A is for Architecture Podcast

In Episode 8 of A is for Architecture, I speak with Geraldine Dening, an architect and senior lecturer at Leicester School of Architecture, De Montfort University. Geraldine runs her own practice, Geraldine Dening Architects, and also co-founded Architects for Social Housing, a CIC that grew out of engagement with the housing crisis in London, and which advocates for the maintenance of social housing, the communities that make them, and live in them.

I was put onto Geraldine by another podcast guest, and so wrote out of the blue to ask if she’d be interested in speaking about the social significance and political character of housing. Gladly, she was both willing and a wonderfully engaging interlocutrice. You can see more about Geraldine and her work via the links above and on LinkedIn.

Listen on Apple Podcasts of Spotify.

Music by Bruno Gillick, voice by Julian. 

Episode image from ASH.

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In Episode 6 of A is for Architecture, I speak with Lee Ivett, course leader at the Grenfell Baines Institute of Architecture, University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN), as well as director of Baxendale, a practice based in Glasgow and Preston.

Lee’s critically acclaimed body of work includes small and medium-scale projects in a very broad range of places and contexts across Europe, and addresses themes relating to the social role of architecture-as-programme, rather than as (just) stuff and space.

I met Lee through work at the art school in Glasgow, eventually joining him as a director of Baxendale between 2015 and 2018, working with him on The Happenstance, Scotland’s collaborative architecture, art and design installation at the 2018 Venice architecture biennale.

w. baxendale-dco.com

t. twitter.com/baxendalestudio

i. www.instagram.com/_baxendale

In Episode 5 of A is for Architecture, I speak with Dr Tahl Kaminer of the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University, about his research on ideas of political identity, agency and practice in architecture, and how architects have addressed (and sometimes still do!) their social role. We talk around and about his 2016 book, The Efficacy of Architecture: Political contestation and agency (Routledge) and his 2011 book Architecture, crisis and resuscitation: The reproduction of post-Fordism in late-twentieth-century architecture (Routledge).

I met Tahl when I worked in Glasgow, at an interview, then later in Cardiff. I use his books in my teaching, and was involved briefly in one of the schemes he describes, the Atelier d'architecture autogérée in Paris, France.  

Tahl's academic profile can be found here: www.cardiff.ac.uk/people

In this, the fourth episode of A is for Architecture, I speak with Amica Dall of the design collective Assemble, about themes and ideas in her talk Are Words Good Enough, delivered as a keynote at the Future Architecture platform's 2021 Creative Exchange: Landscapes of Care conference. I met Amica through Baxendale, a practice I co-directed for a while in Glasgow, seeing her in action via her teaching but particularly her role as a co-founder and trustee of Baltic Street Adventure Playground in the East End of Glasgow. 

The conversation is wide-ranging, but comes out of a discussion on the role of language in architecture and for architects, and its importance if architecture is to be a tool for coproducing the common good.

 Enjoy!

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

In Episode 3 of A is for Architecture, I speak with Professor Bob Brown, of the University of Plymouth. Bob is an architect and educator with many years’ experience in socially-engaged and community-orientated practice and research, in the Global South and far east, but also in the UK and USA. In our conversation, Bob and I speak about vernacular and indigenous architecture, its relationship to and possibilities for the profession of architecture – both in practice, but also in architecture schools – and the value and meaning of ‘the other’ for practitioners.

I met Bob through his role as an RIBA external examiner for the school of architecture I work at. Bob pointed out that he had contributed a chapter - Concepts of Vernacular Architecture - to The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory (2013, Sage Publishing), the principal textbook for my MArch course, Cultural Context.

Follow the link in my bio to my website, for Bob and my conversation, or seek it out *A is for Architecture* on Spotify, Apple and Anchor.

Enjoy!

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick.

In the second episode of A is for Architecture, I speak with Professor Kathleen James-Chakraborty about her research and writing on twentieth century modernist architecture and design, looking at the nature and impact of the Bauhaus. Fronted by totemic modernists, the Bauhaus only lasted 24 years and yet its influence on everyday culture, even now, has been enormous. Unpacking that, Kathleen and I discuss the ways the Bauhaus was intentionally curated, towards an image of progressive liberalism which perhaps it didn't entirely deserve, particularly in its relationship to the women who were essential to its success and influence. 

Kathleen's academic profile can be seen here: https://people.ucd.ie/kathleen.jameschakraborty. Her book Bauhaus Culture: From Weimar to the Cold War can be gotten here: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/bauhaus-culture. Kathleen was recently awarded a European Research Council grant on a project entitled Expanding Agency: Women, Race and the Global Dissemination of Modern Architecture, which you can read about here: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101019419

www.aisforarchitecture.org

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick.

In this, the first episode of A is for Architecture, I speak with Professor Richard Williams about his new book, Reyner Banham Revisited, published by Reaktion Books in May 2021. Here's a link: www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

The Professor of Contemporary Visual Cultures at the University of Edinburgh, I first met Richard when he came to give a lecture at the Glasgow School of Art in October 2013, in the Mackintosh Lecture Theatre, before the first fire, after the publication of his book, Sex and Buildings (Reaktion Books 2013). It was a wonderful, rye, candid and witty talk, and the theatre was packed out, the aisles and floor at the front occupied, as well as the awkward, hard benches, with students (mostly) emitting a strange energy, wordlessly: this is what university is supposed to feel like. 

Richard's on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/rjwilliams44

Enjoy.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick.