ancient spatial, political, social and knowledge spaces, but with current pressures to communal resources, are perhaps of even greater value, even as they disappear. Torange talks about how architecture and designerlypractices can make commons, or make them more likely to occur, and how designers can operate through cultural commoning practices to build communities, enrich space[s] and resist social erasure through the articulation of common values.

Torange’s work has been exhibited widely, and includes  The Ministry of Common Land within the The Garden of Privatised Delights, the British Pavilion at the 2021 Venice Biennale, curated by Manijeh Verghese and Madeleine Kessler, and which you can see her speak about here. You can watch Torange give an excellent TEDx talk, Harnessing The Power Of The Civic Commons, in 2019. 

Enjoy!

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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aisforarchitecture.org

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In Episode 32 of A is for Architecture, I speak with architect Craig Hamilton, whose work in the classical tradition, particularly his sacred work, represents another mode of 'doing' architecture in the contemporary period. We speak about his body of buildings, including his Chapel of Christ the Redeemer, at Culham, which Gavin Stamp described as demonstrating that 'classicism today can be resourceful, appropriate, and, in its own terms, truly original. It is a beautiful building.' We speak about the meaning of the classical languages of architecture, their dialogic character, and the possibilities of classical architecture for the contemporary public. Craig speaks about his approach to scared space too, which is embedded within a very old discourse around cult and the numinous, as well as his design method, based on hand drawing and the close study and deep knowledge of historic precedent, realised through very high quality making.

Craig's practice website can be found here, and contains a good selection of downloadable articles on his work. Gavin Stamp's article, Art and Soul is in Architecture Today and can be read here. You can watch Craig discussing his home, Coed Mawr, with the Architecture Foundation, here. There's much else online, so if you fancy, have a sticky. Ellis Woodman's book Temples and Tombs: The Scared and Monumental Work of Craig Hamilton can be found here, published by Lund Humprhies in 2019.  

Enjoy!

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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aisforarchitecture.org

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In Episode 31 of A is for Architecture I speak with Maristella Casciato, Vikramaditya Prakash  & Daniel E. Coslett about the recent volume they edited, Rethinking Global Modernism: Architectural Historiography and the Postcolonial, published by Routledge this year. The book is a collection of essays and studies which critically reflect of 'other moderns', those spaces, places, people and artefacts which are definitively modern but which, for reasons discussed in the podcast, have historically been excluded from established discourse and the canon. It's a recurrent theme for this podcast, reflecting on the peculiar gatekeeping of modernist architecture that has dominated scholarship, architectural education and public perceptions of what modernism is and, by extension, what it is to be modern.   

I was fortunate enough to be introduced to Maristella, Daniel and Vikram by Fran Ford at Routledge, Vikram also hosts a podcast, Architecture Talk, which you should also listen to. We also touch on another recent book which Vikram wrote, One Continuous Line: Art, Architecture and Urbanism of Aditya Prakash, published by Mapin in 2021, and with an introduction by Maristella. 

Enjoy!

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick.

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aisforarchitecture.org

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In Episode 30 of A is for Architecture, I speak with Alastair Parvin, CEO of Open Systems Lab, co-founder of WikiHouse, writer and architect. Open Systems Lab 'believe that if we want to build a successful, sustainable, fair and inclusive digital economy and to navigate the massive changes of the next half-century, we need to design, invest-in and deploy new open systems for everyone'. We discuss the impact of these things and the implications and possibilities they suggest, particularly for the production and management of the built environment - towns and cities, house and homes (and the gaps in between). Alastair and I talk about all this with reference to three pieces he has written: A New Land Contract, Planning for the Future and We need new operating systems. Whose job is that?, all linked here but available on Alastair's Medium page.

I met Alastair At Sheffield School of Architecture, where we both studied. His work, which incorporates stints at RSH+P and Architecture 00, is a wonderful example of the possibilities afforded by engaging with socio-spatial and process thinking. Follow the links above to Al's articles, and watch him TED the roof off here: Architecture for the people by the people. He also gave a talk entitled The Future of Regulations at the Radical Practice Conference 2020, Royal College of Art & Dark Matter Laboratories, which is worth a sticky.

Enjoy!

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick.

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aisforarchitecture.org

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In Episode 29 of A is for Architecture, I speak with Michael Young, founder of Young & Ayata and assistant professor at the The Cooper Union, New York. We speak about Michael's recent book, Reality Modelled After Images: Architecture and Aesthetics after the Digital Image, published this year by Routledge. Its a fine book, very thoughtful, tempered by Michael's dual role as a practitioner-scholar. We speak about aesthetics, and its diminished role in modern architectural practice and discourse, and the way digital images constitute a challenge to current readings of aesthetics, situating them within an historical narrative with roots in the Beaux-Arts architectural tradition.

I was introduced to Michael by Fran Ford, Senior Editor and Publisher (Architecture) at Routledge. We have never met IRL. You can see Michael's The Cooper Union profile here, and his practice, Young & Ayata, here. The book is linked above.

Enjoy!

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick.

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aisforarchitecture.org

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