Failed Architecture

[You can find a transcript of this conversation in the article version posted on our website] This episode focuses on Greece’s so-called new generation refugee camps, officially known as Closed Controlled Access Centres or CCACs. These are high-tech compounds located on islands such as Samos and Lesvos used to process, detain, and surveil people on the move. You’ll hear from voices across spatial practice, activism, and journalism to unpack how these sites operate as extra legal spaces, contributing to a wider ongoing project of the intense management of migration. This podcast was written by System of Systems, co-founded by Maria […]

[You can find a transcript of this conversation in the article version posted on our website] This episode is an unpacking of migration and border management with a focus on the US-Mexico border and European externalisation practices. Written and narrated by journalist, jurist and urbanism specialist Nuria Ribas Costa, it features an in-depth interview with Gabriella Sánchez, a socio-cultural anthropologist and global expert on border control. In this conversation, she explains how borders are fictional constructs that require vast amounts of energy and resources to be manufactured into dangerous spaces; but also how borderlands, and border imaginaries, are not just […]

[You can find a transcript of this conversation in the article version posted on our website] In an article published in the Guardian earlier last year Jon Henley reported on the state of the housing crisis in Amsterdam. The article’s title took a quote from one of the people that Henley interviewed: “Everything is just on hold”. For a lot of people in Amsterdam, everything really is on hold, as in, stuck where they’re living, usually with several other people, unless they’re a yuppie or coming from money or they somehow got a foothold on the housing ladder right before […]

For this episode, our editor Charlie Clemoes talks to Adare Brown, Elisa Iturbe, Geneva Strauss-Wise, Josh Barnett, and Ryan Ludwig from the Architecture Lobby’s Green New Deal Working Group. The Architecture Lobby (TAL) is a grassroots organization of architectural workers that advocates for just labor practices and an equitable built environment. Founded in the United States and international in membership, TAL  brings experience and expertise from many design fields—architecture, construction, planning, landscape, engineering, academia—to protect the rights and livelihoods of all workers. The Lobby’s Green New Deal Working Group focuses on organizing for ecological justice as it relates to architectural […]

We continue the conversation with Callum Cant about his book Riding for Deliveroo, which, as the name suggests, documents his experience riding for the UK-based food delivery startup Deliveroo, in a bid to understand the new form of “algorithmic management” that the company represents.  In the first conversation, we started by having Callum talk in […]

For Breezeblock #40, editors Maria Mazzanti, Juana Salcedo, and Maria-Victoria Londoño talked with Exutoire (Bui Quy Son and Paul-Antoine Lucas) about queer architecture practices, non-conforming gender and dissident methodologies and utopian futurities. In their conversation, they touched upon what are the norms and normativity in architectural practices and discussed how can we disrupt these codified […]

When the gig economy hit cities across the world in the early 2010s, gig companies promised flexible working hours to their “contractors” and on-demand ease to their customers. In reality, the companies and their algorithms have induced a monumental change in patterns of work and consumption, recomposing commercial districts in pursuit of more efficient last-mile delivery and invisibilising deeply exploitative and often criminally underpaid labour practices. In a bid to understand this new form of “algorithmic management”, researcher Callum Cant took a job riding for Deliveroo, a food delivery startup that was founded in the UK in 2013 by Will […]

For Breezeblock #38, editors María Victoria Londoño-Becerra, Juana Salcedo, and María Mazzanti discuss with Sidra Kamran questions on public space, domestic space, and workspaces for women workers in Pakistan. In the conversation, they explore what forms of experiences and encounters appear in these different spaces and how they shape connections between work, retail, the beauty […]

Para el Breezeblock #37, las editoras María Victoria Londoño-Becerra, Juana Salcedo y María Mazzanti hablan con el artista colombiano Iván Argote sobre como su obra se aproxima a diferentes tensiones entre espacio público, monumentos y memoria colectiva. El Breezeblock #37 es la quinta edición de la serie de podcasts On Discomfort (sobre la incomodad) y […]

Listen to this episode and subscribe to the FA podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Overcast, or wherever else you usually get your podcasts. For Breezeblock #36, editors María Victoria Londoño-Becerra, Juana Salcedo, and María Mazzanti discuss with Todd Brown how architecture in its different scales is perceived as racialized. During the conversation, they delve into […]