Talking Volumes

Leslie Kern is the author of The Feminist City — Claiming Space in a Man-Made World, a book which, since publication in 2019, has sparked conversations between those who design the city, and those who study it, and who live in it. In this episode, she speaks with Reuben J. Brown about the inequities and complexities of our dominant urban designs and ways of living, while looking towards more liveable, more just, alternatives.

And the new urban world Leslie Kern imagines in the Feminist City isn’t designed in a top-down, universalising way — like the utopian urban dreams of the mid 20th Century. Rather, she seeks existing and historical pockets of feminist cities and asks what it would mean to extrapolate those models more broadly. 

Leslie’s academic background is in gender studies: she’s currently an associate professor of geography and environment, and director of women’s and gender studies, at Mount Allison University in Canada. And she brings this viewpoint to discussing the city: acknowledging the complex layers of physical infrastructure and human relationships; private homes, and public squares, that make up the places we live. 

Throughout this conversation, you’ll hear us reference writers, and design collectives who have imagined feminist alternatives, and often put them into practice. And to learn from the success of these projects, is to acknowledge that if design is to have an impact on the culture of patriarchy, it first has to change its own culture; move away from the notion of the master architect, and do a lot more listening from the bottom-up.

The Barbican Estate is possibly the most ambitious architectural statement made in the U.K. in the 20th Century. The ambition and scale of its form, and the radicalism of its ideas, are shining examples of a British post-war architecture which offered a meaningful critique and alternative to the ways of designing and living in the cities of the Industrial Revolution.

In this episode we explore the Barbican: both through its onion-layered network of public and private spaces and passageways; and through its ideological foundations in the Modernist notions of ‘Blank Slate’ planning, and its relationship to the architectural style of Brutalism.

Euan’s skateboarded since he was 11 years old. In this episode, we talk about his experiences of the activity and how it interacts with public space, before going out into Cambridge to skate in the city. We also interview Matt from Cam Skate, and imagine skateboarding as a vehicle towards unique, non-capitalistic public places, shared by everyone in the city.

In the U.K.’s first covid lockdown, Talking Volumes host Reuben worked as a waste collector in Brighton & Hove. In this episode, Euan asks Reuben about his experiences being out across the city at a time when everyone was locked at home; and how architecture changes the way our streets are cleaned, and the daily lives of the people who do that work.

The Royal Pavilion — a palace commissioned by Prince George in the late 1700s — is the icon of Brighton & Hove. It draws hundreds of thousands of tourists from all over the world and is front-and-centre in the Council logo. The city itself may be the U.K.’s most forward-thinking and liberal: the Brighton Pavilion constituency has the U.K.’s only Green Party M.P., and the city is often considered the ‘Queer Capital’ of the U.K.

Without this building, Brighton may well have ended up just like its neighbouring former fishing towns — Hastings, Eastbourne, Newhaven, Bexhill, Worthing — conservative, sleepy. Instead, the city of today is vibrant, queer, liberal — an oddity. The Prince (Later King) George’s investment in the then village through his Pavilion set the stage for this transformation.

But the Pavilion is also an icon of the colonialist ideology of the time — an ideology which the present management of the building doesn't acknowledge. In this episode, we discuss what the Royal Pavilion means for modern-day Brighton.

In this episode we talk through our experiences in interviews at The Bartlett and Cambridge, and give some advice on how to keep calm, answer clearly, and be yourself at interviews

Being able to draw, and translate 3D space onto paper is an important skill for architecture school — this doesn’t mean you have to be incredible at drawing photorealistic, complex perspectives (and some people might find it’s more important as a part of their practice than others). What universities want to see is that you can communicate with drawing. And this can take lots of different, personal forms…

To see how you use drawing to communicate, lots of universities will send you a drawing task to complete. At some schools you might have to do one at interview. These take lots of different forms, but they’re all focus on how you can think and communicate visually. 

In this episode we take you through some different formats of architecture drawing tasks, and offer some advice on how you might to approach them. At the end we give some general advice for good drawing practices at this stage of application — the dos and don’ts that can be applied to any drawing you might be asked for in an application.

If you’re applying to architecture school, you can almost guarantee that the courses you apply to will want to see a portfolio to get a sense of your ideas and how you work. In this episode we talk about the best ways to present your work for this format, the differences between digital and physical portfolios, and how to present the portfolio to use your artwork to tell a story about yourself and your thinking.

We both found it pretty daunting to create our portfolios, and we know it's a part of the application that can be really stressful. This episode breaks it down to the most important parts, and demystifies the details about what work to include, and how to present it.

In this episode we give some advice for writing an architecture personal statement that's really effective at showing the universities who you are and what makes your perspective on architecture unique, and important. We discuss the planning, writing, and editing processes in detail, and at the end Reuben reads out his personal statement in its entirety as an example (you can find Euans on the episode page on talkingvolumes.co.uk)

Choosing what course you want to apply for, and at what university, can be an overwhelming decision. Good news is, in the U.K. at least, you have five choices to fill. In this episode we discuss some questions you could ask yourself to start narrowing down your course choices to the places that will be the best for you.

We also talk about the idea of ‘prestigious’ universities and why it’s important to treat an application to Cambridge or UCL’s Bartlett like you would any other application you make.